TOUT WARS AL: Chris Liss
TOUT WARS NL: Mike Gianella
TOUT WARS MIX DRAFT: Adam Ronis
TOUT WARS MIX AUCTION: Fred Zinkie
TOUT WARS X: Bret Sayre
TOUT WARS DAILY: Charlie Wiegert
The league names link to the final standings.
Congratulations all! See you in March!
There are three days left in the season. Three games left for each major league team, though a massive storm plus a possible hurricane in the east may affect games in Baltimore (versus Yankees), Philadelphia (versus Miami) and New York (versus Washington). None of these series will matter in determining the playoffs, so rainouts on Sunday (or Saturday and Sunday) may not be rescheduled.
How are things looking in Tout Wars? Let’s start with the easy ones.
AL: Chris Liss leads Mike Podhorzer by 8.5 points. Liss’s volatility index gives him a range of 86-97 points. Podhorzer could finish with 79-88. The door is not completely shut, but everything has to go right for Podhorzer and completely wrong for Liss.
NL: Mike Gianella leads Tristan Cockcroft by 11 points. Gianella range is 87-95.5, while Cockcroft’s is 75-86. There is virtually no chance that Cockcroft can make up enough ground, no matter how badly Gianella’s team goes.
Mix Auction: Fred Zinkie leads Scott Swanay by 4 points, and Tim Heaney by 6. It’s good be Zinkie, for sure, but there are still lots of points in play. Zinkie has already gained three points in homers this week, but lost them in Runs, OBP, ERA and Saves, and is tied in Runs and Saves. There’s a lot of baseball left to be played here.
Mix Draft: Adam Ronis is 2 points ahead of Rudy Gamble, who is 3.5 points ahead of Grey Albright. Rudy has gained five points this week, which means he could give back five easily enough. He’s in a three-way tie in wins, with one ahead and one behind. One of the guys he’s tied with is Ronis. Crazy things could happen there. Gamble has five starts over the weekend, while Ronis has just two. There is also a four-way tie in saves. Gamble has Tolleson, Feliz and Robbie Ross(who has yet to get a save and wasn’t listed in the intial post), McLeod has Axford, Vizcaino, and Jepsen, Kessenich lost Huston Street and is left with Hector Rondon, and Paul Sporer has Andrew Miller and Cody Allen. Over three games, pretty much anything can happen in saves. Plus there are a mess of possibilities in ERA and Ratio. Keep your eye on this one folks! That said, Grey Albright doesn’t have much headroom, especially since Gamble and Ronis each stand to either gain or lose in the categories in which they’re tied, so it’s hard to see them both falling. Which makes Grey something of a spoiler, especially since he’s right behind Ronis in ERA and right behind Gamble in strikeouts, with his five red hot starters going.
Let’s let Bret set the scene:
“If the entire final month left me seasick, the final weekend made me schizophrenic. In fact, it almost made me jealous of the fantasy writers who cover both baseball and football, as I would have had a healthy distraction. Almost. By the halfway point, Pat had taken the overall lead and I was staring down the barrel of what would easily have been my worst period of the entire contest. A week later, my luck had turned and my offense started hitting–pushing me to a 5.5-point lead overall and a little more comfort, which would hold until the final lineups were set on Friday. From that point on, my team’s performance became irrelevant, as Pat’s team was absolutely firing on all cylinders. My lead was down to one at the end of the day Friday and gone by the evening games on Saturday.”
You can read Bret’s story at Baseball Prospectus. It’s on the free side of the paywall.
Going into the last four week set of Tout Wars X at Shandler Park, Bret Sayre had a 14.5 point lead over Patrick Mayo. But in the game’s final period, Mayo quickly jumped out to a lead, a lead he didn’t relinquish all month. On same days he moved into the overall lead and he won his second month of the competition, but in the end he fell short overall by three points.
Here are the final overall standings (click to enlarge):
Mayo’s 62 points were the most for any one-month winner, but it was not enough to overcome Sayre’s sizable lead. Sayre and Mayo, notably, had no months in which they scored fewer than 40 points, the only players not to, and Sayre’s final margin of victory was also the difference between his worst month (5) and Mayo’s (1).
Congratulations Bret!
Bret says: “My goal was to shoot for a safe 45 points and if Pat scored 60, I’d tip my hat to him for a job extremely well done. It turns out he certainly earned that hat tip, but I was fortunate enough to squeeze out 50 points again, despite not having my SB safety blanket in Billy Hamilton.”
From Mastersball, Todd Zola and Co. chat about Tout AL, NL, Auction and Draft.
Mike Gianella goes over the AL and NL moves each Tuesday morning at Baseball Prospectus. This week features a dark anti-sabermetric blues rant about JP Arencibia.
With a month left in the season we’ve crowned one Tout Wars Champion for 2015: Charlie Wiegert is Tout Wars Daily champion. But what about the other leagues? While you can alway check in on the standings and transactions by using the links in the right nav at toutwars.com, at this point it might be a good time to check in on the pennant races.
Chris Liss is having a classic Liss season, young pitching, lots of hitting, lots of risk, and is seven points ahead of Jeff Erickson and nine points ahead of Mike Podhorzer. The three have bubbled up and down around the top of the standings all season, but Liss has benefited from Chris Davis’s spectacular season, and Carlos Correa’s emergence after being called up earlier in the year. There are plenty of points in play for all three teams, up and down, for this to turn any which way at any time, but Liss is clearly the fave.
Mike Gianella is seven points ahead of standing three-time champ Tristan Cockcroft, but just two weeks ago his edge was only two points. For Cockcroft, the problem has been a freefalling pitching staff, which has won just a single game in the last 13 days, allowing Gianella to pass him. These teams have lots of points in play, too, so while you have to prefer to have the lead, there is no sitting comfortably at this point. Still, Gianella has to appreciate that he was the best team in the first half and has been the best team in the second half. Now he just has to bring it home.
At the halfway mark on the season Zach Steinhorn had a commanding lead, but that was before Fred Zinkie went to work. Zinkie was in 12th place on June 28, 39.5 points behind Steinhorn. From that point to the August 31 trading deadline he made 19 trades, and has taken a slim lead ahead of Scott Swanay and Steinhorn. Swanay was in 10th place on June 28th, and has nearly matched Zinkie in the second half. Meanwhile, Tim Heaney is just five points behind Zinkie, in fourth place. There’s a lot of pennant race to come in this one.
Adam Ronis and Paul Greco have been near the top of the standings all year long, but their weak second half performances have given Rudy Gamble a chance to open up some space ahead of them and Eno Sarris (whose had the best second half of them all). Gambles position is pretty strong, but he’s vulnerable in Wins and the pitching qualitatives,
Bret Sayre entered the last four-week contest 14.5 points ahead of Patrick Mayo and 31 points ahead of Doug Anderson. As we approach the halfway point, Sayre is 15 points behind Mayo, who has moved into a tiny lead. What looked like it might be a blowout has ended up a a nail-biter, if you’re Sayre and Mayo.
Mastersball finds Tout Wars far more active than LABR, but really, the well is running dry. Rotoman, for his part, bid hard on Rodney and Verrett, while Phil Hertz bid big for Rotoman castoff Michael Lorenzen. The standings say trust Hertz. But at this point all of us, except maybe Mike Gianella, are looking for a hero.
Gianella will weigh in on Tuesday at Baseball Prospectus on this week’s moves in Tout NL and AL. In fact, the moves are less than half of it. Mike does a nice job dissecting the NL pennant race (which he is atop) in his piece, and discusses the AL race, which Chris Liss currently leads.
Here’s something the old and new can agree upon. Back in the day, when Major League Baseball tried to appropriate all rights to fantasy sports, Charlie Wiegert put his business on the line to challenge that notion.
You will have to look elsewhere for the history, but karma is paying back, as Charlie Wiegert has won the first Championship of Tout Wars Daily by FanDuel. That’s a $1,000 prize, and validation for the fact that the Daily Fantasy Games are not only the domain of the younger fantasy players.
Wiegert won the Tout Daily championship going away, riding the broad back of Clayton Kershaw. He was the only team to choose the day’s most expensive, and most productive, player.
Here’s how he did it:
