By Chris in NorCal

Cappo, League 6

In a recent column, I mentioned that the NFBC includes something called a Free Agent Acquisition Budget (FAAB). Team owners use this to acquire free agents during the season.

There’s no simple reviewing the waiver wire and grabbing whoever you like. You can’t pick up free agents, or stream pitchers, on a daily basis like we can in our Mafia leagues. The NFBC is a different “animal”.

A few people have asked me to explain how the FAAB works.

The free agent system is a “blind bidding” process. Each team starts with a FAAB of $1,000 for the season and is permitted to bid for free agents on a weekly basis with a minimum bid of $1 per player. These dollars are imaginary, not real, by the way.

Since it is blind bidding, we do not know what amount other teams are bidding on free agents, so there is some strategy based upon whether you need the player or merely fancy adding him to your roster. There’s also some guesswork in assessing the likely winning bid on any given player. The fact that you have only $1,000 to spend throughout the year also means that it needs to be spent wisely.

You may want to pick up a player, and you may value that player highly, while others in the league may not value that same player so highly. There is a lot of guesswork in trying to figure out just how much money to bid on a player - you may want to be sure that your bid is enough to “win” the player but not so high that you end up overspending, and, as a result, unnecessarily depleting your free agent acquisition “dollars” too early.

You are also allowed to place conditional bids for other players. A conditional bid will become relevant only if you lose out on your primary bid. Subsequent conditional bids become relevant only if a previous conditional bid fails.

As I looked over my team last week - rosters are set weekly, remember - my offense was pretty solid, but my pitching was not too good. Out of 15 teams, I was 14th in Wins and 11th in Strikeouts. My ERA, WHIP and Saves were decent, but Wins and K’s were keeping me out of first place. I was in third place, overall, 10 points out of first.

I have three solid starters (Young, Snell, Harang) and a questionable fourth (Bannister). I was brilliant enough to bench Bannister the first two weeks and miss out on his three wins and start him the last couple of weeks and capture three pretty mediocre starts (I hate pitchers).

Harang has been snake bitten, pitched pretty well but only with one win to show for his efforts so far. Snell has not performed well as of yet, and Young has been a little inconsistent. I have been planning on keeping Bannister, for now, but picking up another spot starter here and there. I’ll play match-ups with Bannister.

I already have Jay Bruce, Colby Rasmus and Steve Pearce on my bench, so I know that offensive help is potentially there. But it was time to beef up my pitching staff, meaning that I needed to spend some of my FAAB.

The opportunity in front of me was the dynamic Max Scherzer. I was hoping to pick him up in this league for cheap a few weeks ago, but he hadn’t yet been made available. He had been activated a few days before, and I expected the bidding to be through the roof now that he is up and had that unbelievable line of seven strikeouts in four innings in his debut. The problem was, I had no idea what “through the roof” would look like in my league. I wanted to bid enough, but I did not want to deplete the rest of my FAAB and, therefore, cripple myself for the rest of the year.

The only guide I could base my bid upon was Brian Fuentes who had been named the Rockies closer the week before. The bidding on him across all NFBC leagues was crazy - the lowest winning bid was $351 and the highest was $750. Can you believe it? Someone used 75% of his FAAB for one player! Now, each team and each league is different but I thought - and still think - that to be a bit too much for one player.

Back to Max. As I mentioned above, pitching (namely W’s and K’s) was where I needed the most help. There is no doubt he will provide the K’s, no matter whether he starts or pitches in relief, but him being a fixture in the rotation increases his chances of getting some W’s on that potent Arizona team.

In a 15-team league with seven bench spots, there is not a lot available on the waiver wire to be able to rack up the numbers needed to come back in these categories and that potentially made Max a ‘must-have for’ me … especially since most of the other pitching prospects had been drafted (Kershaw and Bailey to name a couple). There are no real stud AAA pitchers that are not already on another team.

So, again, I concluded that Scherzer would be a very good fit for my team and I submitted a bid of $511 for him. The crazy thing is that when I submitted the bid I knew it could be too high, yet it could also not be enough. The end result is that I did get Scherzer for $511 - with the second highest bid being $332.

So, for my league, I could have paid less, but there was no way of knowing that beforehand. I checked the winning bids in other leagues. They made me feel more comfortable with my bid … he went for $350 at the low end to $900+ at the high end. In fact, the average winning bid was just over $500 - right around my bid.

So that is FAAB at its best. As I continue through this league, I am becoming a fan of the FAAB process for acquiring free agents - for leagues with weekly transactions, at least. I think it levels the playing field by giving everyone access to every player, not just the guy who sits in front of his computer all day being the first to be able to pick a player up when major news hits.

The FAAB process also lends itself to incorporating a more strategic approach to your roster management - again, something more relevant for leagues with weekly transactions, admittedly - by giving you the opportunity to make maximum use of limited resources.