| 3:04 |
: Good afternoon. The auction will begin at 3:15 ET
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| 3:09 |
Hi nando |
| 3:10 |
Emack’s breath smells like a fart that farted. |
| 3:10 |
What the? I smell like pizza. That smells amazing. |
| 3:10 |
draft Kershaw #1! |
| 3:11 |
:
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NL Auction Chat Transcript
| 9:20 |
: Had some technical issues in here, but we should be good to go now.
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| 9:20 |
: Billy Hamilton goes $22 to Gianella
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| 9:20 |
: Reminder, this is an OBP league now and batting average has been killed!
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| 9:22 |
Morning Jason. |
| 9:22 |
Does Hamilton’s price vs LABR reflect that change?
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| 9:24 |
How are you this morning Jason?
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Tout Wars Mixed Draft: It’s All Over!
Why play the season? onRoto, Tout Wars stat provider, offers a Toy Box of tools to help teams create reports for custom periods during the year, look at the draft day roster standings and more. One fun Toy Box item at this point, before the season has begun, is Projected Standings.
BaseballHQ’s projections are applied to the rosters of all teams and standings are calculated. Read ’em and weep (or cry out in joy, Brent Hershey).
Of course BaseballHQ’s Brent Hershey and Ray Murphy are going to rank highly. The Toy Box is using their projections.
This year onRoto has added Clay Davenport’s projections, which have nothing to do with HQ. How’d those turn out?
Well, Brent is still in the top group, but it looks like Perry Van Hook and Greg Ambrosius are also to be reckoned with.
But all pay attention to Chris Liss’s maxim: “I want to be last in the projected standings. If I’m last I know I had a good draft.”
Or as Yogi might put it, “It ain’t over until they’ve started playing, at least.”
TOUTDOWN! Your Guide to Tout Wars Week!
March 11: Tout Wars Mixed Draft. Results. (Click tabs to select a spreadsheet page)
March 22, 9am: Tout Wars NL Auction. Follow on SiriusXM radio, the spreadsheet, the chat.
March 22, 3pm: Tout Wars Mixed Auction. Follow on Sirius XM radio, the spreadsheet, the chat.
March 22, 8pm: Tout Wars Party! Foley’s Bar, 18 West 33rd Street, NYC. Meet the Touts!
March 23, 10am: Tout Wars AL Auction. Follow on SiriusXM, the spreadsheet, the chat.
March 24: Doubt Wars! Beat the pros, win prizes!
I Like My Draft! Notes from the TW Mixed Draft 2014.
I woke up the day after the TW Mixed Draft to a curious email. It was addressed to me and said that my team had won the draft because my team had taken Mike Trout (duh) with the first pick in the previous night’s draft. Okay.
The issue was I was the live blogger, not a participant, but then I realized that in order to observe the draft I made myself a coowner of Tom Kessenich’s team. Tom had the first pick by virtue of having finished second in the league’s inaugural season and last year’s champ, Mike Podhorzer, moving to play in one of the only leagues this year.
So, I read on. CBSsports, who hosted the draft, went on to say:
Draft Recap
Thanks to players like Mike Trout, Tom Kessenich are the team to beat
It’s a long way to October, but you have won the first round, winding up with the top ranked draft. Your squad, led by Mike Trout, are projected to wind up with 96 category points. That’s 39 more points than Ray Murphy are projected to come up with. Coach Murphy will have all year to prove us wrong, but for now, Ray Murphy are slated to finish in last place.
Another team that will have some struggles is Tim McLeod, who have the worst infielders in the league. Coach Mcleod will have to trot out Corey Hart, Howie Kendrick, and Cody Asche into the starting lineup. Perry Van Hook, meanwhile, are the class of the league in that area, with infielders Miguel Cabrera, Mark Trumbo, and Jose Altuve.
Your strength is mainly in your pitchers, who project out to be the 2nd best in the league. That outstanding group is the reason why you are expected to wind up in 3rd place in the wins category.
Turning to individual picks, we tapped charlie wiegert as having made the best pickup with Robinson Cano in the 18th slot. He was projected to be off the board a full 11 picks earlier. On the other hand, Ray Murphy made the worst move of the draft. Coach Murphy selected Shin-Soo Choo with the 20th pick, which we pegged as a serious reach.
Your best pick up of the draft was Max Scherzer, who was expected to have been selected in the 24th slot, but who you got with pick #30. However, you mixed in some (minor) duds as well, the worst of whom was Zack Greinke, taken 12 spots ahead of what his average draft position suggests.
Paragraphs in italics are unique to your version of your league’s Draft Recap.
Now let’s return to some more human commentary.
Perry Van Hook’s draft review runs at Mastersball. He makes an astute point about reserve and DL list use in Tout, and lists the rookies taken and when they went.
Nick Minnix writes about forgetting that Tout Wars uses On Base Percentage rather than Batting Average, which led him to take Adam Jones instead of Joey Votto with the seventh pick. Remember Touts! All Tout Wars leagues are OBP this year! AL touts are hoping Larry Schechter forgets.
The introduction to Paul Sporer’s piece about his team, picking from the 14th slot, before it hides demurely behind the Baseball Prospectus paywall. For subscribers only.
Inside the Mind of a Tout, is a radio clip featuring Adam Ronis talking about his team.
Lots of recaps were heard on the radio, which is a little harder to link to, but send clips if you have them!
Tout Wars Mixed Draft Live Chat!
The Tout Wars Mixed Draft was held the evening of March 11th. Particpants battled in a CBSsports draft room for three hours, making more than 400 picks.Â
You’ll find two different versions of the draft on a spreadsheet here. One is in pick order, the other in team order.
Thanks to Ryan Carey for tracking on the spreadsheet.
There was a live chat of the event, but a software error seems to have broken that. We’re looking for a way to restore it.
Thanks to all the Touts for high spirits and hungry hearts.
READY, SET, ALMOST GO! Tout Wars Mixed Draft is almost here!
The second annual Tout Wars Mixed Draft will be held Tuesday, March 11 at 7pm ET.
There are three newcomers in this year’s roster: Welcome Adam Ronis, Ray Murphy and Paul Sporer. Plus Nick Minnix moves over from the TW Mixed Auction.
Last year’s champ, Mike Podhorzer, has moved to the TW NL Live Auction, so it’s a wide open field. Last year’s second place finisher, Tom Kessenich, has this year’s first pick.
Join us here for a LIVE CHAT during the draft, and live DRAFT TRACKING of the results.
Find a complete roster of managers here.
Hypothetically Speaking 2013: Tout Wars Mixed Auction
On draft day 2013, Paul Singman bought the best team in Tout Wars Mixed Auction. If the league played by Draft and Hold rules, Singman would have won by 18 points over David Gonos.
Paul bought 54 hitting points, third best in the league.
And he bought the best pitching staff, trailed by just a few points by eventual champion Fred Zinkie, who bought an overwhelming number of saves.
Based on the draft day rosters, Singman won going away. But that isn’t what happened.
By the hypothetical measures Singman had a great auction, followed by a terrible season. His moves during the year, as well as the moves of those he was playing against, hurt his team badly, to the tune of -52 points!
I asked Paul what went wrong and he wrote back:
“- I drafted Julio Teheran, and then made a bone-headed decision to drop him after about five starts when his ERA was in the 5.00s. He was pretty good after that.
– Danny Espinosa and Mike Moustakas were big disappointments, and I had them in my starting lineup for longer than other struggling players. (Ed. note: Since he drafted them this wouldn’t hurt his hypotheticals unless they performed better after he dropped them.)
– I started Justin Grimm and Erasmo Ramirez, and probably streamed a couple other pitchers that got lit up in a couple starts.
– Had part-time players like Andy Dirks and Jarrod Dyson in my lineup later in the season, which hurt counting stats some.
– Lastly, it didn’t help that Jayson Werth and AJ Burnett had tremendous finishes to the season, after I traded them.”
My hunch, without delving into this deeper, is that the Werth and Burnett trades hurt him a lot, especially since he got back Gio Gonzalez, who had a mediocre second half. Of course, dropping Teheran was a loss, too, a decision that seemed totally reasonable at the time, but hurt big in retrospect.
What also hurt his team was dealing waiver-wire pickup Yasiel Puig, but that didn’t influence his draft-day lineup. The bottom line is that when confronted with a series of decisions, many of which don’t have obvious answers, it’s possible to make a lot of good decisions (call that a hot streak) or a lot of bad ones (certainly a losing streak). Usually we make some of each and end up like most teams, not much helping or hurting our teams after the auction. (This chart shows how many points each team had on Draft Day, at Season’s End, and what the change was.)
He was also hurt because teams like Eric Mack’s made spectacular buys, like Koji Uehara, that transformed the saves category. Of course Eric did a lot of other things right, as well, and gained 32 points, to climb from 14th place to fifth.
The main point is that, while the auction/draft is the most important day of the year, plenty that happens afterwards affects the final standings. Thus did Fred Zinkie move from third to first, turning a surfeit of saves into winning wheels. His and Eric’s happy tales are the counter to Paul Singman’s nightmare.