Live coverage on SiriusXM from 7pm to midnight!
Live spreadsheet here. List of contestants here.Read the rules here.
Live blog after the jump.
Category: Draft Results
THIS is Tout Weekend!
Where will the best and brightest fantasy baseball writers and broadcasters be this weekend?
Many will be in New York City, for the annual Tout Wars weekend of drafts and parties.
This year’s drafts are being held in the studio at SiriusXM and aren’t open for the public, but you can follow along live on the SiriusXM fantasy sports channel, and on the live blog and spreadsheet at toutwars.com.
When are the drafts? Where and when are the parties?
The SCHEDULE:
Tout H2H: March 18, 7pm. Doors open at 6pm. Ron Shandler is auctioneer. Joe Pisapia has the spreadsheet. Mike Gianella is on chat.
Tout AL: March 19, 9am. Doors open at 8am. Brian Feldman is auctioneer. Paul Sporer is on spreadsheet. Al Melchior is doing chat.
Tout Mix Auction: March 19, 3pm. Doors open at 2pm. Jeff Erickson is auctioneer. Ray Murphy has the spreadsheet. Jason Collette is on chat.
Foley’s NY Party: March 19, 8pm. 18 West 33rd Street. Party with the pros!
Tout NL Auction: March 20, 10am. Doors open at 9am. Brian Feldman is the auctioneer. Steve Moyer is on spreadsheet. Jason Collette will chat.
The live blog for each auction will be available at toutwars.com, where there will also be a link to the live spreadsheet. You can access the live spreadsheet now at https://docs.google.com/
Here’s the Menu of Champions at Foleys on Saturday night:
Tout Wars Mixed Draft Live 2016 Live Blog! March 8 at 8pm!
You can follow along watching the Draft Room at onRoto.com.
Eno Sarris Kicks It in Week 4 of Tout Daily…
…but Scott Engel’s big week lands him a ticket to the finals!
Engel’s 51.25 points for the week, good enough for second place on the week, leapt him from 13th to second place overall for Phase 4 of the Tout Daily contest, a ticket to the August 28th finals where 15 rosters will compete for $2,000, and designation as Tout Wars Daily Champion of 2015.
But for the week Engel finished second, behind Eno Sarris, whose team jumped from 25th to fourth with a 53 point week. Sarris’s team featured a strong pitching performance by Andrew Cashner (15 points, owned by three teams), and solid hitting from Joey Votto, Ian Desmond, and Charlie Blackmon, all popular choices, and Carlos Gonzalez and Yasiel Puig, both owned by three teams.
Sarris’s team (click to enlarge):
Engel’s team was built around Ian Thomas, the Dodger reliever who wasn’t supposed to last five innings but did (earning a win), and cost just $4,200. Engel was Thomas’s only owner. Engel used his savings to also roster Votto, Desmond and Blackmon, and then added the pricey and productive Todd Frazier and Mike Trout.
Twelve of the 15 tickets have now been awarded to (ordered by total points in the four phases): Lenny Melnick, Scott Pianowski, Adam Ronis (two tickets!), Michael Beller, Ray Murphy, Scott Engel, Jeff Boggis, Charlie Wiegert, Lawr Michaels, Jeff Erickson and Tom Kessenich. Kessenich did not play in Phase 1, suppressing his total.
The highest scorer yet to earn a ticket is Seth Trachtman, who has topped 150 points twice and is fifth overall, but is not yet in the finals.
Trachtman and the rest of the Touts will start the fifth and final phase in the July 31 Tout Daily contest by Fanduel.
See the complete Leaderboard here.
Scott Engle’s Phase 4 Week 4 team (click to enlarge):
Tout Daily by FanDuel Week 15 Results! Murphy’s Law Rules.
Ray Murphy rostered Lance Lynn, the week’s most productive pitcher, in this week’s Tout Daily by FanDuel, which proved to be most of the margin of victory.
That’s because on the hitting side, Tom Kessenich and Jeff Boggi$ (the preferred spelling whenever Jeff finishes in the money), the second and third place finishers, similarly to Murphy rostered two of the day’s big sticks, Kyle Seager and Hunter Pence. They fell short, however, by the difference between Lynn and their shared pitcher, Jose Fernandez, who pitched decently but did not beat the Phillies.
Fourth-place finisher Rick Wolf had Lynn on his team. He also had Jose Iglesias’s huge day, but lacked a strong second bat.
With his Phase 4 Week 3 victory, Murphy moves into the lead for the Phase by 10 points, ahead of Charlie Wiegert and Brian Walton. The latter is the only team to finish in the Top 10 all three weeks of Phase 4. The top three teams in the Phase will win tickets to the August 28 finals, when 15 ticket holders will vie for $2,000 in winnings.
Two Top 10 teams for the Phase are already ticket holders. Jeff Boggis and Michael Beller are 11 and 16 points respectively out of the Top 3. Players may win two tickets to the finals.
Phase Four finishes up next Friday, July 24th.
See the whole leaderboard here. Read more about Tout Daily. Visit FanGraphs.
Tout Daily: Week 1 Results
Scott Pianowski (Mixed Auction) kicked butt in the first week of the Tout Daily contest, besting Gene McCaffrey’s (Tout NL) squad by 10.75 points. How’d he do it?
Piano scored big with Oakland’s Drew Pomeranz (17 points), and Miami’s Dee Gordon (12.5) points, and Giancarlo Stanton (10.75 points).
McCaffrey got a fine game out of San Diego’s Brandon Morrow (yes, both leaders went low end on their starting pitching) (14 points), got a monster from the Reds Joey Votto (16.75 points), and a fine game mostly in extra innings from the Red Sox Xander Bogaerts (7 points).
For his success, Pianowski gets $60 added to his FanDuel account, while McCaffrey adds $48 to his. And the two are the leaders in week one of the four week race for eligibility in Phase One of the championship contest, which is to run in late August.
Other first week money winners were: Scott Engel ($42, Mixed Auction), Jake Ciely ($36, Tout X), Patrick Mayo ($30, Tout X), Lenny Melnick ($24, Tout NL), Rob Leibowitz ($18, Tout AL), Chris Liss ($18, Tout AL), Charlie Wiegert ($12, Mixed Draft) and Rob Murphy ($12, Mixed Draft). You can find the full results of Week 1 here.
Here is the running LEADERBOARD. Bookmark it!
Week 2 of Phase 1 comes next Friday, April 17th. Go Touts!
Here’s this week’s winning roster. Could you have done better? (click to enlarge)
Gene McCaffrey (Tout NL): LET’S TALK ABOUT ME!
I can’t believe how big the whole thing is now. Back in the day we would huddle in the dank basement of some New York bar. One year we drafted in Steve Moyer’s basement, which I thought was great but later heard tell of other putative Warriors who did not. Now there are at least a hundred people there either drafting or media-involved. Even girls! Maybe three! TV cameras, live radio broadcasts, no question we’re big shots.
The best thing is that the people are terrific. The very few assholes who have passed through the expert ranks of fantasy baseball over the years all disappeared quickly. I mean, I’m the biggest asshole there and I’m only an asshole sometimes. But you want to know about my team.
I won the battle but I may have lost the war. Here’s The Conundrum: in NL- or AL-only leagues the bargains are going to come on the pitchers, but you can’t get too many or you won’t have enough money to buy an offense. Everyone is spending 30 percent or less on pitching and bragging about it, which ABSOLUTELY guarantees that 1) pitchers will be undervalued, and 2) hitters will be overvalued. (A corollary is that some team or teams who don’t spend on pitching are going to score some pitching bargains, making them instant contenders.) When it works it looks great, when it doesn’t—which is usually since everyone is doing it—it looks terrible, but no one cares because odds are that’s what the winner did. To me this state of affairs calls for a contrary strategy and hence the conundrum. Continue reading “Gene McCaffrey (Tout NL): LET’S TALK ABOUT ME!”
TOUT WARS X: Stylish and Spooky
Part of the experiment, it turned out, was drafting under night club conditions. The Tout Wars X’ers pulled it off gracefully.
Here are the draft results.
Here are comments from the drafters about their teams: Jake Ciely | Bret Sayre (part of Flags Fly Forever Podcast) | Bret Sayre writing | Ron Shandler | Doug Anderson