Mastersball.com’s Todd Zola is the Swat for Tout Wars AL. This gives him a front row seat on each week’s moves, and it landed him in the muck last night.
Here’s what happened: Tout Wars uses the Vickrey auction system, in which players are awarded to teams for $1 more than the second highest bidder bid. You bid $10, the second highest bidder is $6, you get the guy for $7. This sometimes works very nicely. An economist named Vickrey won a Nobel Prize in Economics for demonstrating that this method of bidding produces truer and more robust bids, because bidders don’t fear the risk of being embarrassed by a big overbid.
And this is true in Tout Wars, for free agents that two or more owners might covet.
But a problem arises at the claims following the midseason trading deadline. All the teams put in many bids and many contingency bids. When things go to form, as they did this year in TW NL, it’s all easy, but when they don’t, when there are a mosaic of interlocking contingent bids, which is what happened in the TW AL, it is a bear to figure out. Such a bear that onRoto’s Bidmeister stumbles. It struggles to figure out that a $73 bid in an owner’s third block is actually now $36 because of previous purchases reduced by Vickrey. And that’s only a part of it.
Todd worked late into last night trying to determine who should get who in Tout Wars AL. The problem was caused, mostly, because most teams avoided bidding on Troy Tulowitzki, apparently for some fatalist reason, and he fell to Mike Podhorzer for half price, after the Vickrey adjustment. This gave Podhorzer’s bids on other players (he bid his max on most everyone) extra influence and confused things no end.
Not that it’s Mike’s fault. He did the right thing, absolutely, but coupled with Steve Moyer’s attempt to buy lots of players for cheap, rather than spend all his money on one guy, hell broke out.
Which may be why that at this late point on Monday, we don’t yet have a Tout Wars report from Mastersball.com. Todd just tweeted that the report should be posted on his site around 9pm. He says it’s a goody, but not yet here at close to 11pm. Oh, here it is!
Maybe Mastersball is sick of us. Maybe they’re breaking up with Tout Wars. I know they’re sick of Vickrey (Todd tweeted that today). In any case, we’ll post when they post. And I will initiate a discussion about whether Vickrey is really a good thing in our little leagues this winter.
And tomorrow, Tuesday, we’ll post the observations of TW NL Leader Mike Gianella, who went into Sunday’s bidding with the hammer, and managed to spend quite a bit of his money. You’ll learn how and why then.
Here’s Mike’s column, which has lots of good insight but was headlocked by the wrong data that posted at the league stat site for the reasons detailed above. It will eventually be corrected, but here are my notes, which should help you read it until it is.
CORRECTIONS
Rob Leibowitz
Carlos Gomez Vickrey price is $71.
Seth Trachtman
Gerardo Parra Vickrey price is $39
Mike Podhorzer
Mike Fiers Vickrey price is $30. And change the comment to:
The biggest beneficiary of the diversification strategies of other owners with higher FAAB budgets was Podhorzer. Not only did Podhorzer snag Tulowitzki at slightly less than half of his raw bid with a smooth $35 Vickrey price, he also picked up Fiers for $30. Fiers certainly isn’t in the class of Cueto or Hamels, but in the watery pitching market of AL-only, this is a win for Podhorzer. I really dig the aggressiveness of Podhorzer’s bids on the whole, and even though he didn’t have much of a chance at most of these players in the FAAB sweepstakes, I am more of a fan of being aggressive and getting the best player on the board than worrying about the bargains other owners may or may not get if the league doesn’t bid aggressively on the whole. Marte at $6 is a nice, sneaky play in a week where nearly everyone was focused on the NL imports.
Steve Moyer
Comment edited
Moyer needs a lot of help to get to the 60-point threshold, so instead of putting all of his eggs in one basket with one big purchase, he decided to diversify. I like the strategy to a degree. There is enough variability with the 57 or so games most major league teams have left to play that there is a better chance that two good players could earn more than one great player, especially in an AL-only, where the replacement level consideration is hardly a factor. However, had I been in Moyer’s shoes I would have probably tried two $30 bid blocks in the hopes that I could have walked away with two players of a higher caliber.
Ron Shandler
Johnny Cueto Vickrey price is $39.