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.
Give the edge to Cohen, but in Head 2 Head anything can happen. (Ask Andrea LaMont, who this year scored the second-highest number of points and didn’t make the playoffs. Her recent totals?
LaMont: 397.5, 440, 379.5, 454.5.
Wait til next year Andrea. You had a great season.
Woah. Going into the last week Ian Kahn was two games ahead of Andrea LaMont and three games ahead of Ariel Cohen.
Perhaps more telling, Kahn was 1540 points scored ahead of LaMont, but only 413 against Cohen. Why am I framing the story this way?
Because at the end of the final week Kahn and Cohen had the same number of wins, but Cohen led by 753 points winning the tie-breaker and the championship.
No radio coverage of this one, but the transcript of the Derek VanRiper chat below.
[Mar 15, 2:45 PM] DerekVanRiper: Hello! [Mar 15, 2:45 PM] DerekVanRiper: I had to prep some chicken for quinoa chicken soup…exciting times here at home in Madison. [Mar 15, 2:50 PM] KingerThePW: What time is this draft supposed to start? [Mar 15, 2:51 PM] DerekVanRiper: 3p ET [Mar 15, 2:54 PM] DerekVanRiper: Very curious to see how the league adjusts to the scoring settings for today. [Mar 15, 2:54 PM] rotoman: Hi Derek, I just gave you magical moderator powers, in case you need them. [Mar 15, 2:54 PM] DerekVanRiper: Thanks, Peter! [Mar 15, 2:54 PM] Chamberlain: it looks like fantrax successfully imported the scoring settings, or else the similarities are but a pleasant coincidence [Mar 15, 2:55 PM] rotoman: You may see me here later, but I’m zonked from hearing the auction call some 280 times in the last five hours. [Mar 15, 2:55 PM] DerekVanRiper: Totally understandable [Mar 15, 2:56 PM] Guest7477: Very interested to see how a delayed season would affect pitcher adps [Mar 15, 2:56 PM] rotoman: You heard it about 330 times yesterday afternoon. How did you stand it? [Mar 15, 2:56 PM] DerekVanRiper: I played music over it during the Mixed Auction [Mar 15, 2:57 PM] DerekVanRiper: I think the going once/going twice/sold audio in every auction room can lag a little anyway, so it doesn’t help me much. [Mar 15, 2:57 PM] rotoman: The big thing with the pitchers is the guys injured now regain their standing, depending on when you expect the games to resume. [Mar 15, 2:57 PM] rotoman: Very wise, Derek. [Mar 15, 2:57 PM] Guest7477: i just wonder if the end pitch count for most big arms will be like 160 ip instead of 210+
BaseballHQ did a five part series featuring Brent Hershey, Patrick Davitt, and Phil Hertz in the final weeks of their respective (Mixed Auc, AL, NL). Read them here. Part one | two | three | four | five.
Just three days remain in the final weekly contest of the Tout H2H regular season, and while Clay Link sits safely atop the standings, earning a first-week bye, there is plenty of other action as teams scramble toward the playoffs.
The battles for second and sixth are close.
Ian Kahn and Jake Ciely are locked in a duel for second place, which earns the second place team a first week playoff bye. These standings reflect the current state of this week’s games (remember that each week a team can win 2 points for winning hitting, 2 points for winning pitching and 2 points for winning the overall points, or lose 2 points in each for losing hitting, pitching and overall).
Right now Jake Ciely is 2-4 on the week, while Ian Kahn is 6-0.
Coincidentally, Ciely and Kahn are playing the teams with the worst records going into this final week, but while Kahn has so far done what’s necessary, Ciely’s pitching has struggled. He has a bunch of starters with tough matchups this weekend, while Joe Pisapia is throwing mostly relievers. The bottom line is Ciely needs to hold onto his hitting Ws while also winning either the pitching or overall points to secure second place on his own. He otherwise needs Kahn to falter.
In the battle for sixth place, which is existential when it comes to playoff chances, Ryan Bloomfield is up 4-2 on the week over Alex Chamberlain, who is in fifth place on the season, while Paul Sporer is down 0-6 to Dan Strafford, who is overall fourth. This promises to be a fraught weekend for Bloomfield and Sporer, with Bloomfield having the bigger margin of error (if he takes the hitting points, too, from Chamberlain he should find himself in fifth place).
A reminder about the playoff format: The first week, teams 1 and 2 have a bye. 3 plays 6 and 4 plays 5.
The next week 1 plays the lower seeded remaining team, while 2 plays the higher seeded remaining team.
Weeks 3 and 4, the two remaining teams face off for two weeks. The winner is Tout Wars H2H champion.
A month ago, Clay Link was cruising along, winning 80 percent of his games, looking back at the high-achieving (but not that high) likes of Jake Ciely, Ian Kahn and Ryan Bloomfield.
H2H June 2, 2019 standings.
Since then, Link has cruised along with an .800 win percentage while Kahn and Ciely have fallen back.
H2H midseason 2019 standings
No worries, however. The top six teams make the September finals, with the top two getting a first-week bye.
Jake Ciely has been one of the most energetic owners in Tout H2H, talking about the rules and format of the league. After a couple of years trying experimental hybrids of category based standings as well as points, Tout H2H went full points in 2018, and Jake soared.
All the talk after the March auction was about Justin Mason’s pitching heavy strategy, which turned out to be right, but wasn’t as well implemented as Jake’s was. With Monday and Friday roster resets, the game was obviously to load up on quality innings and have a decent offense.
Jake’s team did that better than any others. Which makes him the 2018 Tout Wars Champ. Well done.
