The RotoWire Staff Keeper League auction took place Tuesday night - it started at 11 pm Western European Time and lasted until 4:20 am. It's an 18-team mixed league with a standard 23-man roster, seven bench spots and 10 minor leaguers. You're allowed to keep up to 15 players from the previous year with the caveat that heading into their third (C) years with your team you have to either (1) keep them at their current prices, but lose them to free agency in 2018; or (2) extend them at an additional cost of $5 per year extended. So if you had Mike Trout heading into Year 3 at $40, you could keep him this year at $40, keep him through 2018 at $45 per year, 2019 at $50 per, etc. So when you extend players they not only are more expensive in the future, they're also more expensive in the present. (This is an important point which I discuss below.)

Liss and Shoe's Dynasty, the team I share with RotoWire COO Tim Schuler (Shoe), has been a contender almost every year and won the league twice, but last year I did a poor job at the auction, and we had to tank and trade for keepers. In the end, it might have been a good thing as we reloaded with $3 Mookie Betts and $3 George Springer heading into their C years to join Nolan Arenado $13 (in his walk year) and Carlos Correa ($3 B) among others.

Here's the pre-auction roster:

Notice the three $13 superstars. They're not that price by coincidence. The rule for minor leaguers in this format is they're keepable for free indefinitely until they reach the majors and pass a threshold of time there (20 or 30 games.) The following year they show up on your roster as $3A players. So many prospects that turn into stars are initially kept at $3.

When they go into their third seasons on our team, as mentioned above, we have the choice to keep them this year for three, this year and next for $8 per, this year, next and the one after that for $13, etc. Shoe and I pretty much never extend anyone beyond three years and $13 for a few reasons:

(1) When you're a contender this year, you want to save as much present money as possible to build the strongest roster around the star players, i.e., you'd rather have a $50 profit on a player for one year than a $1 profit on him for 50 years;

(2) While player performance is always uncertain and hard to predict, it's far easier to predict 2017 than it is 2020. Every year out, you have to regress player values to the mean, yet the further out you go, the more expensive the player gets; and

(3) There's a time value to money - or enjoyment - we'd rather have a better team now and deal with 2020 when we get there - if we get there. Between the threats of environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, global economic collapse, viruses and the supervolcano, who knows? And if this strategy turns out to be wrong, we can argue hindsight is 20/20, and in 2020 our case will have particular resonance.

Seriously though, we've never gone more than 3 and $13 on a player, and we've rarely regretted it, while avoiding Carl Crawford's and Cliff Lee's abrupt collapses. Paul Goldschmidt, whom we extended to three and $13 in 2014, might put that to the test this year, but we won a title in 2015, and who knows if that would still have happened had he been $5 or $10 more expensive? I can also see a good case for making Mookie Betts an $18 2020 player rather than a $13 2019 one, though the fact that I would leave $5 on the table at this year's auction (more on that below) wasn't knowable at the time.

In any event, we had strong keepers, and heading into the auction, we had the most money ($188) to spend,  though we knew it wouldn't go that far given the high levels of inflation in keeper formats. To understand why there's so much inflation, consider we had Betts, Springer and Arenado at $13 and Correa at $3 among other bargains. If in a re-draft league, Betts would go for $40, Arenado for $38, Correa for $32 and Springer for $28, that means we're making a profit of $96 on those four alone. If we say we're $120 to the good total for all our keepers, that means we have $120 to spend on the remaining pool that we wouldn't had we simply rostered those players in a regular auction.

Even if other teams haven't amassed that much keeper equity - give them $80 on average - that's still quite a bit ($1440) when multiplied by 18 teams. In fact, there's only 18 * $260 ($4680 total), so we're talking about 31 percent of the entire budget as stashed profit. So you can imagine what's going to happen when $1440 that shouldn't be there as well as all the money that should is unleashed on the available player pool. So instead of getting Bumgarner for $30, I budgeted closer to $50, for example. (He went for $57.)

My goal was to get at least one star pitcher (Bumgarner, Scherzer or Strasburg), one ~$30 pitcher (hopefully Gerrit Cole), one star closer (Mark Melancon was our target), one big outfield bat (I had written Ryan Braun for $42 into the spread sheet) and another outfield bat with upside (Yasiel Puig for ~$15 was our target there.) I would skimp on catcher, the last outfield spot and the last pitching slot or two. It's good to have some low-priced players for keeper purposes too.

We were also full at MI and 3B, and Kendrys Morales was clogging our utility, so I could not even bid on middle infielders or third basemen during the auction. Moreover, once I bought a first baseman, we were also locked out of all corners in the end game, i.e., I could bid or nominate only pitchers, outfielders and catchers.

Mostly, I achieved our goals. I got Strasburg for $45 - $3 more than I guessed I'd have to pay, but I wasn't going to make the same mistake as last year when I let all the top pitchers pass me by. I got Cole for $34, again a few dollars over budget, but we had our two 200-K types (if healthy) that we needed. I got Melancon for $27, a couple dollars under budget and a good bargain after I let Aroldis Chapman go to Jeff Erickson for $37 (I was the $36 bid.)

We didn't need as much hitting, but we needed some. Ryan Braun went past my $42 target, and I let him go. Carlos Gonzalez, the backup plan in that slot, went to $47, and even Puig went to $19, and I bowed out. I settled for Carlos Santana for $26 and Carlos Gomez for $18 as our significant bats, got two cheap catchers with upside (both on the Brewers) and splurged $19 for Cam Bedrosian, perhaps my one rash move of the auction. But our other closer, Jim Johnson, is shaky, and having three closers is a big advantage in a league this deep where your last starter is as likely to hurt as help you in a given outing. I actually left $5 on the table because my target Gerardo Parra went for only $1 instead of the $5-6 for which I had budgeted him. All told, I feel good about this team, but relying on Strasburg is obviously risky, and Bedrosian was expensive for a guy who's not a lock to have the closer job.

I won't bore you with our minor league/reserve picks, except to say we got A.J. Reed who I think is a nice post-hype prospect target late in drafts:

Here are the full rosters: