Last Updated on February 2, 2026 1:15 pm by Anthony Kates | Published: February 2, 2026

Auction drafts are the original types of drafts for fantasy baseball. The original Rotisserie Baseball league started with eight categories, a 4×4 if you will, they drafted just 23 players (14 hitters and 9 pitchers) and had a $260 budget. Not much has changed since then. Most standard auction drafts are for leagues with 10 categories, a 5×5 league, teams still draft 23 starters, but they’ve added in a seven man reserve draft after the auction is over.

Auction Draft over Snake Draft

Why should you choose to do an auction draft over a snake draft for your league?

Simple: you can draft any players that you want, so long as you have enough of your draft budget available and room on your roster. Compare that to a snake draft, where you really only have the opportunity to draft players from certain average draft position (ADP) ranges, instead of the entirety of the league.

In a snake draft, if you have the 12th pick of the first round in a 10-team league, you stand little to no chance at drafting one of the top five-to-eight ranked players, because they almost always will be draft within the first eight picks. In an auction draft, though, you have the opportunity to draft anyone, regardless of what “pick” (in auction drafts, there isn’t really a draft order, it is a nomination order; we’ll talk more about this) you have. If you have the budget and you are willing to bid more than everyone else you can get the player(s) that you want the most.

Preparing for your Auction Draft

Step One: Establish Auction Values

You can establish auction values in one of two ways: create your own or use pre-existing auction values.

Create Your Own Auction Values

There are two ways to create your own auction values: a very complicated process of using projections to determine each individual player’s z-score (a measure of how many standard deviations a data point is from the mean, calculated by subtracting the mean from the data point and dividing by the standard deviation), rank the players by z-score and then assign auction by multiplying X amount of dollars (X being the number of auction dollars each full-point of z-score is worth) by the z-score of each player. It’s complicated and time consuming and can be very difficult if you do not know how to do all of that (which I do not know all that well, so we will not be explaining it here).

But, there is an easier way. Find multiple auction value rankings that you trust (Fangraphs, ESPN, Fantrax, Rotoballer, PitcherList, Yahoo, etc.), find the average auction value of each ranking at each position and then rank the players at each position how you see fit.

Here’s an example:

When you look at the table, you see five pitchers in order of the highest ranked to the fifth ranked, then their auction values from three sites, then the average of the auction prices and, finally, rearranging of the pitchers based on your own rankings. You would do this for every position with X amount of players per position, with X being the number of teams in the league plus eight to ten; in leagues where you have an extra utility or a corner infield and middle infield position or two catchers or five outfielders or all four options or some combination, then you’d rank 30 to 45 of every infield position, 60 to 100 outfielders, 80 to 140 starting pitchers and 30 to 60 relievers.

It is going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort to do this. Not as much time as the first option mentioned (establishing z-scores), but still plenty of time. If you are a first time auction drafter or a first time auction drafter AND first time fantasy baseball player, this may be a bit too daunting, so maybe you want to try something else.

Like using the Fangraphs Auction Calculator (Click Here). Plug in all of your league’s settings, choose no split or split (I’ll explain this in Step 2: Creating a Budget), choose the projections you trust and then generate and export the values and rankings.

What do you do if you don’t want to do either of the options for creating your own auction values?

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• About the Author
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Anthony Kates

I’m a husband, father and fantasy sports fanatic. I’ve been playing some fantasy sport or other since the fall of 1996, thanks to one of my childhood best friends, Brent. I enjoy watching all major sports, reading fantasy novels, watching TV shows and movies, playing video games and writing about fantasy baseball. I started at Sports Ethos in 2023, just writing one article a week and cutting my teeth in fantasy sports writing and I am now a co-lead of the Fantasy Baseball department, co-host of the Fantasy MLB Today podcast and the author of two weekly articles, our dynasty baseball rankings and a handful of random articles a year. I support the Houston Astros, Dallas Mavericks, Tennessee Titans and all things Texas Longhorns.

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