FAAB Bidding

It's been a while since I posted, so I'll give a quick update on my teams.

The slow draft team ('The Waiver Wire') has been awful. It's firmly planted in last place. Surprisingly, the problem hasn't been the pitching (yet), but my offense is near last in all categories. There's not a lot to say about the team other than this...they say that if you sit down at the poker table and don't know who the sucker is within five minutes, then it's you. What they forget to tell you is that sometimes even when you think that you DO know who the sucker is, you're wrong...and it's you.

The first NFBC Double Play team that I drafted ('DailyBaseballData.com') has had a good week, and had moved up to 3rd place in it's league this morning. This league is pretty evenly matched at this point, so much so that the team that was leading yesterday is in 5th today. What's particularly encouraging about my move up is that it's happened despite Cruz and Anderson joining Mike Gonzalez on the DL. The only bad news is that this is the team I didn't think had enough pitching going into the season. My rotation is now Lester, Anderson (DL), Slowey, C.J. Wilson, Hughes, and Romero. That's not awful, but unlikely to score well enough to put me into the running for the top overall teams. I'm also thin at closer, where Qualls and Dotel are my only healthy options...and both look like performance (and health) risks at this point.

The second NFBC Double Play team that I drafted ('Fanduel.com') has had a decent weak too, finally moving out of the cellar and up to 10th place. While the team's performance has been disappointing so far, I think it's too early to completely write it off.

One of the features of NFBC that's a new experience for me has been Free Agent Acquisition (FAAB) bidding. Each team gets a budget of $1,000 to bid on players every Sunday night. There are such a wide variety of strategies being used that all sorts of weird situations come up. Several players in my leagues have already gone for more than $100 higher than the next highest bid. One owner in each league has already exhausted more than $700 of their $1,000 budget. For the most part, I'm making frequent small bids, and trying not to treat any one player as a 'must have'. I anticipate using my budget gradually throughout the season to patch lineup holes, and pick up players with favorable schedules. I want to try to avoid filling up my bench with lots of speculative players who may or may not ever have a use...although with my closers struggling I'm finding the that temptation to pick up potential future closers is getting the best of me in some cases.