Woody Allen once told us that those who can’t do teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym.

I think Woody said that with Steve Phillips in mind. First, Phillips failed as a player (drafted in the fifth round in 1981 by the Mets – he was so bad he doesn’t even have a page on Baseball Reference), then he failed as general manager of the Mets and now he works for the XM fantasy sports station giving advice to people who pretend to run teams.

So while I try not to listen to people who have followed the path Phillips has (OK, I’m being really harsh on the guy…for all his shortcomings he does know baseball), he did say something intriguing today. Phillips made the claim that it’s better to target closers on teams with better records because, obviously, they’ll have more save opportunities.

It makes sense that good teams would win more games and thus have more save opportunities, but good teams also tend to win by larger margins more often than bad teams. When bad teams win games, it’s usually by only a couple runs. Do these two competing factors even out?

This wasn’t the first time I had heard this theory, but it was the first time I decided to look into it. I went back over each of the last three seasons and looked at each team’s save opportunities and total wins. This allowed me to create 90 data sets (30 teams over three seasons) and I charted them below.

Note: I used the data available on ESPN. They count save opportunities in accordance with MLB rules, so it’s not a perfect representation of ninth inning save chances (since that stat was not readily available). Still, it shows what correlation there might be between team success and save chances.

As the caption says, team wins is on the x-axis and save opportunities is on the y-axis. We see here that there is in fact a noticeable positive correlation between team success (wins) and saves. We can also see from the graph, though, that there are many data points that fall far from the best-fit line.

Warning: I’m about to go all STAT101 on your ass.

The R-squared value for the data (0.219) further shows this lack of solid correlation. R-squared values range from zero to one, and the closer they are to zero the less correlation there is between the two data sets. R-squared allows us to see exactly how much the variation in one data set is due to variation in another data set. Put more simply, it allows us to see how much of the variation in save opportunities is due to variation in team wins. An R-squared value of 0.219 means that changes in team wins accounts for just 21.9 percent of the change in save opportunities. The other 78.1 percent is due to other factors (such as strength of offense).

Now that the math minute is over, it’s time to sum things up (pun intended). While there is an overall positive trend, there is so much variability from case to case that team wins alone is not an accurate predictor of saves.

Because the data above shows total team save opportunities, including all pitchers in the bullpen, the more important factors in save totals for a pitcher are reliability and job security. Of course, this is not a surprise – closers that have strong holds on the job and receive a greater percentage of their team’s overall save opportunities will likely have more saves – it is helpful to see this trend nonetheless.

Perhaps Steve Phillips knows what he’s talking about after all.

There are few things more boring than listening to someone else talk about their fantasy league. There’s only so many times I can listen to my buddy’s hyperbolic retelling of how he totally flim-flammed some random guy I don’t know by swapping an injured Chase Utley for Robinson Cano, and even one time is once too many.

Heck, I’d rather watch my grandmother knit me an iPhone warmer while she learns that the trashy looking guy on Maury is not the father…and I don’t even have an iPhone. Or a grandmother. Is Maury even on TV anymore?

So that’s why I won’t bore you with the pick-by-pick details of a recent auction draft I did with some of my fantasy friends from across the web, but I will use this extremely limited sample to draw some conclusions about how you should approach auction drafts. While many of these tips and strategies will work in leagues of all shapes and sizes, they were written with your standard 10- and 12-team mixed leagues in mind.

As always, know your league settings

It’s amazing how often a brilliant draft strategy reveals itself with a quick glance at your league’s settings. Your head-to-head league has no minimum innings pitched per week? Grab an ace starter, a couple stud relievers, pay for a strong offense and you should be set. There’s 16 teams? Save some money late in your draft for the inevitable run on bargain closers. You need to start two catchers? Better make sure you get one of those top-10 guys.

Ok, so usually it’s not so blatantly obvious, but five minutes of mild rumination and quiet reflection will usually be enough for you to not completely screw things up. Generally, you’ll even excel.

Avoid the elites

This is a very broad generalization, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to spend more than $25-$30 on anyone. Before you close the page and call me a fraud, this obviously comes with the addendum that if someone like Pujols, Troy Tulowitzki, Roy Halladay, Ryan Braun, etc. is available for that kind of price, you take them and praise the heavens. My guess is those guys are going for significantly more than that. In my draft those four went for $41, $36, $38 and $38, respectively. The more starting positions your league has, the more you can afford to sit back and smile while everyone else pays top dollar.

There is of course one caveat to this rule; if your league is uber-shallow (maybe eight or 10 teams, three outfielders, no middle infield or corner infield starters and maybe three to five pitcher spots) you should make sure you get some elite players and it’s probably alright to overpay a little for some of them. In a league this shallow, your depth is wasted. Oh, and as always, AL- and NL-only leagues function like this.

My draft saw Cano go for $38. I got Dustin Pedroia for $20. Sometimes it pays to wait.

Have no fear, under-priced talent is here!

It can be nerve-racking when you start to see elite talent fly off the auction board while you’ve barely made a splash, but this is usually a good thing.

No, you won’t have Albert Pujols, Evan Longoria, Carl Crawford or any of the other top-10 players, but your opponents won’t have the resources to outbid you for the next tier of players and instead will be stuck starting third- or fourth-tier guys just because that’s all they can afford. Better yet, other managers won’t even have enough money to throw in bids for the sole purpose of driving up the price. You can now get players for less than their market value, which will allow you to throw a few extra bucks at the guys you really want.

One of the other managers in my draft asked if I was even there because after 45 minutes and 25 selections I was the only person who didn’t have a player, but by the end of the draft I was getting anyone I wanted for almost any price I wanted including Stephen Drew for $5. To put that in perspective, Hanley Ramirez went for $43, Jose Reyes for $20, Jimmy Rollins for $18, Elvis Andrus for $10 and Starlin Castro for $7. Drew isn’t as good as Ramirez or Reyes, but he’s probably at least comparable to everyone else and he went for less than all of them.

It can be tough, but identify the runs

It’s easy to spot a run on a position in a snake draft, but doing so in auction drafts can be a little trickier. At some point in the middle of your draft, you might notice that everyone has a couple starting pitchers but very few people have shortstops. This is probably a good time to nominate a popular shortstop that you don’t want in hopes that the other managers will bite. You know you’ll be fine waiting for another shortstop because you’re sticking to your plan, but there’s bound to be two or three other managers who will panic and click the “Bid” button a bit too hastily.

But we don’t just nominate players we don’t want. Sometimes we need to nominate the guys we do want. If you have your eye on Matt Wieters and you just saw Geovany Soto go for a couple bucks under his pre-draft estimated value, go ahead and put Wieters up for auction. Soto and Wieters are similar players and there wasn’t a ton of interest in Soto so perhaps you can get Wieters at a good price. If, however, you see Soto go for more than he’s worth, nominating Wieters right now might not be the best idea.

Sometimes the price is wrong even when it’s right

I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to put a bid in for a player just because the value was too great or I didn’t want my opponent to be getting such a great deal. Colby Rasmus went for just $3 in my draft but I already had my five starting outfielders and I really needed to stock up on closers. I wanted to bid on Rasmus desperately, but I had to resist the urge. In the end I got Angel Pagan and Leo Nunez for $2 apiece. While I think Rasmus is better than Pagan, I got both Pagan and Nunez for the same amount I would have had to bid on Rasmus.

Know other managers’ maximum bids

This isn’t particularly helpful early in drafts, but it can be very extremely useful at the end. Let’s say it’s your turn to nominate a player and you still need a starting catcher. You notice all but one of the other managers already has their starting catcher and Mike Napoli is the last of the potential top-five guys left (for some reason people insist on nominating sub-par players like Carlos Ruiz and Yadier Molina early on…I don’t get it).

Normally this would mean an epic showdown between you and the other guy because the difference between Napoli and someone like Kurt Suzuki could end up being pretty large, but you see your opponent has a max bid of $6. This is the perfect time to nominate Napoli. Heck, when the other guy places the next bid for $2, go ahead and raise the bidding to $6. He can’t top you and you’ll win Napoli outright.

Had you bid just $3, he probably would have bid $4, you would have bid $5, he would have maxed his bidding out at $6 and you would have been forced to bid $7 to get Napoli. Save yourself the buck. It might come in handy later on when everyone else has max bids of $1 and you can pick up a lower-tier closer for $2.