12-Team Auction Mock Draft (2021 Fantasy Baseball)

The auction format seems to grow in popularity every year in the fantasy baseball community, and it’s easy to see why. Instead of randomized draft slots and hoping for the right players to fall to them at their spot, fantasy managers can identify and assign values ahead of time and head into the auction with a plan. Luck is still involved, the auctions give fantasy managers much more control over their strategy.

I’m constantly experimenting with new fantasy baseball strategies, especially when it comes to auctions. This year, I’ve been doing a ton of mock auctions to both try out those strategies and to see how I am valuing certain players against other experts in the industry. The great thing about using the FantasyPros Draft Simulator for these mock drafts is that you’re drafting against teams that are based on the current FantasyPros Expert Consensus Rankings, so the decisions those teams make are based on expert opinions in the industry right now.

For this experiment, I completed a 12-team mock auction draft for a standard 5×5 format. Let’s first take a look at the team and I ended up with, and then we’ll walk through the general strategy, where things went wrong, where things went my way, and how things look overall.