(*) MASTER NOTES: Last thoughts on Tout

I’ve already described my own efforts in a Roto Gaming article (no subscription required) earlier this week. Now, as Tout Wars weekend recedes into the rearview mirror, I wanted to share a few last notes, from during the auctions and their followups, both at the venue at post-draft events and online afterwards, about hit-pitch splits, player values, oddities and more.

First, I was curious about Hit-Pitch Splits, because home-league and NFBC players sometimes clock Tout and other experts’ leagues to see if there are trends to play with or against.

For the last few years, there has been a slow but steady movement in experts’ drafts towards greater allocations to pitching. The touts and other experts have come to accept that pitchers, especially top pitchers, are no more risky than top hitters, and that it is easier to find four-category contributors among top starters than among hitters, even allowing for the capricious nature of pitcher wins.

Just FYI: The splits I’m about to talk about are based on splits of owners’ actual spending, not hitting as a percentage of the theoretical league maximum of $260.

In the AL-only league, which I’m playing in, the overall split was 70%-30%, off maybe a point or two from what we might expect. But the split was skewed upward by one owner’s extreme budget strategy. Steve Moyer of Inside Edge tried a near-Labadini Plan, spending $248 of his $260 on hitting and just $12 on pitching. That’s a 95% hitter split! Without Moyer’s extreme split, the league would have had a 68-32 split, quite low for modern auctions. The low split in this league was 58% by Lawr Michaels of Mastersball, who often takes this sort of path, but six of the 12 AL Touts had splits of 67% or lower.

In the NL-only league, the split was 69-31. The high split was BaseballHQ.com’s Phil Hertz at 76%, the low belonged to defending champ Mike Gianella of Baseball Prospectus at 62%.

The Mixed Auction league split 76-24 overall, but with an interesting divide among individual teams. Four of the 15 touts in Mixed were over 80%, led by Al Melchior and Scott Pianowski at 85%. At the same time, four more touts were under 70%, led by Nando DiFino at 66%.

Of course it might be that none of this will affect your leagues directly, but experts’ drafts do influence home and NFBC drafts, and this sideways drift towards higher pitching spends should be something you’re at least thinking about as you head toward your draft table. Ask yourself this: If you knew Chris Sale or Max Scherzer had the same chance of avoiding injury as Andrew McCutchen or Carlos Correa, would you adjust your split?

Player Values

Within the splits, we saw an increasing swing towards stars-and-scrubs, with top players commanding big bids. Across all three leagues, seven different players went for $40 or more: Mike Trout in AL and Mixed, Bryce Harper and Paul Goldschmidt in NL and Mixed, Josh Donaldson in the AL-only, Clayton Kershaw in NL-only, and Miguel Cabrera and Manny Machado in Mixed.

The AL-only also had 12 players bought between $30 and $39, the NL-only had 11, and the Mixed had 18.

Among all three leagues, with is 39 different teams, just seven had entire rosters of players under $30.

As a result, dollar days was huge. About 15% of all players auctioned went for a buck. The AL auction had a record 46 $1 players taken, including 12 by Moyer and 10 more by former champions, the Rick Wolf/Glenn Colton team. By contrast, Mike Podhorzer had only one, and that was by accident. The NL had 44 one-buckers, 10 of them rostered by Lenny Melnick. And of the 44 $1 players taken in the Mixed League, Tim Heaney and Al Melchior had eight apiece while Scott Pianowski didn’t have any.

If the stars-and-scrubs approach continues to grow, there might be opportunities to zag while the S-and-Sers are zigging. Conversely, you might want to join the bandwagon, which seems to imply a willingness to do your homework to identify the top candidates for those endgame maneuvres.

Owner Oddities

Part of the fun of every draft is watching for unusual or odd happenings. This year’s Tout drafts had their share, which we either saw or heard about.

For instance, there was Podhorzer’s lone dollar player. He didn’t even want Yovani Gallardo. He nominated Gallardo as a $1 throwaway but didn’t get a rebid.

Rob Leibowitz of fantasyheaven.com said he planned to spend between 75 and 80 per cent of his budget on hitting, which would have been among the highest in the league. It’s funny how drafts go—he ended up spending 67% on hitting, in the lower half of the league.

Is there an influence of the well-known “stacking” tactic from daily fantasy?

In Tout-AL, Chris Liss bought the entire Yankees bullpen for $38.

In Tout-NL, Derek Carty bought the entire Dodgers rotation for $69.

And almost my whole team is stacks: Four Red Sox, four Tigers, and three each from MIN, OAK, TAM and TEX. I swear this was not by design. At least I’ll know which games to pick on XM and Extra Innings!

As usual, the prices in Mixed were a few bucks higher than in only leagues. But there were exceptions, even at the high end. Giancarlo Stanton went for $39 in both the NL and Mixed. Justin Upton went for $30 and Félix Hernández went for $22 in both AL and Mixed,.

It was also seeing how aggressively some owners went after their targets. In Mixed, Derek Van Riper bought three of the first nine players, rostering Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer and Paul Goldschmidt for a total of $115. Then he went to a movie.

In Tout-NL, Andy Behrens spent $106 on his three top guys: Nolan Arenado, Bryce Harper and Madison Bumgarner.

Gianella, the defending NL champion, spent $55 to buy four of the top catchers in Tout-NL: Jonathan Lucroy, Yasmani Grandal, Derek Norris and Miguel Montero. He put Montero into one of his UT spots and Norris into a corner IF spot (Tout Wars gives position eligibility to players based on a 15-game requirement from the previous season, and Norris had 17 at 1B).

Speaking of Gianella, he went the opposite of Stars-and-Scrubs. He did not spend more than $18 on any player, and had 14 players in the midrange between $11 and $19.

Finally, a comic note from the NL Auction. When Grey Albright of Razzball came into the SiriusXM “fishbowl” (a rectangular room with glass walls; it should be called “The Aquarium”), he took off his blue sweater, only to show identical blue sweater underneath. Big yuks. I met Grey at the Tout Wars gathering at Foley’s Pub in midtown and he is very funny and fun guy to hang with.

Team Representation

With 646 players drafted in AL- and NL-only, there should have been about 21 players from each MLB team. But the range was a low of 16 from the least-represented team to a high of 26 from the two most represented teams. Guess who they are! (Yes, teams have only 25-man active rosters, but Tout Wars rules allow any player to be drafted, as long as he is not affiliated with a team in the opposite league.)

It will probably come as no surprise that the least represented team was sad-sack Atlanta, with just 16 players taken. Miami had just 17 and Detroit and the Angels had 18.

On the high side, the tie was between, unsurprisingly, the powerful Dodgers and… the Rays. I don’t know if that surprises you. It surprised me. The other hot commodity teams were the Rangers, with 25 players taken, and Cleveland, St. Louis and Pittsburgh, with 24. I expected the Cubs to be among the leaders, but in fact they were at the other end of the spectrum, with just 19 players taken, the same low total as their crosstown rivals the White Sox. Maybe the touts were anticipating limited playing time for Cubs’ bench players, which seems weird considering manager Joe Maddon’s predilection for using different lineups.

The Name Game

Then there’s a tour through the player names. Among first names, the most commonly drafted were Jose and Chris, with 13 each, and nine Michaels. But when we added translations and diminutives, the Michaels and variations were on top with 21: Michaels Bourn, Brantley, Fulmer, Conforto, Pineda, Morse, Wacha, Saunders and Taylor; Miguels Montero, Cabrera and Sano; and Mikes Napoli, McKenry, Fiers, Moustakas, Bolsinger, Trout, Zunino and Leake. Plus Mikie Mahtook.

The 13 drafted Joses were Abreu, Altuve, Bautista, Berrios, DeLeon, Fernandez, Iglesias, Lobaton, Peraza, Pirela, Quintana, Ramirez, and Reyes. Since “Jose” is Spanish for “Joseph,” I added the seven drafted Joes and Joeys (Gallo, Kelly, Mauer, Panik, Ross, Smith and Votto), giving the Jose/Joe combo 20 picks and second place.

In third were the 13 Chrises. If you’re keeping score at home, they were: Chris Archer, Bassitt, Carter, Coghlan, Colabello, Davis, Heston, Iannetta, Johnson, Owings, Sale, and the two Chris Youngs (no relation).

The Colton/Wolf team in Tout-AL had two Joes (Kelly and Abreu) and two Mikes (Trout and Moustakas), as well as two Trevors (Bauer and May, which sounds like an upscale casual restaurant).

The other popular first names: a three-way tie at 11 among Carlos, Matt and Tyler, with Carlos getting the tiebreaker from Charlie Blackmon. There were also nine Brandons (and Steve Gardner bought three of them—Crawford, Drury and Finnegan, which sounds like a law firm).

If you were wondering, 256 players were the only representatives of their names, which is no surprise considering Yasiel, Yadier, Yangervis, Yoenis and Yimi, just among the “Y”s. But are you as surprised as I am that there’s only one “Todd”?

Among last names: three surnames were taken five times each: Garcia, Ramirez and Smith. There were four Gonzalezes ending with a “z” and another ending with an “s.” And the last weird surnames note (I promise): three Escobars were taken, Alcides, Eduardo and Yunel. And Ron Shandler bought all of them.

Good luck and good hunting as you go into your drafts and auctions!

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