2022 Draft Recap: Tout Wars (15-Team Auction)

On Friday, Tout Wars’ mixed salary cap (auction) league completed its draft. It’s a 15-team league that uses a 5-by-5 rotisserie scoring convention, except it replaces batting average (AVG) with on-base percentage (OBP). I transitioned into this league last year—and got absolutely eviscerated (I finished 14th of 15). I can make excuses—it was my first time playing in an OBP league and also my first time participating in a 15-team salary cap draft—but at the end of the day, the blame falls at my own feet. I planned very poorly for last year’s draft. In fact, I planned very poorly for all my drafts last year. I was a new stay-at-home/work-from-home father navigating parenthood and a pandemic. I was burned out! Fantasy baseball was not the reprieve it should’ve been; it felt like a chore.

I am rejuvenated this year. I didn’t want to embarrass myself again. I studied and wrote unique comments for more nearly 350 players (I wish I could have done more in time). I recalibrated my internal encyclopedia of player knowledge to better understand players’ OBP tendencies rather than their AVG tendencies. I was as prepared as I could possibly be given the limitations and constraints of daily life.

I will say up front: my draft went OK. I feel a lot better about it than I did last year, but I’m still not thrilled. I think that is a side-effect of drafting in a 15-team league. The pool of worthwhile players exhausts itself at just the right time in a 12-team league. In a 15-team league, you feel like you’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel. It feels… not great!

An eternal pessimist, I may be underselling the quality of my team to myself, not allowing me to get my hopes up, lest I implode gloriously for a second year. ATC projections like my team, and I drafted guys I like because I think they are projected accurately or even slightly bearishly, allowing for upside. I didn’t really draft anyone who left a bad taste in my mouth. That’s a minor victory in and of itself. Of course, if my team sucks, then maybe the lesson learned is not that my team didn’t leave a bad taste, but that I simply have bad taste.

The typical salary cap is $260 per team, each team typically 23 players (14 hitters [2 catchers], 9 pitchers). Accordingly, I develop for myself a player salary roadmap: a loose guideline of what I plan to spend when. I have drafted enough salary cap teams to understand both how I typically construct a roster and how player salaries tend to be distributed.

The ebb and flow of salary cap drafts is such that you can expect to over-spend early; then, salaries will start to level out; and, finally, you’ll under-spend on whichever remaining quality players are left. If you can practice patience, you will happen upon late-draft bargains.

Conversely, if you expect and are willing to wait to get an elite player without being willing to spend above his projected value, you will not acquire any elite players. It’s just not how auctions work; it is fantasy baseball human nature to naturally place a premium on the perceived safety and guarantee of production from elite players. You may be able to pick your spots—not every high-end player can go for more than his projected value—but you may end up with a player whom you don’t want, or, more accurately, whom no on wants. In other words, there’s a reason why that allegedly top-end player went for a relative discount, and you’re the fish in a sea of sharks.

Anyway, here’s how I actually executed my roadmap. At one point, I kicked myself for acquiring an extra $5ish player, which removed completely my ability to come over the top of other drafters for several picks during the Dollar Days twilight of the draft. That $5ish player, however, was a great value. In that moment when I locked myself, I had lost sight of my failure to execute not in that moment (by exhibiting restraint) but, rather, my failure to execute early on, when I over-spent on my high-end bats and arms:

I don’t regret the nameless players highlighted blue—I just think I could have recalibrated my targets a little bit and held back on some bidding wars. I had enough targets at those junctures that I didn’t need to have any of the specific players I acquired. They simply presented themselves as good deals in that moment, or they felt like the last bastion of a particular tier within their position that, if I didn’t act decisively, I’d find myself wading through a lower tier of players I didn’t like. At the end of the day, I would rather spend a couple of bucks extra on someone I like much more than saving a couple of bucks to roster someone I don’t like. The impacts my top-end players will make dwarves the potential impacts of my Dollar Days gambles.

You have tolerated a lot of vague philosophizing, so: here’s my team!

Some draft trends I noticed:

• Saves (SV) and stolen bases (SB) went for premiums (aka were over-valued). I tried my best to stay patient amid the tumult. You need SVs and SBs to win, but I didn’t want to compromise.
  • I vowed to scrape together SBs by drafting hitters who chip in a few and here and there—and achieved about as much success as I could reasonably expect. I also drafted Andrés Giménez, who is young and talented but somewhat unpolished. He’s a high-variance player, but he’ll run, and the Guardians are not exactly replete with other options (although they are replete with capable prospects—but, again, Giménez, at 23, is barely a former prospect himself).
  • For SVs, I targeted Gallegos and only Gallegos ($14). He’s a Tier-1A closer, and any noise about him not being the lockdown guy is nonsense in my book. He stands head and shoulders above his bullpen colleagues. Then I threw some darts. Here’s where I’m sad about compromising the integrity of my Dollar Days strategy because I really wanted to gamble on Paul Sewald ($4). Instead, I settled for Castillo ($1).

I don’t intend to bore you with minutiae about why I drafted the players on my team. Every man has his price. I like everyone enough, some more than others in an absolute sense, some more than others in a comparative sense. I’ll offer some rationale for certain players, though:

• I’m overloaded on Salvador Perez this year, but he’s not exactly my ideal OBP target. Alas, I failed to pull the trigger on Yasmani Grandal and Will Smith, and I came to regret it deeply. I did not want to leave a two-catcher league without a top-end option. $22 was an acceptable salary to acquire him.
• Keibert Ruiz is projected for only 60% or so of Washington’s reps behind the plate, but they, too, have scarcely any internal options to spell him. I’m hoping he ends up seeing closer to 500 plate appearances, not 400.
• I have only recently become informed about Jake Fraley beyond my vague knowledge of him as a former prospect. A key acquisition for a gutted Cincinnati squad, and with skills that appear to make him at least capable of treading water, I liked the idea of targeting him for cheap speed when so many other speedsters cost an arm and a leg.
• I was already targeting Ha-Seong Kim widely before Fernando Tatis Jr.’s injury. For those with short memories: he was, consistently, a 20-20-.290 guy for six years in the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) with 30-30-.310 upside when everything broke right. Even if those skills only present themselves as 15-15-.270 stateside, that’s sufficient. The Padres didn’t agree to a four-year contract just to give up on Kim after 298 PAs. I hoped he might carve out a utility role for himself prior to Tatis’ injury; now I almost expect him to, and for him to retain that role once Tatis returns. Heck, maybe the Padres push Cronenworth to first base, fire Hosmer into the sun (edit: I totally missed today that the Padres acquired Luke Voit; maybe Hosmer already booked tickets for his direct flight to the center of our closest star) and let Kim play second.
• I liked a lot of pitchers in the Gausman/Rodón/Morton juncture, including Lance Lynn, Joe Musgrove, and more. I wanted to grab a few of these guys and generally succeeded. I did not allocate my dollars as perfectly optimally as I would’ve liked; I think, very specifically, Lynn instead of Rodón would have afforded my rotation more floor/safety rather than more ceiling/risk, especially with deGrom as my ace.

Here’s my bench:

• SP Tylor Megill
• 2B/SS Andrés Giménez
• OF Steven Kwan
• SP Mike Soroka (will be sent to IL and replaced with free agent via FAAB immediately)
• 3B Brian Anderson
• SP Glenn Otto

To gauge the “success” of my draft, I compared my currently projected totals to last year’s standings,* which can be found on the bottom line of the previous table. Eighty-two points is nothing to write home about—it would put me in the middle of the pack of a 15-team league. But I take solace in knowing my starting lineup, on which my projected point total is based, will not account for my entire production.

(*This is an altogether dubious affair, so don’t fool yourself into thinking I think this is appropriately rigorous. Projections can only predict, like, 35% of variance in player performance. Given how dramatically the league’s offensive environment has changed year to year, this is mostly a fool’s errand.)

A full slate of games played would afford me roughly 1,000 more PAs and 400 more innings. Assuming those PAs and innings are roughly league-average—a reasonable assumption, I think, given the circumstances—my final stats and point totals would look like the bottom two rows:

OK, so maybe league-average is too generous. Or maybe not? Maybe this is actually a great team. One-hundred and twelve points would have netted me a 3rd-place finish last year. Obviously I want to win, but given my abysmal showing last year, a podium finish would be very welcome. I won’t hold my breath, but I do feel microscopically more confident in my squad.

I hope this glimpse into my soggy, moldy brain was at least a little bit insightful. If you have questions about players I drafted, you can drop them in the comments and I’ll address as needed. And, of course, if you have questions about my strategy, ask away.

Someone will ask about the full draft results, so here they are. Forgive the length of the table (as well as the lack of diacritical marks (accents)—the Fantrax .csv export does not contain them, so some players won’t link properly). You can sort the table by clicking any of the column headers, so sort away, my friends.