Tout SOLDS+IP Draft is Today. Join the Conversation!

Tim McLeod is hosting a watching party for today’s Tout Wars Mixed Draft SOLDS, the league that uses Saves+Holds and Innings Pitched as categories (replacing Saves and Wins).

Join Tim at playback.tv/toutwars at Noon PM Eastern Time. Register at playback.tv to use the chatroom.

You can still watch and listen if you don’t register, but registering allows you to comment.

The league expands this year to 15 teams. The participants, in pick order:

1Matt TrussellRazzball 
2Sara Sanchezbleedcubbieblue.com 
3Chris TowersCBS Fantasy 
4Jeff BoggisFantasy Football Empire 
5Chris CleggPitcher List 
6Zach SteinhornSteinhorn’s Universe on Substack 
7Carlos MarcanoTriple Play Fantasy 
8John LaghezzaThe Athletic 
9Derek VanRiperThe Athletic 
10Joe OrricoSports Ethos, Fantasy ProsTout Rookie
11Ray FlowersFantasy Guru 
12Matt CederholmBaseball HQTout Rookie
13Ryan BoyerRotowire, Baseball ProspectusTout Rookie
14Geoff PontesBaseball America 
15C.J. KaltenbachFantasy Guru 

You can also follow along on the SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Network.

Tout Wars Mixed 15 Draft is Finished!

See the full draft results here. Click tabs for different leagues.

Scott White writes about his draft here.

Rudy Gamble writes about how his draft went here.

Charlie Wiegert’s recap (part 1) is right here. And like the Godfather, it has a part 2 right here.

Mike Gianella’s story of his draft at Baseball Prospectus out from behind the paywall.

Tout Wars Mixed Draft 15 is Coming Up Soon!

You can follow it by Zoom, hosted by Jason Collette, at Zoom room 897 6009 8139. No password is required.

The draft is being covered by Colton and Wolfman on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports, though I hear the Wolfman isn’t in tonight. I’m sure Glenn will have an able co-host.

The link to the public draft room on Fantrax is here. You can see the actual draft order there.

Draft order is based on teams that finished better last year getting their choice of picks. The order of picking this year was:

Adam Ronis (1000) 2015, 2016, 2021 Mix 15 Champion
DJ Short (1000)
Shelly Verougstraete (1000)
Tim McLeod (1000) 2014 Mix 15 Champion
Tim McCullough (1000)
Seth Trachtman (1000) 2016 AL Champion
Charlie Wiegert (1000)
Ray Murphy (1000) 2019 Mix 15 Champion
Rudy Gamble (1000) 2018, 2017 Mix 15 Champion
Scott White (1000) 2020 Mix 15 Champion
Michael Beller (920)
Anthony Perri (870)
Mike Gianella (700) 2015 NL Champion, Xfer from Tout AL
Perry Van Hook (680))
AJ Mass (1000) Return to Tout

Teams that finish in the lower half of the standings one year face a FAAB penalty the next. The numbers in parens are that team’s FAAB for 2022. The penalties follow teams even if they change leagues.

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 Touts: In their own write (or radio, or podcast)

Each year we publish links to the Touts writings and ruminations about what happened in the season that just ended. Here they are for 2021:

Draft and Hold: Michael Stein |

NL: Fred Zinkie | Phil Hertz |

Mixed Auction: Zach Steinhorn |

Head to Head: Frank Stampfl |

End Of Season Round Ups: The Touts Describe What Happened

TOUT MIXED AUCTION: Sayre | Hershey | Flowers | Steinhorn | Zimmerman | Melchior |

TOUT AL: Davitt |

TOUT NL: Hertz |

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.

TOUT MIXED DRAFT: White | Short |

Tout Wars Mixed Draft 2019 Tonight!

Starts at 8pm ET.

Check out the live draft board here.

Follow along on SiriusXM, with Colton and the Wolfman, Kyle Elfrink and Ray Flowers.

The live chat is live! Drafting commences at 8pm sharp!

The Tout Mixed Draft Chat Transcript is here.

Rudy Gamble Wins Tout Wars Mixed Draft League for the Second Year in a Row

Rudy (Still) Can’t Fail
by Jeff Erickson

We’ll delve into Rudy Gamble of Razzball’s hegemonic-like dominance of the Tout Wars Mixed Draft League momentarily, but first, a song:

I know that the spelling is different, but any excuse to include a Clash song has to be taken.

For the second year in a row, Rudy Gamble of razzball.com has won the Tout Wars Mixed Draft League. Once again, he had to hold off Adam Ronis of Scout.com for the title. I wanted to say that Rudy and Adam are the Red Sox and Yankees of the Mixed Draft League, but that wouldn’t do justice to the size of the field they are besting each year, and the comparison fails because there’s no carryover from year-to-year. Moreover, Rudy made a better analogy in his write-up of his victory—they are Federer and Nadal, with a combined four firsts and three second-place finishes over the last four years.

With the win, Rudy vaulted into third place on the All-Time Tout Wars leaderboard, behind only Fred Zinkie and Larry Schechter, despite having played only four years. Thus, Rudy will get another meal named after him at our annual Tout Wars get-together at Foley’s. It’s a good bet that if you ever have leftover Tout Wars currency from that meet-up and it has Rudy’s visage on it, you should keep it so that you can use it the following year.

It’s worth noting that Ronis isn’t that far behind on the list, sixth all-time and fifth among active participants, and fellow Razzballer Grey Albright has demonstrated similar strength, following up his 2017 win with another “cash” finish in 2018.

If you’re looking to see where I’m on the list, don’t bother. Seriously, it’s embarrassing. Having me write this article is like having Anders Jarryd or Manuel Orantes compare themselves to Federer or Nadal.

So … how did Rudy do it? Let’s take a quick look at the standings first:

The first thing that jumps out is Rudy’s utter dominance of the pitching categories. He won four of five categories outright and finished third in saves. He did this despite getting only 25 starts from his first pitcher, Noah Syndergaard, who he took at the 2-3 turn. Unlike many of his competitors, he backed up Thor with a second ace, getting Aaron Nola at the 4-5 turn. Two great starters aren’t enough to dominate the starting pitching categories, however – he had to hit on the slippery mid-round starters to succeed, and he did that in spades by getting Charlier Morton in the 13th and Blake Snell in the 15th rounds.

One might be tempted to dismiss those picks as windfalls – but I think that’s underselling the skill in picking in the mid-tiers. Moreover, because he had that second ace, he was less reliant upon ‘hitting’ with all of his mid-tier SPs. Obviously, there are so many landmines that he could have gone with (and in one case, in Round 12, did go with, in Jon Gray) instead of Morton and Snell – just looking at the draft grid, some disastrous alternative picks in that range included a lot of injuries (Danny Salazar, Garrett Richards, Taijuan Walker, Dinelson Lamet) and underachievers (first-half Cole Hamels, Chase Anderson, Aaron Sanchez, Jake Odorizzi). Rudy was able to combine all that top end starting pitching with quality contributors late in the draft, too – getting significant contributions from Eduardo Rodriguez, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Tyler Skaggs, the latter two in the reserve rounds of the draft.

Rudy might not have won saves, but he got two solid closers in Felipe Vazquez and Raisel Iglesias that weren’t ever a threat to lose their jobs. 2018 was a really frustrating year to chase saves – plenty of closers lost their respective jobs, but often their replacements weren’t all that stable, either. Iglesias was Rudy’s first “value pick” at 9.1 – and it had the added bonus of preventing a disaster in Delino DeShields.

Turning to the hitting, once again most of Rudy’s value came from the draft rather than through trades or the waiver wire. Starting out with Mike Trout is great, especially in an OBP league, and then he hit perfectly at 3.1 with Christian Yelich. After that, he had a number of solid players but few breakout hitters (at least compared to the year before, when he nailed Tommy Pham and Whit Merrifield), though he got great values with Shin-Soo Choo (16.15) and Michael Brantley (19.1).

It wasn’t the proverbial “perfect draft” for Rudy – he had to overcome injuries and suspensions from Kevin Kiermaier (10.15), Steven Souza (11.1) and Jorge Polanco (14.15), for example. But he avoided the critical early-round disasters, which is so important in a format like this. He also invested very little in scarce positions. Catchers were a disaster in 2018, but with his catchers coming in Rounds 17 (Mike Zunino) and 28 (Bruce Maxwell), any shortcomings there weren’t that damaging.

Can Rudy be stopped? All signs point to no, but you should tune in next spring and of course read up at Razzball to find out!