Watch Now: 2019 Fantasy Baseball Position Preview: Starting Pitching ( 2:54 )

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If there's a phrase to sum up the results of every Fantasy Baseball auction, it's "you had to be there."

Trying to piece it together after the fact will drive you crazy.

How could Anthony Rendon have gone for $30 when Kris Bryant went for $23? What about Whit Merrifield for $26 when Ozzie Albies went for $11? What's lacking is context — more specifically, when these players were nominated relative to one another. One of the things that makes auctions difficult is they force you to predict human behavior. And people are whack, yo.

What seems like a sensible price tag at one stage of the auction can look terrible in retrospect. When the competition thins at a position, it can drive bidding down and make for big bargains. But sometimes it goes the other way, and the last couple players in a particular tier go for well more than they should because, you know, scarcity (see Gerrit Cole for $49).

As the auction is unfolding, you can get a sense of how many dollars will be in play later by observing whether players are exceeding or falling short of their projected auction values, but certain scarcities are worth blowing the budget for — in this case, high-end starting pitching. There isn't much of it available, you can't count on it to develop from further down the rankings and, particularly in this format, its impact is considerable.

Case in point: Heath Cummings and I went the most aggressively after starting pitchers last year, each of us landing four costing $24 or more, and we went on to meet in the championship game (where he won by one point, doggone it).

So that's the path the two of us took again, relying on bargain hitters to fill out our starting lineups. And there was no shortage of bargain hitters, it turns out. I wouldn't even say we got the best ones. Some owners left significant money on the table because the competition was so lacking in that middle stage of the auction when Corey Seager ($10), Yasmani Grandal ($6), Gleyber Torres ($3) and David Peralta ($2) went off the board.

One thing to keep in mind in this format, where you're auctioning both a lineup and a bench, is that owners don't have much incentive to bid on a second baseman when they've already filled second base. And the same goes for shortstop, third base, wherever. So particularly if all the money is going elsewhere, like to starting pitcher, you can cruise to easy buys at the deeper positions.

Let's meet who took part in this nonsense, presented alphabetically:

Brant Chesser, Baseball HQ (@BrantChesser)

Heath Cummings, CBS Sports (@heathcummingssr)

Ralph Lifshitz, Razzball (@ProspectJesus)

malamoney, Razzball (@malamoney)

George Maselli, CBS Sports

Chris Mitchell, Fantrax (@CJMitch73)

Tom Ogonowski, Future Studskis (@ProspectFiend)

Phil Ponebshek, Patton & Company

John Russell, Friends with Fantasy Benefits (@JohnRussell215)

R.J. White, CBS Sports (@rjwhite1)

Scott White, CBS Sports (@CBSScottWhite)

Scott Zeidman, CREATiVESPORTS

And here's your reminder of how the scoring works in this format:

Head-to-Head point values For hitters

For pitchers

Single 1 Walk -1 Double 2 Earned run -1 Triple 3 Hit -1 Walk 1 Hit batter -1 Caught stealing -1 Inning 3 Hit by pitch 1 Strikeout 0.5 Home run 4 Win 7 Strikeout -0.5 Loss -5 Run 1 Save 7 RBI 1 QS 3 Stolen base 2





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