A week ago, I was able to hold on a win to win my first Tout Wars league. The extremely gratifying experience was the culmination of too many years of managing fantasy baseball teams. From the early auction to the results coming down to a Christian Yelich at bat, the season was great. I am not going to talk about the team in detail because no one wants to hear about someone else’s fantasy team. Instead, I will stay away from the details and go over some of the keys to winning the league.

Know and exploit the rules

This idea is hard to implement in leagues which have the same set of rules for years, but in new leagues with unique rules, this is the biggest key to winning. Since it was my first year in Tout Wars, I was added to the lower/experimental league. Tout Wars has four other leagues, AL-only, NL-only, mixed-draft, and mixed auction. If any rule is being considered for any of the other four leagues, like moving from batting average (AVG) to on-base percentage (OBP), it is done first in this league. The league got hit straight on with new rules this year with net steals, net Saves, K/9 vs strikeouts, and a head-to-head format (detailed in a previous Rotographs articles).

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Author’s Note: The article you see below was completed before Andrew Miller was injured by a comebacker on Wednesday. I believe the thought process and information below is still relevant and useful, even in light of this injury.

I love this time of year. Sure it’s fun to be doing my own draft prep. But a much underrated part of draft season is all the talk by others in the industry about their own processes. If you’re trying to learn about other strategies and improve at this game, the expert draft season is a treasure trove of goodies. A lot of the strategy and thought provoking discussions will dry up as we get further away from March.

I gobble up the draft recap articles and podcasts that come out of the LABR and Tout drafts because I’m such a junkie for the strategies and decision making processes others use.

And there were some interesting ones this year. Ron Shandler took his new BABS approach to Tout Wars. Steve Moyer attempted the Labadini plan. And there’s now a Tout Wars head-to-head draft with some interesting rules that will lead to interesting strategies (as Jeff Zimmerman wrote about on Rotographs (free!), Rotographs again (free!), and Rotowire ($$)).

But the one outcome I want to discuss wasn’t so much an overall strategy as it was a specific plan or series of decisions. Chris Liss, of Rotowire, drafted Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Dellin Betances for a combined $38 in the AL Tout Wars draft (click here to see the entire results of all the Tout leagues).

Was this a good move? Or not? Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, I asked our RotoGraphs readers on how they would approach my Tout Wars mixed 12-team head-to-head auction. The strategies stated in the comments were similar to the approach I took. But that is not how the rest of the teams operated and it threw me for a loop.

A person must remember the rules to this league are fairly unique with a head-to-head component making up 80% of  the league’s wins and a roto component being the other 20%. A full rule set can be found here and the abridged set here.

Going back to the comments from Friday’s, here are the approaches the various readers would have taken.

Pitching Strategy

Few high K starters to make minimum IP, RPs otherwise
dparker713
jbona3
David
schulni
HappyFunBall
OutOfTheBox
Brad Johnson Read the rest of this entry »

3/25/16

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

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Strategy Section

• We deep-dive our Mixed H2H Tout Wars Auction (a brand new format in Tout Wars)
• Tout Wars Rules
• Part 1 of Jeff’s Write-Up
• Tout Wars Auction Boards

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A week ago, I participated in a new Tout Wars league which is called the Head-to-Head league, but it has a roto component. It was interesting to prepare for a highly competitive league with no previous similar leagues to reference. With the new format, first I had to decide how I would approach the league and second how my opponents would approach it, and how to find some advantages. Today, I will go over the rules and then ask you, our readers, about how you would approach the league. Later, I will go over my approach.

Here are the simplified rules with the full set being available at the Tout Wars website.

Rules Read the rest of this entry »