You pull up to a stoplight, looking to get some gas for your car. Here, you're presented with a dilemma.
The first gas station you see is charging $2.30 per gallon of gas. Your car's pretty parched, so you're willing to pay that to prevent later calamity.
However, across the street, gas is just $2.10 per gallon. This is an awesome deal! Obviously, you're going to bop over there to fill up there instead to capitalize on the pricing discrepancy.
One of two things will happen with these gas stations once you leave. Either the expensive place is going to jack down prices, or the cheap one will crank things up. The market as it stands is clearly inefficient, and changes will be made to account for that.
Looking at average draft position (ADP) data on multiple fantasy baseball sites is a lot like sitting at that stoplight. We get to see the lay of the land and know where one asset may be underpriced while another is due to come back to Earth a bit.
We're certainly not going to pass up paying for Player A on one site just because he's cheaper on another, but this can be an indication of where markets may be inefficient in season-long drafts. Studying the differences can allow us to see where the buying windows are open for each player.
So let's try to decipher this for fantasy baseball this upcoming season by comparing ADPs on Yahoo and ESPN. Any players whose ADP may have been influenced by an injury (and thus potentially differing only because of differences in how each site reports ADP) were omitted. Here are the players who stand out as having big-time gaps in their costs between these two sites.