How much is hard work rewarded in Rotissery Baseball?

I just completed my 2nd year in a competitive rotisserie 5x5 baseball league as co-owner of the SF Marauders.  After leading for a couple of months in the middle of the year, we finished a solid third.

This league is a good test bed to try to estimate how important daily moves and work are to maintain your team.  Because we had one team manager, the Jolly Jayhawks, who spends a lot of time on fantasy baseball, making moves basically every day, as he was researching matchups and streaming a starting pitcher almost every day.  Another team, the Los Angeles Sad Pandas, paid no attention all year, making no trades, no drops or pickups, nor, as best as I can tell, did he even make internal moves to correct for players on the DL, starters who needed to be put in, etc.  In effect, "his" team, including, so far as I know, the Draft, was entirely computer driven.  And for my team, the SF Marauders, most of the time I was pretty active, but was away on a long vacation for nearly two months (August and September) with limited internet access.

In a rotisserie league with ten teams, each earning scores of 1-10 on 10 categories, the average score for a team should be 55.  How did the three teams fare?

Jolly Jayhawks won the league and ended up with a phenomenal 85.5, 30 points above average.  Is constant work is worth +30?  If we break that down by month, one could argue that constant, smart, savvy work on your roto team is worth about 5 points a month, or about 1 point a week.  The second place team, the Pac Bell Bombers, was also quite active and finished with 82 points, roughly supporting this calculation.

The completely inactive Sad Pandas did end up last, at 23 points.  32 points below average.  Again, roughly 5 points a month.  Now, part of the blame probably lies in his initial draft, since this particular league (and the managers) places less emphasis on starting pitchers and more on relievers than the computer AI seems to understand.  The Sad Pandas have way too many starters and zero relievers to fare well in our league.  Pulling a number somewhat out of my butt, let's ascribe -8 points to his lousy draft.  He should have ended up at 31, -24 off average, for a net loss due to neglect of -4 a month, or -1 a week.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to get the ESPN site to show me some graph of the standings over time to find out exactly how my team did during my vacation.  But, based on memory, the Marauders dropped from the high 70s to the low 70s.  (After my return, we rallied in the final weeks to get back to 75.5)  Let's say a net loss of 6, or 3 a month.  Now, I did have some internet access, so if we call my activities "50% active", you come up with a loss of 6 a month for complete inactivity.  Not far from the 4 and 5 above.

In conclusion, it appears that continuous, smart, high activity in a roto league is worth about 5 points a month, relative to "average activity".  Complete inactivity costs about the same, 4 points a month.  And the difference between high activity and complete inactivity is nearly 10 points a month.  These results are based upon a very small sample size of one league, so take them with a huge grain of salt!