This year you’ll have two sources of notes about the weekly FAAB and claims from Tout Wars.
Long time compilers, Mastersball, continue their ongoing series of FAAB grids and comments, about each week’s buys and claims.
This year, Baseball Prospectus resumes a series it has run in the past, commenting on the week’s moves each Tuesday from a few different expert leagues.
Lawr Michael’s thoughts about the inaugural Tout X Drauction.
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
Lawr Michaels | Mike Podhorzer | Chris Liss | Rick Wolf on Colton/Wolf | Jeff Erickson | Jason Collette (Podcast edition) | Jason Collette (written) | Glenn Colton (shadow draft) | Andy Behrens | Rob Leibowitz
I couldn’t agree with No. 1 more:
No One Looks Like Their AVI – Not that I can say much when mine is a logo, but the most common expression seen for Tout weekend is confusion. No, not because people are confused on who to pick or how much to spend… it’s because we all look at each other with that “I think I know this guy, but I don’t want to say something and look stupid, so maybe he’ll recognize me first” look. We need a fresh update across the board for owners’ Twitter AVIs. Read On
Zach Finklestein on the MLB.com teams (plus a video about Tout Wars) | Cory Schwartz | Al Melchior | Ray Flowers | Scott Engel| Derek VanRiper | Zach Steinhorn | Tim Heaney | David Gonos | Paul Singman | Joe Pisapia | Ray Flowers | 411Fantasy Podcast | Scott Swanay (polled the other touts in TW Mix) | Zach Steinhorn (How did that happen?) | Patrick Davitt | Scott Pianowski
The granddaddy of Fantasy Baseball Experts Leagues is USA Today’s LABR.
The LABR-AL auction is tonight, March 7, at 7pm ET. You can follow the draft here.
The LABR-NL auction is tomorrow night, March 8, at 7pm ET. You can follow that draft here.
Every fall we solicit rules change suggestions from the team owners in Tout Wars. Despite our recent move replacing BA with OBP, which some love and some hate, we’re generally more interested in tinkering with the procedures, making them more fair, easier, and hopefully innovative. A major rules change, like replacing Saves with Saves + Holds (or some permutation of such) will be considered seriously, but the default position, as with replay, is with the status quo. There has to be a good reason to make the change.
I bring this up because this year there has been a strong sentiment among some owners to switch from Saves to Saves + Holds (Solds, Ray Flowers called it), which led Zach Steinhorn to write a 411 post about some work Cory Schwartz put together yesterday. Cory gets at just what seems so dicey about Holds as a category, and makes a pretty good case for sticking with the closers.
