In two of the three Tout leagues in which Red Sox phenom callup is eligible, he’d been bought in previous weeks, because of a quirky in the Tout rules that rewards foresight and advanced thinking. So it was only in Tout Mixed Auction that there was bidding on the young speedster. It wasn’t surprising that Fred Zinkie was aggressive, he always is. It was surprising that Scott Swanay didn’t wade in at all.
Todd, Brian, Rob, Zach and Perry let you know what happened and why in this week’s report.
Tim writes:
On the pitching side, Perry lost all-world starter Jose Fernandez early, but his rotation of Anibal Sanchez, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Nathan Eovaldi and two recent $1 free agent additions, Jesse Hahn and Danny Duffy, have allowed him to amass 27-of-30 points in the ERA and WHIP categories. There aren’t a lot of holes in this squad.
Congratulations Perry! We’ve got our work cut out for us in the second half if we’re going to catch Team Mastersball.
McLeod Around the Horn
The closer situation in baseball is about as stable as we’ve seen it since the tumultuous start to the season, and with that stabilization teams have begun to shuffle the deck. The past several weeks have seen numerous trades as teams attempt to shore up their bullpens and make hay in the saves category. There are points to be gained as the closer carousel continues to spin.
For instance, a whopping 40.5 percent of the total FAAB spent year-to-date has been spent chasing saves. We witnessed a mind-boggling 51.3 percent FAAB expenditure chasing saves in the first six weeks of the season. When nearly half of our budget has been spent on one-tenth of the categories in play thought should be given to the rules we use moving into the future of our great game.
The Mastersball gang makes hay during a fairly slow week (unless you bid and won on Joe Panik or Mark Melancon or Edwin Jackson or Yohan Pino), with some sound strategic advice, as well as the listing of winners and losers and what they bid. Read it here!
Oh, the problems when everything goes right. Rotoman explains.
Wins are not, says Nick Minnix, in a story at Fangraphs today. He’s talking about pitchers’ wins, of course, a stat that some would say is ridiculously random, while others might say its imperfection accentuates its beauty.
Nick is clearly not sure where he stands along a spectrum that perhaps begins with cumulative Game Score, features PQS and W+Quality Starts and ends up with naked Wins alone. He is properly ruminative about this delicate question, which can provoke some fire. I suggested doing away with the Wins category at ESPN.com nearly 20 years ago and my ears still ring with the dismissive, “The game is all about winning, stupid.”
Some of the commenters about Nick’s story suggest Innings Pitched as a proxy for wins, but I think that’s barking up the wrong category. Innings pitched is a fine substitute for Strikeouts, an ability that often enough has little to do with winning or pitching effectively. A pitcher who puts up the innings is doing some important part of the job, no matter the outcomes.
A pitcher who wins, however, is likely on a decent team AND is getting the job done. He may be Masahiro Tanaka, throwing lots of strikeouts and leading the majors in wins, or he may be Mark Buehrle, who is hardly striking out anyone, and nearly matching Tanaka W for W. Or he could be the antichrist spawn of the two, the master of the unlucky, like Jeff Samardzija, striking them out but crippled by his dismal team, winning but twice thus far in 90+ innings pitched.
Nick throws down a challenge to Tout Wars to wise up and replace the Win category with something, anything, better.
We’ll see. Tout never shys from innovation, but the question here is whether there is a replacement that reflects the vagaries of the game and doesn’t simply mirror the gradations of the qualitative stats, ERA and WHIP. There is something to giving a pitcher extra credit for playing on a good team, or overcoming a bad one.
Todd Zola, Rob Leibowitz, Brian Walton, Zach Steinhorn, and Perry Van Hook explain and analyze the week’s FAAB bidding in each of the four Tout Wars leagues. Informative and fun, especially if you’re aware that there are $0 bids allowed in all TW leagues.
Actually, Spianow wrote a story over at Yahoo! explaining why he sold low on Shin Soo Choo, by trading him to Jeff Erickson in the Yahoo Friends and Family League and to Fred Zinkie in Tout Wars Mixed Auction. So the headline here could have been:
Pianowski: Ah Choo!
Or ScottP: The Shin Soo Also Sets.
But we chose to go with the Dog Bites Man hed, though it would seem to foreclose on us using it again. Because Zinkie will make another trade. He also promises us his thinking about taking on a bum like Choo later, after he handles some personal business.
In the meantime, enjoy Scott’s Closing Time piece. There really is something good called Selling Low.
UPDATE: Fred’s angle.
By Peter Kreutzer, blog.askrotoman.com
For weeks there has been a lot of chatter about the Pirates uberprospect, Gregory Polanco.
When would he be called up? Why isn’t he being called up? How can a struggling team choose to save money rather than bring up their best prospect? Plus, WHEN WILL HE BE CALLED UP!?!? Dammit.
And then, just as sudden as can be, when the Pirates second baseman suffered an appendicitis on Monday, the world knew. Polanco was coming!
Pirates fans rejoiced, baseball fans were excited, and fantasy baseball players who had taken Polanco on reserve got giddy. One of those was ESPN’s Tristan Cockcroft, Polanco’s owner in Tout Wars NL. Continue reading “Everything You Wanted to Know About Gregory Polanco’s Promotion *and weren’t afraid to ask”
