Scott Swanay won Tout Wars Mixed Auction 2024, decisively winning behind excellent seasons from Yordan Alvarez, Willy Adames, and Jose Altuve at the bat, and George Kirby and Emmanuel Clase on the mound.
Rudy Gamble is Tout Wars Mixed Auction champion. This is his third title in this league. He had a dominant draft, winding up with Yordan Alvarez, William Contreras, and Wyatt Langford on offense, and Framber Valdez and Chris Sale on the bump. He had only Evan Phillips as a closer but managed to scramble together enough saves for four points.
Ray Flowers is the 2024 Mixed Draft Alt Categories champion. MDAC uses IP instead of Wins and Holds+Saves instead of Saves. Ray had the 11th pick of the draft and took Shohei Ohtani. Enough said, though he took Trea Turner on the way back and picked up Framber Valdez and Joe Ryan in the next two rounds, which didn’t hurt.
Alan Harrison has won the Tout Wars Draft and Hold this year, his third championship in the last four years. He dominated across the board, with Elly De La Cruz, Tyler O’Neill, and Jurickson Profar on offense, and Paul Skenes, Hunter Greene, and Emmanuel Clase pitching.
Ron Shandler’s comments presenting the award before the Tout Mixed Auction on March 19th:
It’s been over three years since we lost Lawr Michaels, and the fantasy industry lost a good part of its heart and soul. Lawr always reminded us that Tout Wars was all about community.
So two years ago, we started the Lawr Michaels Zen and Now award to honor a Tout who exhibited Lawr’s most valuable qualities – demonstrating the most positive energy, providing the greatest contributions to the overall competitive experience, and inspiring others in the Tout Wars community and across the fantasy baseball industry.
Our previous two honored recipients of this award have been Todd Zola and Rick Wolf.
This year’s award winner is Justin Mason, who has taken the concept of “community” to the extreme. The competition he started – The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational – draws hundreds of fantasy baseball content providers each year. The owner roster includes everyone from long-time industry veterans to rookies, and establishes a playing field that fosters a higher level competitive experience for the industry’s newer talent.
TGFBI has become a great way for those of us who are fantasy baseball vets to pay it forward. Given the explosion of writers, analysts, podcasters, and generally smart people contributing content these days, Justin’s role in helping to grow this industry can’t be underestimated.
In the words of one of his nominators: “Justin’s work is a perfect example of the sense of spirit, community, and camaraderie embodied by Lawr Michaels.”
It is my great honor and privilege to present this year’s Lawr Michaels Zen and Now Award to Justin Mason of Friends with Fantasy Benefits.
Here are some of the Touts’ nominating Justin:
(by Tim McCullough)
Justin runs the TGFBI leagues and does a great job of being inclusive in doing so. He also writes for Fangraphs and the Friends with Fantasy Benefits site. He’s an all-around good guy in my opinion and is deserving of recognition for the way he promotes the fantasy business.
(by Derek Vanriper in 2020)
In addition to creating a league that brings together a very large portion of the fantasy baseball community (TGFBI), Justin raised more than $6,000 for Meals on Wheels with his Podapalozza event back in April. Without a doubt, he’s one of the most positive people in our community, and one who constantly demonstrates the values that were a priority to Lawr.
(by Todd Zola in 2019)
Justin Mason’s The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational is a perfect example of the sense of spirit, community, and camaraderie embodied by Lawr Michaels. A competition among veterans, fledgling newbies, and everyone in between is a great way for some of the established mainstays to pay it forward, much the way it was done for them. Further, Justin’s own personable nature carried over onto social media where there were spirited discussions about the TGFBI from February through September, a rarity in the fantasy baseball realm as football talk dominates after the All-Star break. Justin’s development and administration of the TGFBI warrants strong consideration for the Lawr Michaels Zen and Now Award.
At 8 PM Sunday night at the end of week one of the two-week H2H final contest – Frank Stampfl of CBS currently leads my team (Ariel Cohen of FanGraphs) in the 2021 Tout Wars Head to Head Championship. His current lead is a large one, sitting at just over 106 points. For now I am the reigning champion of the league, but I am in trouble.
After heading into Sunday down by over a hundred and fifty points, I managed to cut Frank’s lead down to about 100. At one point, the margin of victory was as large as 175 on Sunday … but I still had four starting pitchers throwing late afternoon out on the West Coast, which helped my team climb back.
Still, it was a miserable week. I haven’t scored fewer than 328 points in a week since back in July. Meanwhile, Frank is on a roll, scoring more than 400 points in four of his last five weeks. Stampfl picked the right time to get hot, while I have picked the wrong time to stumble.
Frank managed to generate his solid first-week lead despite not having Max Scherzer in his active lineup. But Nick Castellanos has carried his team through the weekend, homering in three straight games. His pickup of the week, however, was Tampa Bay’s Shane Baz. Baz is now 2-0, securing 50+ points for Team Stampfl.
I was done in this week by poor team play across the board, that happens, but I also made some poor managerial decisions. I left Kenley Jansen sitting on the bench while in real life he earned two wins and two saves. Jansen would have hauled in more than 40 fantasy points for my team if he’d been active. Marco Gonzales was my top performer – notching a seven-inning victory on Sunday against the Angels.
A 100+ point deficit is not insurmountable, but it is still a very tall order to overcome. Consider Frank the favorite to knock off the defending champ this week, denying me the chance to be the league’s first back-to-back winner.
Follow the action at onRoto.com. The results update each morning around 8 AM eastern. (Editor: We’ll have updates during the day next Sunday here at Toutwars.com if the race is close.)
If Frank does win, I wonder what scoring system he’ll choose next year? Did I make a mistake choosing CBS this year?
I would like to nominate Rick Wolf. With the exception of Lawr himself, I am hard-pressed to think of anyone more selfless in the fantasy sports community. I could write forever, but here are the highlight points for why I think Rick would be a great first recipient:
Like Lawr, Rick is constantly mentoring people and fostering their careers. People who Rick helped get where they are today include luminaries such as Matthew Berry, Tristan Cockroft, Greg Rosenthal, Mike Fabiano, Scott Engel, Howard Bender, Kay Adams, Maria Marino, Stacie Stern and many, many more.
Like Lawr, Rick has no ego. Rick just wants to see the fantasy community grow and prosper. Whether friend, stranger or competitor, Rick is more than willing to give his time to anyone who seeks his help within the fantasy community or anyone seeking to get into the community.
Like Lawr, Rick is incredibly charitable and committed to important social change. After two young men in his community took their own lives, Rick threw his considerable talents and energy into an organization named after one of the young men, the BTH Foundation, whose mission is prevention of suicide, mental health awareness and training for people to spot the signs of when to get help or seek help for others. His work has already made a difference in many lives and likely saved people we will never know would otherwise been in trouble.
Finally, like Lawr, Rick never met someone with whom he could not connect in some way.
That helped him climb past Jason Collette into first place. All the credit can’t go the Eric Sogard, Edwin Encarnacion, Mike Minor and Justin Verlander helped, too, but Sogard’s career month certainly didn’t hurt.
We’ll delve into Rudy Gamble of Razzball’s hegemonic-like dominance of the Tout Wars Mixed Draft League momentarily, but first, a song:
I know that the spelling is different, but any excuse to include a Clash song has to be taken.
For the second year in a row, Rudy Gamble of razzball.com has won the Tout Wars Mixed Draft League. Once again, he had to hold off Adam Ronis of Scout.com for the title. I wanted to say that Rudy and Adam are the Red Sox and Yankees of the Mixed Draft League, but that wouldn’t do justice to the size of the field they are besting each year, and the comparison fails because there’s no carryover from year-to-year. Moreover, Rudy made a better analogy in his write-up of his victory—they are Federer and Nadal, with a combined four firsts and three second-place finishes over the last four years.
With the win, Rudy vaulted into third place on the All-Time Tout Wars leaderboard, behind only Fred Zinkie and Larry Schechter, despite having played only four years. Thus, Rudy will get another meal named after him at our annual Tout Wars get-together at Foley’s. It’s a good bet that if you ever have leftover Tout Wars currency from that meet-up and it has Rudy’s visage on it, you should keep it so that you can use it the following year.
It’s worth noting that Ronis isn’t that far behind on the list, sixth all-time and fifth among active participants, and fellow Razzballer Grey Albright has demonstrated similar strength, following up his 2017 win with another “cash” finish in 2018.
If you’re looking to see where I’m on the list, don’t bother. Seriously, it’s embarrassing. Having me write this article is like having Anders Jarryd or Manuel Orantes compare themselves to Federer or Nadal.
So … how did Rudy do it? Let’s take a quick look at the standings first:
The first thing that jumps out is Rudy’s utter dominance of the pitching categories. He won four of five categories outright and finished third in saves. He did this despite getting only 25 starts from his first pitcher, Noah Syndergaard, who he took at the 2-3 turn. Unlike many of his competitors, he backed up Thor with a second ace, getting Aaron Nola at the 4-5 turn. Two great starters aren’t enough to dominate the starting pitching categories, however – he had to hit on the slippery mid-round starters to succeed, and he did that in spades by getting Charlier Morton in the 13th and Blake Snell in the 15th rounds.
One might be tempted to dismiss those picks as windfalls – but I think that’s underselling the skill in picking in the mid-tiers. Moreover, because he had that second ace, he was less reliant upon ‘hitting’ with all of his mid-tier SPs. Obviously, there are so many landmines that he could have gone with (and in one case, in Round 12, did go with, in Jon Gray) instead of Morton and Snell – just looking at the draft grid, some disastrous alternative picks in that range included a lot of injuries (Danny Salazar, Garrett Richards, Taijuan Walker, Dinelson Lamet) and underachievers (first-half Cole Hamels, Chase Anderson, Aaron Sanchez, Jake Odorizzi). Rudy was able to combine all that top end starting pitching with quality contributors late in the draft, too – getting significant contributions from Eduardo Rodriguez, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Tyler Skaggs, the latter two in the reserve rounds of the draft.
Rudy might not have won saves, but he got two solid closers in Felipe Vazquez and Raisel Iglesias that weren’t ever a threat to lose their jobs. 2018 was a really frustrating year to chase saves – plenty of closers lost their respective jobs, but often their replacements weren’t all that stable, either. Iglesias was Rudy’s first “value pick” at 9.1 – and it had the added bonus of preventing a disaster in Delino DeShields.
Turning to the hitting, once again most of Rudy’s value came from the draft rather than through trades or the waiver wire. Starting out with Mike Trout is great, especially in an OBP league, and then he hit perfectly at 3.1 with Christian Yelich. After that, he had a number of solid players but few breakout hitters (at least compared to the year before, when he nailed Tommy Pham and Whit Merrifield), though he got great values with Shin-Soo Choo (16.15) and Michael Brantley (19.1).
It wasn’t the proverbial “perfect draft” for Rudy – he had to overcome injuries and suspensions from Kevin Kiermaier (10.15), Steven Souza (11.1) and Jorge Polanco (14.15), for example. But he avoided the critical early-round disasters, which is so important in a format like this. He also invested very little in scarce positions. Catchers were a disaster in 2018, but with his catchers coming in Rounds 17 (Mike Zunino) and 28 (Bruce Maxwell), any shortcomings there weren’t that damaging.
Can Rudy be stopped? All signs point to no, but you should tune in next spring and of course read up at Razzball to find out!
