Yesterday, I assembled a 14-player offense from the hitters who weren’t bought in NFBC auctions since March 15. Today, let’s flip over to the pitching side.

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The following is the second part of my 2020 Tout Wars Head-to-Head Points League recap. You can read Part I of my recap here.

For the second straight year, I had the honor and privilege of participating in one of the most prestigious fantasy baseball industry leagues – Tout Wars (toutwars.com). This was my very first live Tout Wars auction. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, we drafted online on the Sunday of March 15, 2020.

In Part I of my recap, I discussed the league rules, some of the homework that I had done on last year’s auction results, and how I obtained my auction values. I also talked about some of my other adjustments made due to the postponing of the MLB season.

Part II of my recap will be different than the typical recap article you tend to see. It will certainly differ from my usual writing style.

In today’s article, I will go through some of the intel that I had gathered on my opponents. I will dictate to you what I was looking for from the other touts and how I picked up on particular strategies during the auction. I will talk about what went right for me at the auction table and what went wrong. Finally, I will give a brief overview on my player selections.

The Touts

Well, I’m not sure that I would call members of the Tout Wars Head-to-Head Points my enemies. However, they most certainly were my opponents … at least for that Sunday afternoon in March. The quote above has appeared in folklore from many cultures, and of course, was one of the great lines of the movie “The Godfather.”

Fantasy baseball is largely about the numbers. If you often read my articles, you likely already know the importance that I place on projections and valuation.

Almost as important … perhaps even more important … is knowing your opponents. It is an advantage to be aware of the types of players that they bid on, how high they press bids, whether they nominate players they want to buy, the typical construct of their fantasy squads, etc.

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In my previous post, I looked at the hitting landscape for The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational (TGFBI) drafts. I also analyzed my own personal team from league #14, which was dubbed as the “league of death.”

Onto the pitching …

General Observations

Starting Pitchers

Let’s first compare starting pitcher ADPs from the past two seasons of TGFBI.

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I know some drafts are still going forward despite the delay to the MLB season so I wanted to get these RP rankings out as I did promise them on the podcast the other day. I’ll probably do an update to every position once more before the season starts, but here’s the initial run of RPs.

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03/12/20

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RELIEVER PREVIEW

• Here is the NFBC Average Draft Data, but we didn’t follow it in order for this one.

THE SUPER 3 (6:46)

• Josh Hader
• Aroldis Chapman
• Kirby Yates

THESE GUYS ARE GOOD, TOO (18:05)

• Edwin Diaz
• Roberto Osuna
• Kenley Jansen

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I’ve noticed some trends in my drafts. The good closers are going fast – often over 20 picks earlier than their already aggressive ADP. After a handful of elite guys, the warts become extremely noticeable. It’s hard to justify going Sean Doolittle when Luke Voit is staring you in the face.

The correct answer, probably, is to jump aboard the early portion of a closer run. However, that’s not always a choice. I certainly didn’t have an option of participating in either closer run during my TGFBI draft.

My mistakes in closer design have forced me to wade into the ugliest portion of the reliever pool.

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Alex Colomé was solid as the White Sox’s closer in 2019, going wire-to-wire in that role. He blew only three of his 33 save opportunities, but because he was short on strikeouts (55 in 61 innings) and had a merely good ERA (2.80) and WHIP (1.07), Colomé finished just 17th among relievers in 5×5 Roto value. Based on ADPs in NFBC drafts so far, that seems to be roughly where fantasy owners expect him to slot in among relievers in 2020. Colomé’s ADP of 160.0 places him 14th among relievers, so if anything, his 2019 performance has fantasy owners expecting a slightly better standing this season.

Many of us are likely to have some trepidation about any closer outside of the top six or so, meaning that Colomé’s ADP is not a sign of fantasy owners’ overwhelming confidence in him. Nonetheless, he is typically getting drafted ahead of Emilio Pagán, Brandon Workman, Hansel Robles, José Leclerc and Archie Bradley, so he is getting some respect. Also, no other White Sox reliever is getting drafted within the top 500 picks overall, as Aaron Bummer’s 586.6 ADP is the next closest. Colomé has engendered enough confidence that he is not viewed like Pagán, whose ADP is only 100 points higher than that of teammate Nick Anderson, or Mark Melancon, who is getting drafted 92 picks on average later than Will Smith, even though he is slated to be the Braves’ closer.
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This past weekend was an eventful one for the Cardinals’ bullpen. At the team’s Winter Warmup, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak said that Carlos Martínez was ahead of schedule in his return from offseason shoulder surgery, giving momentum to his push to become a starter again. Martínez was slated to begin his road back with a bullpen session on Tuesday, and barring a change in plans, bullpen roles are now up for grabs. Once Jordan Hicks was shelved by a torn UCL and subsequent Tommy John surgery last summer, Martínez took over as closer. He secured 22 of the Cardinals’ 30 saves after Hicks’ season had come to an end.

There was also news regarding Hicks. He is currently tossing on flat ground two or three times a week and could return by the middle of the season. While it seems unlikely that Mike Shildt would put Hicks immediately back in the closer’s role, it does complicate our calculus for determining who (if anyone) we should target from the Cardinals for saves in this year’s drafts. Even if there was a clear successor to Martínez as the team’s closer, that reliever could conceivably get pulled from the role if Hicks made a sufficiently early and strong return.
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Last year, I took a stab at developing what might be loosely defined as park factors using Statcast data. (I called them park “impacts” because they lacked the requisite rigor to be true factors, although it’s all semantics, truly.) I sought to use Statcast’s expected wOBA (xwOBA) metric, specifically on batted ball events (BBEs), such that we would have a measure of xwOBA on contact (or xwOBAcon). This metric accounts for exit velocity (EV), launch angle (LA), and little else — which makes it perfect for this purpose.

The difference between actual and expected wOBA on contact indicates the amount of luck, whether good or bad, a hitter might have incurred on a particular batted ball event. In other words, given ‘X’ exit velocity and ‘Y’ launch angle, what is the most common wOBA outcome, and how much did the actual wOBA outcome differ from it?

The beautiful part about xwOBAcon is it strips away all other context. It removes elements that confound other park factor calculations, such as hitter and pitcher quality or even sequencing (vis-à-vis run-scoring). Except for fielding. Can’t control for fielding, unfortunately.

With this approach, we have the exit velocity. We have the launch angle. We have historical results for that particular combination of EV and LA to use as a benchmark. And then we compare.

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The Braves continued the upgrading of their bullpen, which they began at this year’s trade deadline, by signing Will Smith on Thursday. In inking the lefty to a three-year, $40 million deal with a fourth-year team option, they added a reliever who struck out 96 batters over 65.1 innings and recorded 34 saves for the Giants in 2019. Smith’s ex-teammate (and now new teammate), Mark Melancon, was effective as the Braves’ closer down the stretch this season, but I was probably not alone in assuming that Smith would go into spring training as the team’s new closer.
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