Between some of my reactions to the prices at Tout Wars and a long list of injury news, it was an incredibly busy week for pricing updates. Below is a list of the most significant changes made this week.

National League Hitters

Next weekend, Jason Collette, Paul Singman, and I will be representing Baseball Prospectus in Tout Wars. Jason will be in the AL-only pool, Paul will handle the mixed format, and I will tackle the NL-only side. Just like with LABR, there will be plenty of updates based on how the experts profess their opinions with their bid prices.

For now, let’s get right into this week’s updates...

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Last Monday, I examined how the bidding in the AL-only LABR auction impacted some of my bids. This week, it’s the National League’s turn (although I do have a handful of notes about the American League based on injury news).

National League Hitters

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This is the third installment of Baseball Prospectus’s 2013 5x5 bid limits for 12-team National League, American League, and mixed league Rotisserie-style formats. While the first two installments were based mostly, if not entirely, on my own opinions and predilections, this installment is influenced by a second opinion: expert auction prices.

The League of Alternate Baseball Reality (or LABR, as it’s more commonly known) expert auctions took place over the weekend in Phoenix, Arizona. (The CBS Analyst League auctions took place were held online last Tuesday and Thursday.) LABR is the more renowned league, but both auctions give me my first opportunity to see how “realistic” my prices are compared to the market.

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Last week, I rolled out my AL-only, NL-only, and mixed league bid prices for 12-team formats. In that installment, I explained how I constructed the bids. I thought that this week I’d explain the usefulness of bid limits. Bid limits are designed to be guidelines to provide a valid stopping point on every single player in your auction. However, the goal of bid limits shouldn’t be to create a fixed price that you robotically aim to pay for every player. In fact, your goal should be to pay slightly less than the recommended bid limit for as many players as you possibly can. If you pay par price for every player at your auction, you will buy a middle-of-the-pack team and finish seventh.

This does not mean, however, that you should never pay the par price or even slightly more than that ceiling. Circumstances change at every auction. If you really need a closer, you might decide to be aggressive on Craig Kimbrel and let everyone else fight it out for J.J. Putz. During the auction, you might decide that Hanley Ramirez is going to turn back to clock to 2009 and, instead of stopping at $30, push him to $32.

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Welcome to the first installment of Baseball Prospectus’ 2013 bid prices for “standard” Rotisserie-style formats.

In the tables below, you will find my recommended bid limits for AL-only, NL-only, and mixed leagues. For all three formats, the presumed settings are 12 teams, $260 budgets, 14 hitters, and nine pitchers. The bids for the top 168 hitters and 108 pitchers in each player pool add up to $3,120, which is equal to the total league budget for each pool.

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