Category: Mixed Auction

July 21, 2014 FAAB Report from Tireless Mastersball.com.

When only three days pass between FAAB sessions, as happened in Tout Wars this past week, the reports come fast and furious, though the bidding is weak and limpest.

Mastersball.com’s latest details all of this week’s fun. You can read it here.

One play from out of left field that the Mastersball crew missed was Rotoman’s bid on Cuban free agent Rusney Castillo, who isn’t even signed to a US team at this point! And this isn’t a keeper league! We spoke with Mr. Man, who says the following explains his bidding:

1) To compete for first he needs more hitting, and can’t afford to trade Madison Bumgarner to get it. At the same time, when he proposes to deal his next best starters, Alfredo Simon and Tanner Roark, to owners for mediocre sluggers like, say Adam LaRoche, they laugh and say they’ve been offered good pitchers for, um, LaRoche. Lenny Melnick today traded LaRoche and Drew Storen to Mike Gianella for Cameron Maybin and Tim Hudson. Fair enough, it’s a tough market.

2) Rusney Castillo is 27 years old and has been working out in Florida since being cleared to sign with a US team. He will have an open workout on Saturday and presumably sign shortly thereafter. He he signs with an AL club, Rotoman is SOL, but if he signs with a NL club, Rotoman will hope he is promoted quickly to the big league club.

3) Like Yasiel Puig and Jose Abreu, Castillo is a mature hitter, though more a speedster than a slugger. It is thought that if he signs fast enough he’ll spend a short amount of time in the minors and be promoted to the big club by the end of August. Regular at bats in September could be big for Team Rotoman.

4) The cost for all of this is $1 FAAB and a reserve slot, plus having to keep Castillo active for one fruitless week. If Castillo were to sign next Saturday, after the workout, with a NL club, his price would be much higher. And if Rotoman didn’t have Castillo active he would have Nate McLouth’s two AB instead. It seems worth the risk, he said.

Friday Edition: Mastersball FAAB Report, July 18, 2014

This year, for the first time, Tout Wars moved it’s transaction deadlines during the All Star break to Friday, with the FAAB Bidmeister running at Midnight on Thursday.

Although announced back in January, this led to some confusion (which Todd and Perry take on in their parts of the Mastersball FAAB Report) and some spirited opposition to the change in FAABing from a couple of owners.

The change was proposed for a few years running by the TW NL’s Phil Hertz, and adopted this past offseason. I think we all thought, Why not? It means that the week’s moves can be made after any information coming over the break has been processed.

The opposition seems mostly to be about making the break a real break, part of Week 17, not an extension of Week 16. There will be offseason discussion, but absent widespread opposition, it is likely to stay where it is.

Not so the FAAB redemption procedures. What we learned today was that the NL and Mixed Auction leagues have been releasing DL players immediately and then awarding the releasing owner his FAAB for the second Sunday FAAB run following the release. In TW AL, it turns out, released players have been held along with the FAAB until the second Sunday FAAB run following.

I doubt this has made any difference, since the reason teams release their DL players is because they’re either sad they ever bought them in the first place or they’re out for a long time. But that isn’t true before our Noon on July 17th deadline this year. At that point, the value of the redemption is cut in half (with odd totals rounded down). It was that deadline that put Phil Hertz on a point of decision.

After trying to deal Votto, unsuccessfully, he decided to redeem him. Phil gets $38 FAAB, which gets him up into the top group (not counting Gianella, who is out of this world), and Votto became a free agent. The fun thing is that no one knows if Votto is going to get back, or when. Bryan Price, his manager, seems to be saying he expects him back in a month, but when he got hurt again earlier this summer, going on the DL for the second time, there was speculation he wouldn’t get back at all.

For a team like mine, desperate for at bats and not in position to pick off any big guys who come over in the interleague trading, a bold play might help if Votto comes back at any point, and won’t likely hurt if he calls it a day at some point. But I hope not to find out if that part is true.

The July 7 FAAB Report

Mastersball does its usually fine job reporting and analyzing the moves this week in the four Tout leagues, as they do every week.

We had another transaction-deadline kerfuffle this week in the leagues. As you surely know, the Cubs and Athletics made a big interleague trade on Saturday. The trade was processed on Saturday and Jeff Samarzdija and Jason Hammel were available in the AL Bidmeister this week, and Dan Straily was entered into the minor league list of the NL.

Then, on Sunday morning, the Yankees and Diamondbacks made a trade of Vidal Nuno for Brandon McCarthy. Whatever the merits of the deal, it clearly took place sometime around noon ET Sunday officially. That’s when the Dbacks tweeted that the deal was done.

The wrinkle was that some enterprising Tout Warriors were able to find McCarthy’s and Nuno’s names in the list of “Minor Leaguers” that our stat provider adds in addition to our regularly eligible list, because Tout Wars allows teams to buy minor league players on waivers (provided they keep them on their active roster for one week afterwards). It turns out the minor league list is actually a list of all ineligible players, so other-league guys like McCarthy and Nuno were listed though they clearly weren’t eligible.

The claims were unravelled. A note has been sent to all Tout Leagues about who is legal and who is not.

Just to clarify one thing: The reason Tout Wars determines eligibility based on the previous day’s legal ML rosters is because these are reliable and vetted and available to everyone via the MLB website. In-day moves are subject to lots of interpretation, misleading tweets and timing issues that cannot be regularly and fairly applied.

We know that some leagues approach the transaction wire like a stream of info to be acted on immediately, which is great fun if you choose to play that way, but for Tout Wars purposes a more orderly process has been chosen instead. Alas, this means that Brandon McCarthy and Vidal Nuno are free agents all week, this week.

Mastersball FAAB Report June 30, 2014: Most Betts Are Off.

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.

The June 23 Tout Wars FAAB report, from Mastersball.com

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!

The Mastersball.com June 16, 2014 FAAB Report

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.

Fred Zinkie Makes a Trade! Scott Pianowski Writes About It!

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.

Mastersball’s FAAB Report June 9, 2014: Scott Swanay Props Edition

The Mastervision FAAB report continues to develop, including more opinion and analysis of moves. It has gone from being an invaluable record of bids and winners to a lively commentary on the goings on in Tout Wars.

This week Todd Zola points out the Scott Swanay, bedeviled on auction day in the Mixed auction league with too much money, has managed his team into a competitive position in the first division (barely as of today). This despite losing Jose Fernandez, everybody’s ace, for the season. Keep clawing, Scott!

Brian Walton speaks of my own bedeviled situation in Tout NL. In dollar days I took a flyer on Kris Bryant, the Cubs future slugger, but when he started slowly in Double-A and it became clear that he wasn’t going to be a June callup to the majors, I offered him around the league. Crickets, so I released him in order to hold onto someone I valued more. In May, Bryant got hot, and Mike Gianella picked him up for $1 FAAB a couple of weeks ago.

Apparently, Mike also came to the conclusion that Bryant’s next stop would be Iowa City, not Chitown, but when he offered him up yesterday Gene McCaffrey leaped with $50 of FAAB. What a difference a day (well, more like 45 of them) makes.