There Is No Such Thing As Position Scarcity

Written by: Paul Greco on 20th March 2009

There Is No Such Thing As Position Scarcity | read this item

BY : Mike Podhorzer of FantasyPros911.com

…in Only leagues. That’s right, the same guy who has written article after article about the concept of position scarcity and how undervalued catchers are in mixed leagues, is now telling you that position scarcity does not exist in single-league formats. Unfortunately, in all my discussions of the idea, I neglected to mention a very important point- the format and roster requirements of your league have a huge effect on whether or not position scarcity exists. It’s probably not a good idea for me to make the blanket statement that position scarcity does not exist in Only leagues, but it certainly does not in 12-team NL-Only leagues in this particular year. It’s completely illogical on the surface to think that a shallow mixed league has such a large degree of scarcity, where replacements are still pretty solid players, yet a single-league format has little, if any, despite an enormous difference between the top players and free agents. But, it’s true.

During Wednesday night’s NL-Only Blogger’s league auction, Rob Reed commented in the chat room how crazy it was that the biggest proponent of position scarcity (yours truly) passed on all the good catchers. I ended up spending a total of $6 on backup catchers Chris Coste and Yorvit Torrealba. What, no Ryan Doumit?! Trust me, I was just as surprised as you. When I ran my dollar values, I found that nearly every catcher was worth more in mixed leagues than in NL-Only leagues. Brian McCann, a $27 mixed leaguer, was only a $24 NL-Onlyer. Russell Martin was a $25 mixed league value, but just a $22 NL-Only player. This didn’t surprise me nearly as much as some other interesting valuation findings that I will discuss later on in this article, however.

I have always read that position scarcity is greater in shallower leagues. The values I calculated seemed to confirm that this conventional wisdom was indeed correct. In fact, to really appreciate how much of a difference position makes in a mixed league versus an auction league, take a look at the following:

Read the rest of this great article from our Fantasy Baseball source, FantasyPros911.com

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Topics: Albert Pujols, auctions, brian mccann, dollar values, drafts, fantasy baseball strategy, position scarcity, projections, valuation