This Year’s Touts!

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.

The 2019 Constitution is Posted.

The big news is a new scoring system and a playoff system, finally, for Head to Head, but there are other tweaks in the deadlines, and the new Draft and Hold league is incorporated. Click the Constitution 2019 link above and look for the red type.

Tout Wars H2H Standings Explained!

New standings are out for Tout Wars H2H. Brent Hershey, Jeff Zimmerman and Peter Kreutzer are tied for first, with 15-3 records.

This is a new league with a new scoring system, so this seems like a good time to review how games are won and lost.

Screenshot 2016-05-02 11.50.12

Last week, after the first two H2H matchups, Hershey and Zimmerman were tied at 12-0. This meant that both had won more hitting categories than both their opponents, won more pitching categories than both their opponents, and won more overall categories than both their opponents.

Hitting, pitching and overall categories won in each week are worth two “games” each.

For instance, this past week, you can see in the HIT column, that Hershey won three hitting categories and Zimmerman won two. That means Hershey won two Games for the week, while Zimmerman lost two.

In the PIT column, you can see that Zimmerman won three categories, while Hershey won two. That means Zimmerman won two Games for the week, while Hershey lost two.

In the TOT column, you can see that both Zimmerman and Hershey won five categories each, and lost five categories each, so each receives one win and one loss for that week’s games, making their records for the week 3-3.

Add that to their 12-0 records and they go into contest four at 15-3.

Here’s how the week’s other contests went:

Doug Anderson beat Jeff Mans 4-2.

rotomanisthebest-benderPeter Kreutzer beat Howard Bender 6-0. (Bender and Kreutzer had a bet on this one. Payoff was photo in front of Cafe Society in Half Moon Bay, where Howard lives.)

Jake Ciely beat Paul Sporer 4-2.

Stephania Bell beat Andrea LaMont 5-1.

Michael Beller beat Jeff Boggis 4-2.

New contests begin tonight! Here’s the schedule:

Screenshot 2016-05-02 13.58.30

 

 

The First Tout Wars Head 2 Head Auction March 18, 2016! Read the Live Blog Archive and Spreadsheet.

Live coverage on SiriusXM from 7pm to midnight!

Live spreadsheet here. List of contestants here.Read the rules here.

Live blog after the jump.

Continue reading “The First Tout Wars Head 2 Head Auction March 18, 2016! Read the Live Blog Archive and Spreadsheet.”

Getting Ready for Tout Daily

598x60-tout-wars

The first Tout Wars Daily game, hosted by FanDuel, begins this Friday.

So far  32 34 36 Tout Wars members have signed up.

Each (plus any others who sign up tonight) will receive an invitation tomorrow to the Friday game, then pick nine-member teams against a salary cap for Friday play.

We’ll have all the weekly results here, plus analysis of that week’s winner, and the Year to Date Leaderboard, each week all season long at ToutWars.com.

The Touts are playing for $6,000 in prizes this year, plus the chance to be crowned Tout Wars Daily Champion 2015.

Please stay tuned!

 

Mixed Draft Redemption Schedule

This year, for the first time, Tout Wars Mixed Draft owners will be able to redeem the draft day “price” of a player for FAAB dollars, if a player he owns goes on the Disabled List. The rule reads, in part:

If a player who was bought in the auction is placed on a major league disabled list, 7-day, 15-day or 60-day, his Tout Wars team may release him and ask his SWAT to add the player’s auction salary back to this year’s FAAB. In the Mixed Draft league, players will be given dollar values based upon the prices paid in the Mixed Auction league. For instance, the first player drafted will take the value of the most expensive player taken in auction. Similarly, the 20th player drafted will have the price of the 20th most expensive player bought in auction, regardless of position.

The Redemption Price List can be found here.

The 2015 Tout Wars Constitution is Posted.

The main changes involve the Mixed Leagues. You can read it here.

Each Mixed League team will have six reserve players this year, up from four last year.

Also, for the first time, Mixed Draft owners will be allowed to redeem players who go on the DL for FAAB. How do we determine the prices of the Draft players?

We’ll order the Draft from first to last, then we’ll assign prices in order from most expensive to the cheapest. So the first player taken will have the highest price, the 100th player taken will have the 100th highest price. A list of players and prices will be posted at onRoto and the Tout Wars website.

There is a link in the Constitution to the Tout Wars X constitution for 2015.

Solds: Steinhorn and Schwartz on a new category proposal

Every fall we solicit rules change suggestions from the team owners in Tout Wars. Despite our recent move replacing BA with OBP, which some love and some hate, we’re generally more interested in tinkering with the procedures, making them more fair, easier, and hopefully innovative. A major rules change, like replacing Saves with Saves + Holds (or some permutation of such) will be considered seriously, but the default position, as with replay, is with the status quo. There has to be a good reason to make the change.

I bring this up because this year there has been a strong sentiment among some owners to switch from Saves to Saves + Holds (Solds, Ray Flowers called it), which led Zach Steinhorn to write a 411 post about some work Cory Schwartz put together yesterday. Cory gets at just what seems so dicey about Holds as a category, and makes a pretty good case for sticking with the closers.