Zach Steinhorn details some of the ironies of the early Tout Mixed Auction season.
Category: About Tout Wars
Tout Daily: Week 1 Results
Scott Pianowski (Mixed Auction) kicked butt in the first week of the Tout Daily contest, besting Gene McCaffrey’s (Tout NL) squad by 10.75 points. How’d he do it?
Piano scored big with Oakland’s Drew Pomeranz (17 points), and Miami’s Dee Gordon (12.5) points, and Giancarlo Stanton (10.75 points).
McCaffrey got a fine game out of San Diego’s Brandon Morrow (yes, both leaders went low end on their starting pitching) (14 points), got a monster from the Reds Joey Votto (16.75 points), and a fine game mostly in extra innings from the Red Sox Xander Bogaerts (7 points).
For his success, Pianowski gets $60 added to his FanDuel account, while McCaffrey adds $48 to his. And the two are the leaders in week one of the four week race for eligibility in Phase One of the championship contest, which is to run in late August.
Other first week money winners were: Scott Engel ($42, Mixed Auction), Jake Ciely ($36, Tout X), Patrick Mayo ($30, Tout X), Lenny Melnick ($24, Tout NL), Rob Leibowitz ($18, Tout AL), Chris Liss ($18, Tout AL), Charlie Wiegert ($12, Mixed Draft) and Rob Murphy ($12, Mixed Draft). You can find the full results of Week 1 here.
Here is the running LEADERBOARD. Bookmark it!
Week 2 of Phase 1 comes next Friday, April 17th. Go Touts!
Here’s this week’s winning roster. Could you have done better? (click to enlarge)
Dueling Tout FAAB Reports
This year you’ll have two sources of notes about the weekly FAAB and claims from Tout Wars.
Long time compilers, Mastersball, continue their ongoing series of FAAB grids and comments, about each week’s buys and claims.
This year, Baseball Prospectus resumes a series it has run in the past, commenting on the week’s moves each Tuesday from a few different expert leagues.
X Marks the Opening
How are things going in the first week in Tout X? Lawr Michaels checks in.
Getting Ready for Tout Daily
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!
Beat Zola and Rotoman on Opening Day!
We’re counting down the days to Opening Day, and so is FanDuel. To help promote the Tout Wars Daily game, presented by FanDuel this year, FanDuel is offering a special game on Opening Day.
Sign up to compete against Tout Wars experts Todd Zola and Rotoman in one-day fantasy baseball on FanDuel on Opening Day. It’s just $5 to enter and you can win up to $100. Enter now!
Bed Goes Up On Tout X
Lawr Michael’s thoughts about the inaugural Tout X Drauction.
Gene McCaffrey (Tout NL): LET’S TALK ABOUT ME!
I can’t believe how big the whole thing is now. Back in the day we would huddle in the dank basement of some New York bar. One year we drafted in Steve Moyer’s basement, which I thought was great but later heard tell of other putative Warriors who did not. Now there are at least a hundred people there either drafting or media-involved. Even girls! Maybe three! TV cameras, live radio broadcasts, no question we’re big shots.
The best thing is that the people are terrific. The very few assholes who have passed through the expert ranks of fantasy baseball over the years all disappeared quickly. I mean, I’m the biggest asshole there and I’m only an asshole sometimes. But you want to know about my team.
I won the battle but I may have lost the war. Here’s The Conundrum: in NL- or AL-only leagues the bargains are going to come on the pitchers, but you can’t get too many or you won’t have enough money to buy an offense. Everyone is spending 30 percent or less on pitching and bragging about it, which ABSOLUTELY guarantees that 1) pitchers will be undervalued, and 2) hitters will be overvalued. (A corollary is that some team or teams who don’t spend on pitching are going to score some pitching bargains, making them instant contenders.) When it works it looks great, when it doesn’t—which is usually since everyone is doing it—it looks terrible, but no one cares because odds are that’s what the winner did. To me this state of affairs calls for a contrary strategy and hence the conundrum. Continue reading “Gene McCaffrey (Tout NL): LET’S TALK ABOUT ME!”