Don't get me wrong, our keepers were so good, we'll probably contend anyway. But I didn't make good use of our budget at the auction.

It's an 18-team, 5 x 5 league with the standard 23-man roster slots. There are seven bench spots and 10 minor leaguers (players with fewer than 20 games at the major-league level.) You can keep up to 15 players, with their salaries escalating $5 more for each year you extend them beyond their third ("C") seasons.

Here's who we kept:

As you can see, we were in good shape in an 18-team league with essentially five players that could be first-round picks if it were a draft and three  closers. We needed to acquire starting pitching and fill in the offense, but we had what seemed like enough of a budget to cover that.

Of course, in keeper leagues with large numbers of keepers, there's significant inflation, and your budget doesn't go as far as one would think. In retrospect, I regret throwing back a keepable $67 Clayton Kershaw (he went for $74 at auction), given how expensive lesser players turned out to be.

In my defense, the keepers aren't posted until a couple days before the auction date, and so there wasn't a great way to generate a cross-off list except by doing it manually. (I could have downloaded the RotoWire software and imported the keepers in, but I prefer to track auctions by hand and pay more attention to the bidding.) I was remiss, however, in not doing this until the auction started, so I spend the first two nomination orbits deleting kept players and watching who was going for what without knowing exactly what was left in the player pool.

Accordingly, I let Madison Bumgarner go at $48, as I was still deleting kept pitchers, team by team, and didn't realize how thin the position would get once he was gone. As I got further into my deleting kept (and auctioned) players from the cheat sheet, I worried I'd have $116 to spend and no one left to buy. So I went to $49 on Jose Bautista and secured one last big bat likely to put our offense over the top. The plan, then, was to wait on the next tier of pitchers - Masahiro Tanaka, Kenta Maeda and Francisco Liriano - with the intention of landing two or more of them. But Maeda went for 31, Tanaka went for 30, and I was lucky to snag Liriano for $24. While I felt good bailing on what I deemed to be bad deals, the remaining options were awfully thin.

John Lackey went for $20, Kevin Gausman $19, Jason Hammel $17, Anibal Sanchez $14 and Gio Gonzalez (on whom I probably should have bid) $13. The inflation was so pronounced, I opted to spend money on hitting and cobble together the rest of the staff (four more pitchers) on the cheap even though pitching was our greatest need.

To that end, I bought a $1 Chris Heston, Rubby de la Rosa, Nick Tropeano and Jesse Hahn. While one or two might pan out, it's hardly the nucleus of a staff for a win-now team. With all that savings you'd think I put together a monster offense, but I passed on some good values like Austin Jackson ($3) and Jayson Werth ($9) and was outbid later on Rusney Castillo ($17) and Cameron Maybin ($10). I was happy to land Aaron Hicks, though I thought he'd be cheaper than $11, and I probably overpaid for a useful Didi Gregorius ($10). By the end of the auction, I had some money left, but so did a lot of people, and I got into a bidding war over Rockies backup catcher Tom Murphy. I "won" him for $9, but it was probably about $4 too much even in a league of this depth.

Rather than filling my last outfield slot with a mediocre/part-time major leaguer, I bought Brewers prospect Brett Phillips for $1 and left $2 on the table. It's out of keeping with our aim to win now (we have a cheap Gordon, Scherzer, Chapman and Goldschmidt expiring), but maybe we can flip him for a major leaguer at that price.

I supplemented the weak pitching staff with a lot of reserve arms, but in our quest to win the title last year, we traded away our second, third, fifth and sixth round reserve picks. In an 18-team league, that's a lot of waiting around and watching your reserve targets get swiped.

In summary, we're still in good shape because our keepers were so strong, but even under tough circumstances, I don't think this was my best work. Here's the full roster:

Players in orange were bought/drafted this year.