2024 Season Recap: Tout Wars 15-Team OBP Auction (3rd Place)

So, yeah: I came 3rd place. That’s cool! I didn’t win, so it’s not that cool, but it still feels good. In our league there are a lot of sharp folks whom I respect. Given the sheer number of leagues in Tout Wars now it’s easy to accuse the talent pool of being diluted. It’s also easy to defend it as being not diluted, seeing as I directly participate and thus have an incentive to save face, but nevertheless. It’s a solid crop of talent.

Additionally, I am categorically bad at 15-team leagues (thus, it feels good to do moderately well at something you’re bad at). For 15-teamers you must have that encyclopedic knowledge of the player pool. It is imperative to minimize mistakes because they cannot be rectified as easily through waivers. You know what it takes to develop that encyclopedic knowledge? Time. You know who doesn’t have time? Parents of toddlers. Or people with full-time jobs outside of fantasy baseball. More than half my opponents do fantasy baseball full-time! How can I possibly compete?

Rather than make excuses, I wanted to prove to myself I, indeed, could compete. I made a big fuss in March about how I was not going to let myself be humiliated again. I was going to put in time I didn’t really have to enjoy something that, honestly, I had kind of lost my love for. And I did. I did it. I developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the player pool. I conducted deep dives on every player on each team’s 26-man roster. Even the ones—especially the ones—who I thought on first glance might be a waste of my time. Those are precisely the types of players where, once in a blue moon, they absolutely are not a waste of my time.

It was exhausting, but it clearly was worth it.

But all of this prologue glosses over an enormous detail that probably only I noticed: my team, as of mid-August, was in 11th place, with something like 68 standings points. I finished the season six weeks later in 3rd place with 92.0 points. And, the truth? By August, I had effectively quit. In July, I went on vacation; I missed a couple of waiver runs; my team looked pretty noncompetitive. I just kind of went into cruise control. For example, I didn’t even make an attempt to replace an injured Luis Rengifo for, like, four weeks, and I had no suitable replacement so he remained in my active roster. That’s lazy.

The low-hanging joke, then, is that I’m not actually any good at this. My team succeeded right when I stopped paying attention to it! That is damning. That is humiliating right there.

On the other hand—well, let’s actually look at my draft and in-season moves.

The Draft

I wanted to try a strategy in which I ignored on-base percentage (OBP). In batting average (AVG) leagues I often over-value AVG not just as a category but as a skill that can be reliably replicated player to player. The truth is it’s the least-important of the five hitter categories. I hadn’t done the research, but I figured a study of OBP leagues would yield a similar result.

Unsurprisingly, “ignoring” OBP became “punting” OBP: I came dead last in the category, and it wasn’t even close. That’s fine, but moreover, I think my thesis about OBP was, in fact, quite flawed. While AVG is somewhat decoupled from other hitter metrics, OBP is pretty strongly correlated with Runs. That makes a good deal of sense in hindsight. So by ignoring OBP I ended up punting not just one category but two. Oops.

I think it’s pretty remarkable, then, that I was even competitive at all. With five points between runs (4) and OBP (1), I compiled 87 points in the remaining eight categories. Bret Sayre, 8.5 points ahead of me in 2nd place, had twenty-six OBP-plus-runs points. Scott Swanay, exactly 26 points ahead of me in 1st place, also had 26 such points. It’s not an eight-category league, but it goes to show how constraining my particular approach was.

Anyway, here’s my roster with my players’ salaries, relevant transactions, their final values (courtesy of FanGraphs), and their surpluses.

I don’t think any of the subtotal lines are reflective of performance, but I do think it’s somewhere among the three, probably closes to “without cuts” which finds happy ground between the most-extreme scenarios. Obviously I did not incur a $7 loss by starting Edman’s ghost all year; Rengifo was quite a bit more valuable during his four healthy months than his final line shows; et cetera. But I also incurred losses on the likes of Rogers, Sandoval, and to some extent Velázquez. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

What you may not realize, though, is the average team turns a 35% to 40% loss on its draft, with the losses increasing as the number of teams (and depth of rosters) grows. Seriously. I’ve done the research; I’m sure I published it at some point over the years. Thus, through poor performance and injuries, I could have reasonably expected to incur a $100 loss on my draft. That I even came close to breaking even is outstanding, especially after botching my outfield (J-Rod, Robert, Adolis—a trifecta of underperformance). I drafted nine players with $5+ surplus and five players with $10+ surplus. I don’t know how many players turn a profit in a typical draft, nor do I know the magnitude of those profit, but that kind of surplus helps offset a lot of mistakes (of which I made a great many).

FAAB

I wish I could say more of my success was attributable to free agents. It simply wasn’t. I suck badly at free agent auction budget (FAAB) weekly bidding. I often forget to do it in the first place, but when I do remember, my brain turns to mush. I might as well be a monkey at a typewriter. It might as well be complete guesswork.

Because I performed so poorly last year, I actually only had something like $770 (rather than $1,000) to spend in FAAB. It’s basically the one mechanism imposed by Tout Wars to keep us from quitting (I think you lose $10 of FAAB for everyone 1 point you finish below 80 points, or maybe 75 points, something like that). I was already at a disadvantage, but it hardly mattered.

Here are my free agent acquisitions with relevant transactions and values (because most of these players did not spend much time on my roster). Each value reflects the entire year, unless highlighted yellow—then the value is custom-calculated to reflect performance from that point onward (courtesy of my Pitch Leaderboard).

I mean… it’s bad. Is it always this bad for everyone else? It can’t be.

But you know what: I spent roughly one-fourth of it wisely—and $33 in particular very wisely. Thank you, Sean Manaea.

Takeaways

Normally I’d shrug and say there aren’t many takeaways. Somewhat surprisingly, I do think there are a couple of pertinent ones!

One: You can punt OBP (or AVG, or some other lesser category like pitcher wins or saves), but you have to be extremely confident in your ability to minimize mistakes.

Two: I drafted none of my players by accident. (Except Mullins; you can read the original post for more on that.) The top of my draft was more flexible; I see top-end talent as much more interchangeable than low-end talent, so landing J-Rod was more a matter of circumstance than anything else. But other guys—guys like Langeliers, Peña, Rengifo, Neto, O’Hearn, Imanaga, Sánchez, Martinez—were all very deliberate. (Same with my closer choices.) I came away from my deep dives on them very impressed and targeted them heavily in all my drafts, not just this one. I am especially proud of seeing the promise in Luis Rengifo and Nick Martinez, as I’ll discuss soon in my bold predictions recap. I hope I’ve established enough trust with you, the reader, for you to take me at my word that these guys were targets.

Two-point-five: I was only able to have strong convictions about these players because I actually did the requisite painstaking work to unearth them as potential gems. And I’ve already complained about how a lot of just don’t have that time. I forced myself to have that time, and I slept less because of it. And I love sleep. I was not happy about it. It paid off, but it’s just not something everyone can do. It is, frankly, a privilege to be able to devote more than an hour or two a day (excluding mindless scrolling on Twitter) to fantasy baseball.

All of which is to say: who the hell knows if I, let alone you, can replicate this in some future season under different circumstances. But I sure as hell know I’ll be doing my deep dives again for 2025—and perhaps this time I’ll focus a little more on OBP. Thanks for making it this far with me. I hope this was at least a little bit entertaining or insightful.