148 155 All Green Caesar Preparing for the GDR FAB 3/20/06, 2:49pm (Last Edited: 3/20/06, 2:57pm) Well, my GameDayRitual FAB starts tomorrow at 1:00pm EST. The FAB (Free Agent Blitz) is basically an auction drawn out over 6 days. Starting tomorrow at 1:00pm, Team #1 will put a player out there to start the bidding, followed by Team #2 ten minutes later and Team #3 ten minutes after that … this process goes on until all 12 GMs have put 5 players up for auction (60 players per day). A player stays on the market for 24 hours after being put up for auction. The creators of GDR claim that you do not have to be at your computer for the entire process … but everything I have read says that you will become &bold-very-bold& addicted to the FAB. So if all goes well, I will still be married after this is all said and done. I talked about the VBD approach to draft preparation in one of my earlier entries. I am using a similar approach to the FAB. I scoured the internet to find the best 2006 Projections. I found two and half really good ones that projected the stats that GDR uses. I then averaged out the projections and plugged them into the GDR formula for scoring. This gave me a number to attach to each player. After that, I went through and highlighted the top 12 at each position that GDR requires (36 at OF and 60 at SP). I need to include a DH in my starting lineup, so I highlighted the 12 highest point totals that were not highlighted earlier. This shows me … in my opinion … what players should be starting. I still needed to figure out what players would be drafted. This was a little tougher. Looking at the un-Highlighted players, there were a number of players that I knew would get drafted, so I included those. After that, I looked for plateaus and added certain groups of players to get to my 300 players that would be drafted … again, in my opinion. So now I have 300 players (189 hitters and 111 pitchers), each with a Total Projected GDR Points Total. I rank the 189 hitters from highest GDR Points total to the lowest. I then find the true value of each player by subtracting the GDR Points Total of the 189th hitter from all other hitters (I did the same for the pitchers but subtracted the 111th pitcher from all other pitchers). The 189th hitter now has a value of zero. Now, I need to put a price on this value. Keep in mind that this is all done with a spreadsheet. Now, take the player’s value and divide it by the sum of all player’s values (1st-189th). This will give you a decimal number that you will use to get the monetary value of the player. The only thing left to do is multiply this decimal number by the total amount that you think will be spent on hitters in the FAB for your league. Each GDR team has $100 million to spend in the FAB … so that is $1200 million total. Now I have to guess on how much will be spent on pitching. I am going to use the trusty 65/35 ratio … this leads to $780 million to be spent on hitters. This leaves $420 million for pitchers. Here is some players and their values that I came up with in my preparation &box-NAME - - GDR Pts - - Value - - Decimal - - $$ Value A Pujols........684........515....... .017........$12.98 J Santana.....762........380....... .030........$12.65 E Gagne.........591........209....... .017..........$6.94 C Figgins.......403........204....... .007..........$5.14 J Estrada.......273........34.5...... .001..........$0.87-box& Pujols projects to be a beast this year … as does Santana. I will now use these figures as a guidleine during the auction. One thing to keep in mind is that the minimum salary in GDR is $0.5 million … so any player that projects to a value less than that, I hard-coded a value of $0.5 million. Wish me luck … I will do my best to blog frequently during the FAB [Green Caesar from Roswell/GA] Replies: 167 168 170 173 177 180 184