Tune in at SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio for Todd Zola’s and Jeff Erickson’s commentary on the Rotowire Show.
And join Tim McLeod for a chat on Zoom by joining room 835 5818 2948.
The Mixed 12 Draft Board is here.
The Draft and Hold Draft Board is here.
Note, that you have to click Reload on these pages to see the latest picks.
With one exception, this year’s Tout Wars leagues are filled. See who’s playing who on the Touts 2022 page.
This year’s Tout Wars Draft and Hold league kicks off on March 1st. We’ll have a link to monitor the slow draft once we begin.
Tout Wars Draft 12 league also kicks off on March 1st, starting at noon, covered by the Rotowire show with Jeff Erickson and Todd Zola on SiriusXM fantasy sports radio.
Tout Wars Draft 15 league will take place on March 8 at 8pm, covered by Colton and the Wolfman on SiriusXM.
This year’s live auctions, on Tout Wars weekend, will be remote again, alas. They take place on March 19 (AL at 10am, Mixed Auction at 3pm) and 20 (NL at 10am and H2H at 3pm). More details the week before Tout Weekend.
Some other announcements:
Head to Head will again play by CBS Sports H2H Points scoring system, as selected by 2021 winner Frank Stampfl. Unsurprising if you know who Frank works for.
To address the mess of major league free agents because of the lockout, who may or may not have signed by draft day in the AL-only and NL-only leagues, the Touts in those leagues may roster anyone on a major league roster of their respective league, as usual. But in 2022, while they may also draft free agents, any free agents who then go on to sign in the other league may be kept active accumulating stats even as they play. In prior years those players would have had to be released. While the extra talent is going to dilute the draft day pool if the labor issues aren’t solved soon, allowing the stats of the talent acquired to accumulate seemed the fairest way to deal with the issue for all involved.
Finally, this year Tout Wars is acknowledging that for a variety of reasons, some temporary and some permanent, some Touts need partners. We’re now accepting proposals from Touts in some cases, if there is a good reason and both partners meet Tout Wars’ eligibility standards. In the future you’re likely to see more partnered teams than just Colton and the Wolfman in Tout AL. Once we go back to live events, however, with the grandfathered exception of the Colton/Wolf team, only one of the partners will be allowed to sit at the table during the auction.
Doubt Wars is the game everyone likes to play in order to compete against the Touts themselves. Read about the rules here.
We’ve been very slow compiling the results to determine who last year’s winners were, but they’ve now been published. See the spreadsheets (3 tabs) here.
This year’s winners?
AL: Tout Michael Rathburn edged out Tout AL Champ Jeff Zimmerman for first place in Doubt Wars. Strike Back’s Michael Lester is the Civilian champ.
NL: Inverted Ws’s Mark Mason won Doubt NL.
Mixed: Vandelay Industries Keith Johnson beat out the Touts from both Tout Mixed Auction and Tout Mixed Draft.
Congratulations to all the winners, and for everyone else, Wait for this year!
Each year we publish links to the Touts writings and ruminations about what happened in the season that just ended. Here they are for 2021:
Draft and Hold: Michael Stein |
NL: Fred Zinkie | Phil Hertz |
Mixed Auction: Zach Steinhorn |
Head to Head: Frank Stampfl |
The season is in the bag, and surprisingly no playoff games to enliven our Monday. Here’s a quick rundown of the 2021 winners:
AL: Glenn Colton and Rick Wolf win their third Tout AL title.
NL: Fred Zinkie wins his second consecutive Tout NL title, and fifth Tout title overall.
Mixed Auction: Jeff Zimmerman wins his second Tout Mixed Auction title, and third Tout title overall.
H2H: Frank Stampfl wins his first Tout title.
Mixed Draft 12: Alex Fast win the first ever Tout Mixed Draft 12 title.
Mixed Draft 15: Adam Ronis wins his third Mixed Draft 15 championship.
Draft and Hold: Alan Harrison and Matt Williams share the glory, the first ever tied-after-the-tiebreaker co-championship.
Tout Daily: Ryan Bloomfield topped this year’s field. (Teams gained entry to the finals by winning each week, which is why Carty has so many entries. He won multiple weeks.)
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?
After 24 weeks of regular season games and two rounds of playoffs the final round is here. Two weeks, ups and downs on Mondays and Thursdays, waivers next Sunday night before the last week.
Meet your Tout Head 2 Head finalists.
Returning champ Ariel Cohen had the most points during the regular season and won more games than any other team.
Challenger Frank Stampfl finished the season with the third-most points overall, behind Cohen and seventh-place (!) finisher Andrea LaMont, then beat Nick Pollack and Ralph Lifschitz in the first two rounds of the playoffs.
Cohen beat 2019 Tout H2H champ Clay Link in his only playoff round, drawing a bye for finishing first.
Check in on the rosters and scoring each morning by clicking this link.
Tonight at the 8pm the Tout Wars leagues will have their first FAAB run of the year.
Join Peter Kreutzer and others at 8:30 to chat about this week’s moves on Zoom.
Topic: Tout Wars FAAB Meetup
Time: Mar 31, 2021 08:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
UPDATE: 10PM
Meeting is over. Sorry to all who tried to attend and didn’t get in. Rotoman didn’t put the proper security measures in place and Zoom did something to protect us.
We’ll try it again on Sunday. Look for log in information here at Toutwars.com on Saturday.
