Justin Mason’s 2024 Apology Tour: Tout Wars Mixed Auction

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.

2024 was a mixed bag. While it was profitable for me by cashing in seven of my 1 leagues, I wasn’t as profitable as last season and I only won one league. Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be covering my teams that disappointed in 2024, 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 I did cash in to examine why those teams were more successful.

We begin with my Tout Wars Mixed Auction league where I finished 8th out of 15 teams.

Big congratulations to Scott Swanay who ran away with the league in the second half. There were a number of teams that fought for second place, including my own before my team fell apart in the last few weeks.

The Draft

My strategy coming into the auction was to build a balanced roster and to try and extract as much value as possible while having a deep team as opposed to a stars and scrubs kind of build. 

In retrospect, this isn’t a bad team and I was able to keep 15 of my 29 drafted players, but I struggled with massive injuries and wasn’t able to find the right pieces to replace what I lost in power specifically. My pitching was good, but I didn’t have a true ace with Eflin and Ober having their own struggles. I also made some mistakes in FAAB that cost me which we will cover below. However, the fact I lost a player like Acuna and I stayed competitive over the majority of the season shows the overall strength of the team was fine.

April

There were some nice pickups for me in April. I was able to grab Luis Gil prior to the start of the season as well as Trevor Williams and Alec Marsh who were both effective pitchers early on in the season. I was also able to grab David Hamilton who would be a nice source of stolen bases for me. The problem was I made a terrible drop early in the season. Brenton Doyle was a reserve pick for me in the auction and I dropped him. I had a roster crunch with both Michael Massey and Nathaniel Lowe coming back from the IL and made a really terrible choice of who I dropped. There is no excuse for it considering how well Doyle started the season. He would go on to hit 20 more home runs and steal 28 more bases which could have been massive for my team. I also dropped Trevor Williams, missing a lot of his good early work. 

May

In May, I was able to pick up Lucas Erceg, but unfortunately I dropped him before he was traded and became a closer in Kansas City. My only real good pick up for May was Simeon Woods Richardson who would have been a reliable team streamer early on in the season, but I didn’t get enough of his early work and ate too much of his summer duds. 

June

In the month of June, I had a very similar story to my first two months. I made what could have been some really nice pickups, but I didn’t hold onto the platters long enough. I grabbed Bowden Francis for just $7 but I dropped him in July. I also was able to pick up Miguel Amaya, but dropped him before his hot streak that occurred at the end of the season. I did make a trade to acquire Wyatt Langford from Jeff Zimmerman for $210 of FAAB. I was able to do this because one of Tout Wars’ great rules is that if you lose a player to injury you can drop him and get back 10 times the amount you spent on him in the auction back in FAAB. This gave me the opportunity to add $610 worth of faab once I lost Acuna. 

July

My big pick up in July happened at the end of the month when I was able to pick up Cody Bellinger when someone dropped him. He would go on to hit nine home runs and steal four bases, which was fine, but not game changing for me. My biggest problem in July was that I wasn’t active enough on the wire, relying on my team as is to make strides and it didn’t do it. 

August

In August I was able to grab Ryan Walker from the wire once he became the closer. Unfortunately, I didn’t really need that many more saves and I probably should have traded him or another closer for more power, but the only person that wanted to trade for saves was Scott Swanay and he was running away with the league at that point. 

September

The only big pickup I had in September was Ozzie Albies, but he was activated so late in the season that his impact was minimal. By this time, my team had plummeted. To be honest, by the last month of the season, I had shifted my attention to teams where I was competitive. I am not proud of that fact, but it is the truth. Had I been more on top of it, I could have competed for second or third which I had been battling for in July and August. 

Conclusion

Obviously I made a big mistake with spending so much of my auction money on Acuna. I knew the risks coming in and should have stuck to my traditional strategy of spreading the wealth. More importantly though, I wasn’t active enough in FAAB especially with the added FAAB I got from reclaiming Acuna. If I had spread that money more quickly, I might have been able to make up for the lost stats from losing guys like him. I tend to not make these mistakes normally, but after years of playing 15-20 leagues a season, the workload of that many teams finally caught up with me and it is something I am seriously looking at this offseason.