Rudy Gamble, on finishing second in Tout Wars Mixed Draft.
Fred Zinkie, on winning Tout Wars Mixed Auction
Zach Steinhorn, on falling short in Tout Wars Mixed Auction.
Mike Gianella, on winning Tout Wars NL.
Mike Gianella and Bret Sayre’s Flags Fly Forever podcast, on Tout NL. Fred Zinkie is on this show, too.
Ray Flowers, on finishing in the middle of the pack in Tout Wars Mixed Auction.
Peter Kreutzer, on finishing last in Tout Wars NL.
It’s all in the headline. Mastersball.com has published their comments about the final week FAAB moves in Tout Wars. You can read it here.
At this point, it is highly probable that Mike Gianella will win Tout NL and Chris Liss will win Tout AL. But the mixed leagues both have compelling three man races for the top. Best of luck to Adam Ronis, Gray Albright and Rudy Gamble in the Mixed Draft league, and Fred Zinkie, Tim Heaney and Scott Swanay in mixed auction.
This is your time!
Mike Gianella’s FAAB comments are posted on Tuesday morning. That is his time.
Scoby Snacks, at FakeTeams.com, has posted a story called How Chris Liss Ran Away With AL Tout Wars.
Liss has a seven point lead over Mike Podhorzer today, with eight days left in the season, so Snacks is almost surely right. As Podhorzer noted yesterday, he has a lot of ground to make up, but he does have ways to do it. So let’s wait and see.
In the meantime, you can read Snacks’ article, which errs in one important detail. While Liss didn’t spend big bucks in FAAB during the year, he did make some big bids. When he bought Carlos Correa for a buck, he bid $34. Tout’s Vickrey FAAB bidding reduced it to $1 because no one else bid.
While he acquired Shawn Tolleson for $1 on April 13th, he actually bid $5. The bid was reduced to $1 because no one else bid.
Liss’s bidding in both cases was especially impressive when you look at the timeline. Correa wasn’t called up to the majors until five weeks after Liss bought him, and Tolleson didn’t earn a save until five weeks after Liss bought him.
I took a closer look at the standings and roughly added up the close points up and down for each player. Call this the volatility index.
Liss has five points to gain and nine and a half to lose. His range is 95.5 to 81.
Podhorzer has eight and a half points to gain, and eight points to lose. His range is 92 to 75.5.
Liss is in the driver’s seat, for sure, but there is a lot of overlap there.
Let’s let Bret set the scene:
“If the entire final month left me seasick, the final weekend made me schizophrenic. In fact, it almost made me jealous of the fantasy writers who cover both baseball and football, as I would have had a healthy distraction. Almost. By the halfway point, Pat had taken the overall lead and I was staring down the barrel of what would easily have been my worst period of the entire contest. A week later, my luck had turned and my offense started hitting–pushing me to a 5.5-point lead overall and a little more comfort, which would hold until the final lineups were set on Friday. From that point on, my team’s performance became irrelevant, as Pat’s team was absolutely firing on all cylinders. My lead was down to one at the end of the day Friday and gone by the evening games on Saturday.”
You can read Bret’s story at Baseball Prospectus. It’s on the free side of the paywall.
Mastersball.com’s notes column on the four Tout leagues is here.
Mike Gianella looks at this week’s moves in Tout AL and NL, and analyzes the pennant races, too. He’s leading in the NL.
Todd Zola explains one of the challenges of the Vickrey auction rule, and his merry band talk about this week’s moves at Mastersball.com.
Mike Gianella’s discussion of the Tout AL and NL moves can be found here.
From Mastersball, Todd Zola and Co. chat about Tout AL, NL, Auction and Draft.
Mike Gianella goes over the AL and NL moves each Tuesday morning at Baseball Prospectus. This week features a dark anti-sabermetric blues rant about JP Arencibia.
Mastersball finds Tout Wars far more active than LABR, but really, the well is running dry. Rotoman, for his part, bid hard on Rodney and Verrett, while Phil Hertz bid big for Rotoman castoff Michael Lorenzen. The standings say trust Hertz. But at this point all of us, except maybe Mike Gianella, are looking for a hero.
Gianella will weigh in on Tuesday at Baseball Prospectus on this week’s moves in Tout NL and AL. In fact, the moves are less than half of it. Mike does a nice job dissecting the NL pennant race (which he is atop) in his piece, and discusses the AL race, which Chris Liss currently leads.
