2020 Doubt Wars Winners Announced!

Doubt Wars, the game everyone loves to play, tracks the Tout Wars auctions and lets civilians match wits with the Touts. You can read more about it here.

This year’s winners:

Doubt AL: Vandelay Industries, aka Keith Johnson.

Doubt NL: Fred Zinkie (NL Tout Champ)
Civilian Champ: Amnesia Reboot, aka Kent Ostby

Doubt Mixed: Samauritan, aka Chris Devine

The spreadsheet with the complete standings is here.

Congratulations to the winners, who will receive a grab bag of items from Mastersball, BaseballHQ, Babs Baseball, AskRotoman, and Pattonandco.com.

Look for news about Doubt Wars 2021 in early March here at toutwars.com.

What Happened in 2020? Some Touts Tell

Mixed Draft: Scott White |

NL: Peter Kreutzer | Fred Zinkie |

AL: Mike Gianella |

Mixed Auction: Zach Steinhorn |

Draft and Hold: John Hegglund | Michael Stein | Brad Johnson |

Head 2 Head: Ariel Cohen |

Tout Wars AL 2020 Champion, Chris Liss

In the draft day standings, the Tout AL standings for the team each Tout bought on draft day, Liss finished fourth with 78.5 points. His obvious weakness was Saves, which showed him last.

Once the season started Liss focused on relief pitching. He bought Chris Devenski, Jonathan Hernandez, Rafael Dolis, Greg Holland, Carl Edwards, Clark Schmidt, Dan Altavilla and Andre Scrubb. Those are all his free agent buys.

And he traded for Brad Hand (he traded Kyle Tucker). At the end of the season he was in fourth place in Saves, and ended up with 99 points, 22 more than Rick Wolf and Glenn Colton’s team and Jeff Erickson’s team, which tied for second.

Tout Wars Draft and Hold 2020 Champion, Brad Johnson

Starting with the season’s first full week, there was one thing the Touts in the Draft and Hold league could count on each Monday: Brad Johnson would be in first place.

There were a couple of weeks in late August when he surely slipped behind Mike Florio, who dogged him all season long, but by Monday Johnson was once again atop the standing.

The same is true today, the Monday after season’s end.

Tout Wars Mixed Draft 2020 Champion, Scott White

Tim McLeod had a 1.5 point lead going into the short season’s final week, but when he lost Michael Conforto early on he knew he was in trouble.

Scott White passed him on the way to the championship, easily topping Tom Kessenich, who pushed McLeod into third at the wire.

White finished second in the league in 2017, and third in 2018, and now finally has captured the crown, his first Tout Wars championship.

Tout Wars Head to Head 2020 Champion, Ariel Cohen

Woah. Going into the last week Ian Kahn was two games ahead of Andrea LaMont and three games ahead of Ariel Cohen.

Perhaps more telling, Kahn was 1540 points scored ahead of LaMont, but only 413 against Cohen. Why am I framing the story this way?

Because at the end of the final week Kahn and Cohen had the same number of wins, but Cohen led by 753 points winning the tie-breaker and the championship.

Ian Kahn was the 2019 Tout H2H champ.

This year was Ariel Cohen’s Tout debut.

Tout Wars Mixed Auction 2020 Champion, Derek VanRiper

On August 23rd Derek VanRiper was 1.5 points behind Bret Sayre in the Tout Mixed Auction standings. One week later, despite having only the second best record on the week, DVR was in first by 15.5 over Eric Karabell. With a month left to go VanRiper was in the driver seat.

Tout Wars NL 2020 Champion, Fred Zinkie!

With a week left in the short season Steve Gardner had a 7.5 point lead over Fred Zinkie, apparently comfortable but in the end not enough to hold off Zinkie in his first Tout Wars NL season.

Gardner’s teams was the worst in the league the final week, while Zinkie posted the second best. That was enough for a two point victory.