Justin Mason’s 2023 Redemption Tour: NFBC Auction Championship

2022 was the worst year I have ever had as a fantasy player. I played in 16 leagues and did not cash in a single one. The hard part is that I didn’t  even know what went wrong. I had teams I really liked coming out of the draft and some that were doing very well throughout the season. I could have easily brushed it off as a bad season or beaten myself up over it. However, I worked my butt off to get better. 

Getting better started with my 2022 Apology Tour. I broke down each one of my leagues in depth to see the common strings between each team. It was an extremely illuminating exercise that helped inform my decisions in terms of my prep and drafting in 2023. It was a fruitful endeavor. I cashed in eight of my 20 leagues this season, including my biggest money leagues which led to a very profitable season.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be covering my teams that did well in this series, dissecting what I did right and what I did wrong in order to continue to improve heading into 2024. I will also be covering my teams that did not go so well in another Apology Tour series to examine why they were not as successful. 

We begin with my most important win of the season, my NFBC Auction Championship team.

 

 

The Draft

I did my auction at the NFBC live events in Vegas and had a pretty tough draw with guys like Matthew Davis of FTN, Brian Jenner of Rotoholic, Douglas Gruber, KJ Duke and Anthony Gialde, though there are no easy leagues in these live events. It was a fun auction and I felt great about how it all turned out for me in spite of the tough competition.

In retrospect, I feel fantastic about my auction. I finished the season with 16 of my 30 players that I had bought during the auction and that doesn’t include Bautista who I had for the majority of the season. The only one of my players I spent $10 or more dollars on that busted was Lance Lynn and he was pretty useful for me down the stretch. I had massive contributions from some of my single digit bid players: Jose Altuve, TJ Friedl, Isaac Paredes, Jordan Montgomery, and Kyle Bradish. Having a great draft was a very nice start to the league, but it was just the beginning of what ended up being my most important team.

 

My FAAB Strategy 

In 2022, one of the things that I really noticed in my Apology Tour series was that I struggled with FAAB. There were too many big bids that ended up just being wasted dollars. As a part of my preparation for 2023, I looked at the players who were much better at FAAB than me, namely Scott Jenstad of Rotowire who was in both my Main Event leagues in 2022. Scott used a more conservative approach to FAAB. Spreading his money around in smaller increments and giving himself more opportunities to hit big. My plan was to incorporate this strategy in my leagues in 2023. I was mostly successful with it and while it didn’t always work, when it did, it was massive for my teams, including this one. 

 

April
In spite of some blowup outings from Lance Lynn, Michael Kopech and Zac Gallen, my team was faring very well in both pitching and hitting and I was second in the league and seventh in the overall. Even with the good start to the season, I didn’t really have any major FAAB pickups that helped me in the first month of the season.

The only major thing that happened in terms of my April moves was the dropping of Aaron Civale. Civale was good in his first two starts for me but then suffered an oblique injury and he didn’t warrant holding onto with the timelines for those types of injuries being 6-8 weeks on average. Civale would come back and be great from June 2nd on, but I stand by the decision to drop him and not limit my bench for next nine weeks he would miss.

 

May
May started off fairly rough. I got beaten up by bad starts Lance Lynn, Jordan Montgomery, Marcus Stroman, and Sean Manaea. This left me with a really strong offense, a lot of wins, strikeouts, and saves, but poor pitching ratios.

When Eury Perez was called up to make his debut, I made the decision to make a big bid on him in a number of leagues including this one. This was one of the few times I went against my FAAB strategy for the year. It paid off in this instance. Perez would throw 80.2 innings for my team, getting five wins, 91 strikeouts, and posting 3.35 ERA and a 1.18 WHIP. Most of my other FAAB bids for the month were inconsequential. I was also dealing with injuries to Corey Seager and Jose Altuve. By the end of May, I was still in second place but I was gaining on Matt Davis as my team got healthy and started to pitch better overall.

 

June
Early in June I took over first place and would keep it the rest of the way. The addition of Perez helped tremendously. I also made my most impactful pick up of the season in spite of a number of poor ones.

On June 18th I made some big moves though the smallest dollar move ended up being my most important. Someone had dropped CJ Abrams the week before. When I noticed this, I knew I wanted to target him the following week. I was a big fan of Abrams coming into draft season as a post-hype prospect that was being unfairly buried after a bad rookie season, but I was unable to land him in the auction as I ran low on money. Through June 18th, he had hit just .215 with six home runs and six stolen bases so I understand why he was dropped, but the skills were still intriguing for me. He would go on to hit .251 with 10 home runs and 33 stolen bases for my team the rest of the way. Without this pick up, I do not win the league.

My other two pickups on June 18th backfired on me. I spent $69 each on Jordan Hicks and Kendall Graveman. The strategy was to keep the saves away from my two biggest competitors that really needed the saves. Hicks ended up being fine and registering 10 saves, but I only got four of those saves. Graveman ended up struggling and being traded once the White Sox fell out of contention. While I still believe the strategy was well thought out, the execution was bad and it meant I wasted $138 that I could have used down the stretch to protect my lead in the league or improve my standing in the overall. I also spent way too much on Joey Votto and while he gave me 10 home runs, the batting average was atrocious and I ended up dropping him in August.

 

July
During the month of July, I didn’t make a ton of moves in general. I was mostly fixated on patching holes created by injuries to Cedric Mullins, Jose Altuve and Jarred Kelenic. Kelenic would be dropped as I didn’t know if he would make it back from the IL before the end of the season.

I picked up a $1 Patrick Wisdom who ended up getting me five home runs and a stolen base before I dropped him back to the wire. My biggest pick up of the month was Sal Frelick who had three home runs and seven stolen bases in 186 plate appearances as my sixth outfielder. The big takeaway from July was that I wasted a bunch of money on Jose Miranda and Tyler Soderstrom who I could have gotten for much cheaper than I had bid on. By the end of the month, I had lost a couple of points in the standings, but was still firmly in the lead of the league and climbing in the overall.

 

August
When August hit I was mostly concerned with how I could improve my standing in the overall. The top 12 teams get paid for their finish in the overall standings with the top prize being $30,000. This led me to take some gambles I probably shouldn’t have and not pay close enough attention to the league standings which was a mistake.

The first mistake was picking up Oneil Cruz. I thought I was getting a cheap power bat that could be back in the lineup for me in September. What I actually got was a guy that clogged my bench who never came back and was dropped weeks later. I also made some bad streaming decisions with Allan Winans and Jesse Scholtens which not only hurt me in the overall but dropped my lead in the league to 4.5 points. By the end of the month I decided that while I wanted to do well in the overall, the league win was more important. My weakness in the standings and where I could gain the most ground was in ERA and WHIP, so I made the decision to pick up a $1 Danny Coulombe. He would throw nine innings for my team, allowing just one run and getting two big wins for my team.

 

September
My strategy in September was to continue to improve my ratios to pick up points and preserve my lead. My best ways of gaining points were in average, ERA and WHIP.

I targeted high strikeout relievers like Jose LeClerc, Trevor Megill, and Robert Stephenson to achieve this task. I never actually used LeClerc, but Stephenson threw 5.1 innings with a 1.69 ERa and a .56 WHIP with a win and a save. Megill didn’t do so well for me with a 4.15 ERA and a 2.08 WHIP in 4.1 innings. I had a bad stream with a road two-start for Peter Lambert, but I made up for it in the last week of the season with a nice stream by Matt Waldron versus the Giants. I had some nice pick ups offensively as well with Mark Canha and Noelvi Marte who had a combined four home runs and five stolen bases with a .297 average in 121 at bats. I continued to gain in the standings heading into the last week of the season, but it would come down to the last day.

 

Last Day of the Season

During the last week of the season, both Matt Davis and Douglas Gruber were gaining points and were within striking distance. Gruber was especially hot, gaining 7.5 points in the last week of the season. 

On the last day,I headed to a sports bar in the Bay Area to watch the games with Sammy Reid, Toby G, Nickolaus Sackett, and soon to be Main Event Overall Champion Brian Slack to sweat out the games. 

Gruber had both Bailey Ober and Adrian Houser going which allowed him to gain two points in the standings. I was relying on Kyle Bradish to help me gain a point in WHIP which he did before Coulombe blew that point in relief of Bradish. I was two points up in the standings but if Houser and Ober got their wins, then Gruber would gain a point and a half and I would lose a half point which would tie us in the league. 

As the day wrapped up, the Pirates pulled ahead in the eighth inning and David Bednar pitched a clean inning to move me back ahead in WHIP. However, Houser got his win leaving Gruber just one win away from gaining two standings points. All he needed was the Twins bullpen to close out the Rockies. However, Sean Bouchard came to bat in the bottom of the eighth inning down with the Rockies down 2-1. I turned and looked at Sammy Reid and said, “I need a home run so bad right now. If this guy hits one, I will buy his jersey.” 30 seconds later, Bouchard hit a no doubter to left field and our table went crazy. I had just won the league. I could finally breathe. 

In the end, this victory began with turning last year’s disappointment into fuel to get better. I didn’t let 2022 define me as a player, but it inspired me to get better. I had a good auction and then managed well and in spite of mistakes and falling just short of the overall money, I was able to pull it off. It was the crowning achievement of my season and the redemption I needed.