I came across this meme on NOSTR, and it got me thinking.
The Keynesian economist thinks value is determined by the cost it takes to produce something — for our purposes consider that the ADP at which you’d have to take him.
The Marxist thinks value is determined by how much labor went into it. Anyone who mentions the word-count of the article they post is engaging in that frame. (I’m not sure what the analogy would be for that on draft day, as all players take the same click of a button to draft.)
But the Austrian is talking about everyone doing his own subjective cheat sheet, and the market value being the ADP only after all those people come together to create that market.
At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the Keynesian’s ADP and the Austrian’s, but in practice there is. In the Keynesian view, the ADP is the ADP. In the Austrian view, the market value is only determined by the personal subjective value judgments of the drafters. In other words, they have to make their own cheat sheets first, and only then will the market value really be known.
I’d argue the NFBC ADP (and that of other platforms) are more of the Keynesian variety. Some people are doing their own projections or cheat sheets, but many (including me at times) are just looking at the ADP itself as the baseline and making small adjustments to it. And the ADP itself is also heavily influenced by the projections systems to which everyone has access. In other words, people are treating as-is ADP roughly as value, even though it’s not really the true aggregate of everyone’s subjective preferences.
If no one had access to ADP or anyone else’s projections, the cross-off list in the draft room were only alphabetical (or sortable by individual stats like last year’s HR, RBI, etc.), then everyone would have to come up with their own rankings. (Even better if there were no tweets, podcasts, cheat sheets, etc. influencing anyone’s rankings.) If each person had to generate a cheat sheet solely through his own research, that would be an especially information-rich, Austrian-style ADP.
And this got me thinking. If our group-think ADP that feeds on itself, i.e., “Why did you take this player in the third round? Because he’s a third rounder,” it might not be an especially good baseline for value. We won’t ever again have the real Austrian-style ADP (maybe we were closer in a brief window 20 years ago), but what we have now is really set by a few early drafters and projectors and mostly adjusted due to news and hype.
As such, I’m resigned to do my own MLB cheat sheets this year, maybe starting in December, and I’ll take great pains to avoid even knowing what the ADP or the big projection systems think until just before the drafts themselves, so I know who to jump and who to wait on.
In fact, I plan to do my first draft blind, so to speak, without even looking at ADP at all.