Here's a suggestion, let's make the time for bidding updates random. Make it once a day, but never at the same time. This way if you want a player you bid on him. I love trying to out manuever each other and find bargains but I'm wondering if there's any reason to bid on anyone but "going-going" at 9:55 pm.

Is this the norm? It's a learning curve for us new guys but there have been days bidding seems absolutely pointless. Anyone else feel that way or is just something to adjust to?

I agree with your general frustration about the 9:55 bidding. This is only my 2nd year and it is weird to me.

The problem is, I don't see how you avoid it while bidding on many players at once.

Given the large number of players nominated ta any one time, no team can ever have enough money to bid on all the players they want. So, if I have $200 to bid, and there are $400 worth of players I like at this price, I can't bid them all.

So, I have to wait and see which ones other people are going to keep alive, and only bid on those who will sell without my bid.

The only reasonable way to fix this issue would be to restrict the number of players that are bid on at any one time, and force them to a conclusion faster. But that has its own issues.

The simplest solution that past discussions have generated is to have *each* player be on his own clock with the various states (e.g., Going Once).

Then the auctioneer would run every five/ten minutes instead of once a day, and only those players past their 24-hour clock in their current state when the auctioneer runs would advance to the next state.

There would still be last-minute bidding, but it would be spread across the entire day instead of ten minutes at night, AND, owners would likely not wait until the last minute because they might be busy/unavailable most of the day, and thus if there is a player they want, they would bid upon him sooner than later.

The road block is adjusting the PERL code to have each player have his own clock. And for me to find time to do it. And we might want to test it first.

How about a 2 step, single bid process. Each night teams nominate 1 player to be bid on for the next day.

Teams then submit sealed bids for those 24 players, which are resolved the next night at 10 PM. It would be a Dutch auction, winner pays $1 more than the 2nd high bid.

Greg I love the website. The league I had run for years before joining TRHL had a similar draft and if we could have had it automated my life would have been so much easier. What we had done was use a message board to post bids. Based on the time stamp any player not bid on for 48 hours signed a deal, which is basically what we do here. If the code could be adjusted, and I certainly don't want to suggest more work for you, the window based on last bid worked well for our league. We still had "snipers" that waited til the last minute to bid- sometimes it's a good strategy to keep someone's funds tied up until the last moment- but it does stop owners from checking in at 9:45.

I'm sure part of the learning curve is getting a sense of what the league values a player or position at. It seems like we have guys that decide the bids not high enough so I'll raise it- again could be my wishful thinking on getting a bargain.

Can't wait to sign a player, lol.

Greg's idea is a good one, I think. However, since I'm not the one doing the work ...

In the meantime I think Keith is mostly right. The one caveat is that there is value in bidding a player earlier in order to force him up higher faster. This is a bit of risky strategy but it does make it possible to get a player cheaper that way. Felix Hernandez being one possible example in this draft. The other advantage of getting players earlier is that it reduces the amount of unknowns on your roster which makes it easier to plan. As the number of players in the going, going, stage reaches a critical turning point it becomes impossible to bid up players just because you think they are undervalued. Personally, I think we are getting close to that point. Once that happens the flood gates will open a little.

Other than those reasons, I can't think of a single good reason to bid before the last minute (as any review of my bidding patters will demonstrate).

I also agree that the website is a marvel of simplicity and utility. It works great during the season as well.

The other reason to bid earlier is that if everyone is waiting someone might slip through the cracks. If someone is waiting to choose between two players and you are waiting to choose between the same two players it is possible that one or both might slip through at the last minute. If you bid earlier, you can then allow someone else to bid. Since it is to your advantage to keep as many players alive as possible for as long as possible, there is a certainn rhyme and reason to bidding earlier if you think this situation applies.

I'm not going to openly reveal my particular strategy, but, yes, I do see instances where it's likely an advantage for me to bid on players during the day than wait until the final few minutes before the auctioneer runs.

I cannot take credit for the website. Another Greg, long ago, first created it and wrote the PERL scripts, then long-time owner and friend, Vinay Kumar, maintained it (and we still use Vinay's 1and1.com account to host the website; he doesn't mind).

I now have the keys and have enough savvy with UNIX, code, PERL, etc. that I can keep it going.

Given the interest, and especially given for the first time in a while we (apparently) have 24 really active owners, I will find some time to at least explore the idea of switching to each player having his own 72-hour (not 48, because we have three states, not two) clock.

If I realize I can "easily" modify the website's scripts, I will then discuss this more with the league. Having the auctioneer run every five minutes instead of once a day is easy. That's a cron job edit. I will start with the auctioneer code and how it moves players from state to state, and then try to determine how to more individually tag each player.

Currently a player is assigned, well, an assignment number. "0" is free agent, "5" is sold, thus that means "1" is New Player, "2" is Do I Hear, "3" is Going Once, and "4" is Going, Going. "9" is reserved for LTC penalties added to rosters. Can't recall what "6", "7", and "8" are for. Ah, wait, "6" is used during the re-signing period to indicate which players are to be cut.

So now the auctioneer at 10 pm EST simply sees which players are assigned a "1" and "2" and bumps them to "3", and so forth, with finally "4" (Going Going) moved to "5" (SOLD! About fucking time! I thought you guys would never stop bidding on the player that I really wanted and DESERVE to have).

My first thought is each player also is given a time stamp value of the time when he was last bid upon. Then the auctioneer not only checks the aforementioned assignment state, but also ONLY processes and changes the assignment to those players who time stamp falls within the 10 minutes from the last time the auctioneer ran. So, for example, when the auctioneer run at 2:30 pm on Feb. 4th, it finds all players last bid upon from 2:21 to 2:30 pm the last few days and moves them to the next state.

I think that would work. Now to realize if I can easily change the code and test it on the test TRHL site.

I'll add to my own comment that the end result is that there ends up being a great deal of strategy to bidding. The downside is that if for whatever reason you are not available at the cut off time you are definitely at a disadvantage. The rolling cutoffs would make it more fair, in my opinion, though what that would do to strategy I have no idea.

"what that would do to strategy I have no idea."

That's why we should test it first. Perhaps if I can manage to implement it on a test site, I can load in a past season, say 1927, and we can conduct the auction with those players, set our MPs, and then quick sim the season. The quick sim would add weight to the auction and people would take it more seriously, thus we could see the pros and cons to the different auction structure.

I think those who are awake in the middle of the night, and/or those who can bid on players during the work day would have an advantage.

A compromise might be needed. Instead of once a day for one extreme, and every ten minutes as the other, we could instead run the auctioneer once every one/two/three hour(s).

For my own part, I like the current system. I find it minimizes the amount of time I have to dedicate to bidding--I can do everything auction-related in 20 minutes per day starting at 9:40, and remain current with all auctioned players.

Doing daily auctions for a month, even sealed-bid ones, would be a nightmare and I suspect there would be a lack of proper price enforcement.

Remember guys this auction system has been in place well over a decade. It is well tested.

I don't find not being available at the cutoff time (which happens to be several times every auction) to be a big disadvantage. If you're only available at another time during the day, you can still do your own priority bidding, and of course some price enforcement, although it becomes harder to be quite so effective.


Keith said: " It seems like we have guys that decide the bids not high enough so I'll raise it- again could be my wishful thinking on getting a bargain. "

That is definitely true. There are a number of owners who will enforce pricing. I did it on Josh Johnson in this auction... and yes, I was even mindful of the owner who had the bid on him. I had no particular interest in Johnson, though I wouldn't turn him down as such; but I'd rather use that money elsewhere. But I don't like to see my competitors sneaking bargains through a busy deadline, so there are many times I will bid a guy up knowing someone else will want to pay more.

There are even times where I see an uneasy truce develop as the deadline approaches, with a group of owners (more or less the usual suspects) who decide NOT to enforce prices on each other as it looks clearer that they may get similar players of their own (or other owners are frozen out of bidding by being at the $400 limit, and you don't want to give them more bidding room). It's pretty interesting. Of course this always will break down at 9:59ET, but by then it can be too late.

For my part, I value every player in the auction (via a formula, although I will often override).

Oh, right, Gaelan mentioned reasons to bid other than after 9:50pmET.

The primary one for me is to rationally allocate $ to my priority bids; I literally have lost count of the number of times I have overcommitted myself elsewhere and not had the cash for a bid on a priority target. I am doing better at that now.

Though I can see and respect some price bidding, having the high bid on a player for 71 hours and 55 minutes is just not fun. There is absolutely no reason to drag it out when a team would and could make several bids on day 1 if it is purely a price adjustment. If Josh Johnson is a 10 dollar player in our economy, just as an example, what is the justification for a $3 price enforcement bid at 9:55 of the going going phase? Shouldn't it be $9 or at least $6 or $7? That way the bidding team does what he intends AND gets a steal if he wins the bid.

One of the things that works well with the clock running on players individually is that it rewards owners who actively bid. For example, Cano just got a big contract. There were 3-5teams bidding on him. In our draft they had to be careful with there funds and constantly make minor bids on other players they might want, essentially tying up more teams attempts to build their roster. With a 48 hour clock tied to the last bid made on Cano, those teams could have had a day of competitive bidding and then not only move forward knowing what their budget was and if they got Cano, but also open up the rest of the market.

It seems to me this week has been a series of bids that became essentially useless. Wouldn't it be more fun to sign players than to try keeping 4 mediocre players alive because you have to get one and there's no way to know if that player no one has bid on for 3 days is going to get an offer at 9:59:59?

I pretty much agree with Craig. I think the auction is super fun as it is. He also described how I approach the bidding for the most part. Bidding up players who are underpriced is an important strategy. It is a zero-sum game after all. However, it comes with a fair amount of risk which is why I only do it for positions/players I might want. It serves two purposes, it bids up the player costing someone else money, and it keeps them around for later if you end up needing them. The risk is that you might end up with more players at a position than you really need. The higher the salaries involved the greater the risk. The risk is part of the fun, though.

The detente aspect Craig mentioned is also pretty interesting since you never know if it is really there or you are just imagining it.

Finally, while I definitely make a practice of bidding late I'm not really sure how much advantage I get from it. Craig is right that there is probably an advantage to just deciding which of these guys you really want that day and allocate your money accordingly. You can definitely overthink yourself at the last second.

I also set a value on every player. The trouble is weighing the abstract value you place on player in relation to the actual supply of types of players and the specific needs of your team. The result is that I use this just as a guide. I use it to set a ceiling of a price beyond which I probably shouldn't go.

I think if we really want to eliminate the last-minute aspect of things as they are now, we'd really need to look at a reverse auction. Without any consideration of how difficult it would be to script, something like this:

Start everyone at some arbitrarily high amount ($150 or so, or you could set this maximum by mutual assent at the beginning of the auction).
Decrement that periodically, probably over a matter of hours early on, and possibly as log as a day at the end.
Allow everyone to bid blindly on as many players as the like, up to their free $, and change their bids at any time.
Every time the price level drops, any player who's bid matches the price level is sold to the team that bid that amount earliest.

Another idea previously suggested was to enable a "max bid" component, so that when I bid on a player, I can not only bid $1 more, but also submit a max bid (e.g., $11 on currently $10 player, max bid = $15). Then, IIRC, with the idea, the player does *not* revert back to an earlier auction state if another team bids upon the player but not higher than the max bid, while the salary increases.

So, for example, given the $11, $15 max bid, if another team bids $12, the salary then jumps to $13 and the original team still controls the player, and the player remains in his current auction state. Only when the a new owner takes claim does the auction state change.

I believe the thought was that this would help deter from the last minute bidding because you might not have time to determine how high the bid needs to go to stop the player from being sold.

I am not fully supporting this idea, just repeating an idea that was interesting to me.

Like Craig, I am content with the current auction structure.

One more caveat that individual clocks would help on, not watching guys bid with 10 seconds left just in case they lost their guys to the same garbage bidding. Lost 2 guys tonight that I don't feel were bid adjustments but were bid on as insurance in case they lost their guys. Frustrating!

Ok back to the auction.

Heh ... so you're seeking retribution by bidding on my players (Peavy, Figaro), eh?

Lol, nah, desperate for pitching. Lost Gallardo after sitting on him for 2 days. Definitely easy to get retribution minded though. And besides you got Grandal so be happy and leave Montero alone next time.

I would have, like you said, but when Gattis was bid upon, I wanted to push another catcher back. I should bid on Arrencibia as well.

Heh ... from here on out, now that I'm running out of money, it will be all last-minute bidding!

Well, unless I don't have any one Going, Going!

It's always good for us to watch how the draft is going and whether the owners like it or not. I am always really pleased that we have good discussions of how the league works and the rules and whether or not the owners get a lot out of it. So I don't want my "I like things the way they are" attitude to be mistaken for a lack of desire to talk or to have the matters discussed. This was a great conversation.