How do you handle allocations in keeper leagues? For example, you have a $300 budget, 1 keeper, Trout at $10 but his true value in your league is $50. Going into the auction would you consider your hitter allocation as 10/300 or 50/340?

My opinion, it's not really about valuing your team with a certain split, but the entire draft eligible group. You would still make the assessment that 70% of all draft dollars will be spent on hitters. A single player won't skew the whole field percentage; however, if 90% of the players kept with low salaries in your league are hitters, you might want to allocate more to pitchers (maybe 40% instead of 30%) since that's where the bidding wars will come.

I'm of the school that I want a fairly balanced team coming out of the auction, but I'd rather have $350 in team value (with $250/$100 hitter to pitcher split) than $320 and a more clear $210/$110 split. You can trade the excess hitting value after the auction to fill a hole.

I'm not so sure that the scatterplot reveals only a weak correlation, given the nature of what you were plotting. That is, intuitively, at least, an owner is capable of spending either too little *or* too much on pitching, and an ideal "sweet spot" range is what you're looking for on a scatterplot like this. This would be demonstrated by a pyramid-like shape, with the top finishers all bunched closer to that sweet spot, and lower finishers further out in *either* direction. And it looks to me like that's exactly what you've shown: that spending 30%, give or take, on your pitching is the best way to go. And not because it guarantees that you'll finish in the money (it appears that many spent about 30 and still finished poorly), but because straying too far from 30 guarantees that you won't.

In theory, there should be just as much value in the pitching half as the hitting half. The problem is that there is far less projectable pitching value than hitting value. So, owners are much more willing to go with a $1 pitcher than with a $1 hitter.

So I am not sure if the relatively narrow planned spend is why the top guys finished on top, or they are just better at identifying pitching value and so can budget more reliably for it.

But as the high budgets of some guys who finished at 5-12 shows, spending itself isn't the driver of success. But if you know what you are doing, 36% or so is enough.

Jason,
I'm in a 4 x 4, with Saves, Wins, era, and K's for pitchers and HR, rbi, SB, and avg. for hitters. Closers are valued very highly in this league; does that change the allocation more to pitchers?
Dave

I spent a few years in the late 90s calculating the optimum split between hitting and pitching, and even the splits between the individual categories, by calculating return on investment. It is easy to determine the precise value that players earn in hindsight. If you were to actually draft a league after the season is over (which is quite fun partly because you get to know the winner right away), the split is 50/50. But buying players in the future is a different story. Can't really get into the methodology here, but in order for pitchers and hitters to return the same total value, I calculated that you needed to spend 68% on hitting and 32% on pitching. At the time, most leagues were closer to 60/40, so I was an advocate for spending more on hitting. This may be slightly different now, that was the steroid era, and it was 4x4, but the market seems to have settled close to that value now.