Month: June 2013

Tout NL Trade: Elite Pitcher for Elite Hitter

THE WHAT

Peter Kreutzer trades Cliff Lee to Tristan Cockcroft
Tristan Cockcroft trades Jay Bruce to Peter Kreutzer

THE WHY

I (Kreutzer) drafted a team of starting pitching, with Lee, Greinke, Minor and Lynn. I bought hitters but made a fatal gaffe paying $8 for Dee Gordon. His subsequent demotion left a sizeable hole in the lineup, one exacerbated by an early injury to Ryan Zimmerman and a more recent one to Angel Pagan. Plus, until Ryan Sweeney’s recent explosion, none of the flyers I added on draft day or on waivers have paid off on offense. This is a team that needed another big hitter.

Cockcroft, the league’s 2012 winner, has a commanding lead in HR and RBI thanks to explosive seasons from Paul Goldschmidt and Carlos Gomez, but despite excellent ERA and WHIP it is middle of the pack in Wins and Strikeouts. Adding an elite pitcher should bring up both cats.

WHAT HAPPENED

I was trying to figure out how to make a trade with some of the teams that are strong in hitting but weak in pitching, when Tristan sent out a note to the league offering a hitter for a pitcher. I offered him Lee for Bruce (better for me than anything else I could find) or Lynn for Howard (lesser impact, lesser risk). I contemplated offering the troubled Greinke for the troubled BJ Upton, but felt Greinke was too big a price to pay to take on the Upton risk (even though Greinke carries similar risk). Call that handicapping.

Tristan got back to me after a bit, saying he’d do Bruce for Lee, but would add his Pettibon for my Matt Adams if I wanted to mitigate the pitching hit some. I did not, I’m looking for offense and if a spot opened in St. Louis Adams could be a big help, so we went with the simple one for one deal.

ANALYSIS

My hope is that my recent acquisition of Roy Oswalt and the rejuvenation of Chris Capuano, plus my sizeable (six over third place) cushion in Wins, means that giving up Lee doesn’t cost me too many qualitative and K points. The return of a healthy Marco Estrada would help here, too, I dream. Meanwhile, Jay Bruce should gain me a few points in HR and a couple more in RBI, and more importantly get me into position where another hitting add via FAAB or reserves might make a big difference (and a handful more points). As it stands right now, I have the most FAAB money.

Deducting Bruce’s stats from Tristan’s HR and RBI totals would cost him one point total at this point (though some more in Runs), so giving him up is almost like free money. He was nine wins and eight strikeouts behind me in pitching, however, so I’m going to lose there, but Tristan was sure to make a trade with someone, so those points were likely gone anyway.

The bottom line, we both shore up a weakness and balance our teams a bit. I have more upside and downside at this point. while Tristen secures his position in first place and should be much harder for everyone to catch.

A Tout Wars Mixed Auction Trade (an insider’s opinion): June 24, 2013

puig_yasiel640By Paul Singman

Here’s the deal:

Seth Tractman gets:
Yasiel Puig LAD from Paul Singman
Edward Muijica STL from Paul Singman
A.J. Burnett (DL) PIT from Paul Singman

Paul Singman gets:
Gio Gonzalez WSH from Seth Tractman
Troy Tulowitzki (DL) from Seth tractman

Why?

Because why not? As a participating member of this deal, of course I think that the effects are huge. But even evaluating objectively, you can’t ignore the number of impact players involved, who also happen be some of the most polarizing names in the game. Quite easily this trade could end up a major win for either Seth or myself, given all of the risk involved.

On the surface I (Singman) get an upgrade to my rotation in Gio Gonzalez. Even though I am strong in ERA and WHIP (13 points in each), my two weakest categories are wins and strikeouts (8 points in each). Adding Gio should hopefully address both of those underbellies.

In the short term, Tractman gets a hitting upgrade in the form of Cuban wunderkind Yasiel Puig. When you render Vin Scully speechless, you know you’ve done something significant. Puig should help Seth remain competitive in the fierce home run battle and also boost his 4-point standing in steals. This short-term upgrade might come at a long-term expense though, as it cost Seth one of the premier hitters in the game (when healthy) in Troy Tulowitzki. Tulo is, of course, on the shelf for a month with a broken rib. But whether two months of Tulowitzki will be more valuable than three of Puig is a question worth asking. The answer mostly depends on where you fall on the pessimist vs. optimist spectrum regarding Puig.

Lastly the deal also gives Tractman arguably the most impressive closer this year in Edward Mujica. He went from two closers to zero when Brandon League and Jim Henderson lost their jobs, and Mujica should help him tread water in the saves category, where he currently ranks sixth. I had no problem relieving myself of a closer, given I had three at the time (since then I also traded Jim Johnson in a separate deal) and hold a commanding 20 save lead over Fred Zinkie, who is second in the category.

Reality?

There are many perspectives through which to view this deal. One is to view it in terms of the healthy vs. injured players. Regarding the healthy, Puig and Mujica for Gio favors Seth, while Tulo for Burnett is a monstrous win for me. Although it will be at least a month before I can reap the benefits. In terms of draft day dollars it’s quite lopsided; I’m trading a total of $4 while for Seth it’s $47. This is because Puig and Mujica were both fortuitous waiver pickups, not auction bought. It took 19 well-spent dollars to land Mujica, and a lucky $1 bid placed Puig on the team the week before his call-up and subsequent exploits.

The bottom line, though, is that I was able to acquire two premium players in this deal, and premium players are worth taking chances on in mixed formats. Time will tell if it will be true in this case.

How To Handle a Zombie: What do you do when a fantasy owner stops managing his team during the season?

By Mike Podhorzer

zombiebaseballcards2Though there is no money on the line in professional expert leagues such as Tout Wars, pride, reputation and bragging rights are significant motivating factors. In fact, some might argue that it is more gratifying to beat the best of the best in a fantasy baseball league than winning your local league and taking home a $2,500 prize. I would tend to agree with this. Given this assumption, one would expect that the industry vets lucky enough to be invited to participate in a prestigious league like Tout Wars would be active all season long. Unfortunately, in the inaugural Tout Wars mixed draft league, one owner has left his team for dead. Aside from leaving three injured players on his active roster for several weeks, this owner has not made a transaction of any kind (FAAB or activate/reserve) since the end of April. Quite honestly, this shocks me. While this type of behavior happens all the time in more casual leagues, I cannot comprehend why an owner who is well known in the fantasy industry would completely abandon his team just a month into the season.

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing my competitors’ teams searching for trade opportunities when I noticed this owner’s team starting those aforementioned injured players. At first, I thought, okay maybe it’s just been a week and there were some extenuating circumstances that caused this owner to leave the trio of disabled players in his lineup. So I decided to then check out his year to date transactions, and that’s when I realized that he hasn’t been playing since the end of April. I immediately notified commissioner Peter Kreutzer explaining the situation. I have been the commissioner of my own local league for over 10 years and so have unfortunately had experience dealing with this issue. The question that now arises is whether we should just leave the team as is or develop some sort of system to ensure the dead team has a healthy lineup each week.

Of course, the downside of leaving the team the way it currently stands is that the other fantasy teams now have an opportunity to gain free and easy points in the standings in the counting stat categories. It is rare that a team will make it through the season without multiple injuries. Without any replacements being added, the dead owner’s team is going to be taking zeroes in several lineup slots, killing his chances of accumulating the various stats and competing with other teams. Furthermore, the players on this owner’s team are essentially eliminated from the player pool. Want to trade for an underperforming Jason Heyward or Matt Cain (examples)? Tough luck, he’s on the dead team.

So given the undesirable side effects caused by leaving a dead team’s roster alone, I developed a system that I have used a couple of times in my local league, which I described to Peter. The goal of the system is simply to ensure the team has a fully healthy active roster each week, with no concern being paid to the actual quality of the players. These are the steps that I follow:

1) Check for any injured players currently on an active roster; contact owner for an explanation and if no response, consider the team dead.

2) If the team has a replacement for the injured player on his bench, activate that player. If he has more than one option, activate the player started in the highest percentage of leagues. If the start percentage rate isn’t available, then activate the player currently ranked highest by either the site’s ranking system or another agreed upon ranking system or the player performing best season to date based on a subjective determination. The goal here is to makes the best attempt to mirror what the owner would do if he was actually paying attention.

3) If no replacement is found on the dead team’s bench, then a free agent must be acquired. After the FAAB process has run as normal, then depending on which data is available on the league site, add the player with the highest ownership percentage or with the highest season to date ranking at the position needed. Since this process is done after FAAB has run, there is no worry about other owners also bidding on the same player as the dead team. So the replacement gets added to the dead team for $0 and no one can complain since they were not outbid for the player.

While there is clearly no perfect method to handle this situation, I think the process I described above is the fairest and certainly a better way to maintain the integrity of the league than allowing a team to field multiple injured players and dramatically affect the standings. Unfortunately, Peter advised me of the following:

“The LLC consensus is that it is inappropriate to take action, that the remedy for a player who doesn’t play is to not be invited the next year and to let his team float for this year. We do have a precedent for this.”

I obviously disagree with the decision, but would love to hear your thoughts on handling an inactive team in this type of league.