Tout Wars Victory(!) Recap

“No one cares about your fantasy leagues,” but: I am your 2026 Tout Wars 15-Team Mixed On-Base Percentage (OBP) Auction champion. I’m not sure how helpful draft and/or league recaps are for most people, but I figure debriefing a victory is as good a use of this time as any.

Let’s start with the draft, since my draft telegraphed my championship. Here’s my roster with each player’s final bid and their end-of-season (EOS) value per FanGraphs’ auction calculator. “Difference” represents the difference between the final and EOS value. “Actual Profit” more closely resembles my profit (“Difference”) among the players I started in my lineups basically without thinking about it. A couple of them were injured for a little bit — Ryan O’Hearn and Ryan Weathers missed maybe a month or so, whereas other guys like Clay Holmes and Connelly Early missed more-significant chunks of time — so this may look a little bit cherry-picked. It’s a loosey-goosey exercise to begin with.

I researched this a few years ago (although the numbers may have changed more recently): if you look at, say, the first 360 players off the board per average draft position (ADP) data, where the number 360 represents the number of teams (15) multiplied by the number of starting roster slots (24), you find that the EOS value of those players is something like 63% of their draft value, on average. That means the average team — a theoretical 8th-place team — leaves the draft room with, say, $165 in EOS value on a $260 budget. This exercise ignores how the players get to their final values. Many get injured, some for the entire season. It happens, But fantasy owners do draft those guys, so we can’t ignore them.

It was a great start, then, that I recouped $207.8 of the original $260 that I spent on my starting roster (that is, ignoring my six bench players). Ignoring the prolonged injuries and outright busts, my core starters profited $45.1 — and my three bench pitchers profited another $37.2. Don’t punt your bench, folks.

I would be remiss to note that, while I suffered some major injuries — Lindor, Holmes, Carpenter come to mind — I did not suffer nearly as many as others did. To win, you can’t simply be good — you must also run pure, to some extent.

I don’t want to short-change my season, though. All told, I had a really strong season: out of five teams, I had two firsts, one third, and two fourths, both of which I missed the podium by one point. I chalk it up to strong player evaluation (which, to be clear, ebbs and flows… some years are better than others) and disciplined drafting.

The discipline was a must. This league is stacked with talent, such that I can’t really out-draft the room (not consistently or reliably, anyway). I perennially botch my pitching on draft day, leaving myself with a lack of talent and depth by midseason and forcing myself to spend tons of free agent acquisition budget (FAAB) dollars chasing other bad pitchers in perpetuity. This year, I made a point to actually spend money on good pitchers, and figure out the hitting later, rather than the other way around. (In looking again at the table above, I’m not really sure I did that, at least from a financial perspective. Twenty-five percent of my budget on pitching is probably below the league average. It’s the intent that matters, right?)

In addition to actually drafting good pitchers, I also did not want to fall into some of my typical biases and mental traps. For me, they are plentiful:

1. Old guys who are not yet in decline, so they’ll be good again (they won’t)
2. Players who just had just one down year, so they’ll bounce back (they won’t)
3. Players who just had one good year, so this is who they are now (it’s not)
4. Players I force myself to build around because they represent “great value” (they aren’t)
5. Guys I love irrationally, regardless of talent, so I must have them (don’t do it)
6. Letting the projected or expected salary hold me hostage (spend the money!)

This year was by far my most successful in minimizing the mistakes above. It’s almost enough to convince me that the most important trait to winning is simply keeping a level head.

Now, to talk about the players. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but invariably I will. At the risk of revising history (I’ll try not to), this was my general attitude toward all my draftees. Note that each table shows the stats I accrued for each player based on starting/benching them, not their EOS stats.

I wanted to anchor my dual-catcher tandem with a big, safe name. Contreras represented as high a floor as one could reasonably desire. His summer slump was dreadful, but he ended pretty much exactly where he was supposed to, and I overpaid for it on purpose. Sometimes, you just need to trust that you’ll pick up profit elsewhere.

Moreno was my #1 target for my #2 catcher. I expected his skills would be good enough to keep him in the strong side of a backstop timeshare, if not win him the role outright, and I was correct. I didn’t realize I would end up in a bidding war for him; he went maybe $3 more than I expected. I stubbornly stood my ground — at that point, it was better to overpay for someone decent than to skimp out on potentially awful 2C — and it paid off handsomely.

Alonso represented another stable lineup fixture. Frankly I was shocked to get him for $21. I can’t say for sure, but I think there was a consensus fade for a couple of possible reasons: (1) he moved to Camden Yards (or whatever it’s called now), where they just moved back the left field walls, and/or (2) he experienced a batting average bump in 2025 that folks were not accepting at face value. Or maybe I simply pounced on a good deal when the draft room fell asleep. It happens.

The Law of My Guy suggests that the magnitude of a player being “Your Guy” ought to be inversely correlated with his acquisition cost. This fits the bill for O’Hearn. I was thrilled to get him for $3; as you can see, he turned a tidy profit, despite missing several weeks on the Injured List (IL). His outfield eligibility was an added bonus that proved useful later in the season.

Hoerner had a rough year. Expected wOBA (xwOBA) painted him as basically the same guy he always is/was, he just was badly unlucky on batting average on balls in play (BABIP). We all get stung by it sometimes. That midseason drought was brutal, though, and I kind of just had to sit there and wait it out, hoping it would turn around. Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit, but this feels more to me like random variance rather than imperfect player eval.

If I hadn’t drafted better, Lindor’s injury probably would have torpedoed my season. He looked mostly fine while healthy: typical power and discipline but a sunken BABIP, like Hoerner. Problem is he wasn’t healthy — he missed 57 games. Apropos of nothing, I think I should have discounted him more for concerns around his broken hamate bone. I don’t think it was good process to assume his power would hold up under duress, even if it did.

Abrams was a target for me, but not a priority target. I did like him for his skills and tools relative to his expected salary, like an Oneil Cruz or Jordan Walker type but with lower risk and (what I thought was) a lower ceiling. But then I got him for what I perceived to be a bargain… and then he broke out on top of it. Sometimes, the blind squirrel does indeed find the nut. Whether this year was a true breakout or a 90th-percentile blip (xwOBA sees overperformance to some extent), it doesn’t really matter to the outcome. All I know is he put my offense on his back, especially in the wake of Lindor’s injury.

Bohm was perfect for my plan, which was to simply fill out my remaining roster spots with guys who are both low-variance and high-volume. Turns out Bohm was not as “low-variance” as I thought, given he had the worst full-time season of his career (another issue of low BABIP!). Despite the early-season slump, though, he ended up being a full-time regular who was basically perfectly average — a “compiler,” if you will. Folks use that term derogatorily, but hey: compilers do have value. But I do think you want your compilers to be on the cheap side, like Bohm.

Carpenter is a ride-or-die guy for me, for better or worse — in this case, definitely worse. Sometimes you just want to have fun at the draft and get Your Guy no matter what. Fortunately, Kerry Bonds only cost $5. The injury was a stinker, but he was bad even when healthy, although I would argue he was never truly healthy. The heel-slash-plantar fasciitis issues seem pretty severe, enough for me to consider avoiding him next year unless it’s clear he’s OK.

Happ: another guy who did what he was drafted to do for his salary.

Butler, specifically, was a player I did not really want. He is better for fantasy purposes than in real life, which is akin to a Siren luring a sailor to his untimely death. For $6, though, I couldn’t resist (evidently, that was the Siren’s call), and the remaining outfield options at that late juncture in the draft did not feel any more compelling than Butler did. He ended up being so bad to start the season that he lost his grip on a full-time role. The only thing I did right here was to bench him and not cut him, because if he bounced back, I’d be pissed at myself. It’s hard for me to believe that, despite the turbulence, he ended up turning a small profit. I thought for sure he would be a stain on my season. His 2024 campaign is looking like an unattainable high-water mark, but to his credit he made some nice plate discipline gains this year that ought to help him cling more tightly to a full-time role in the A’s lineup moving forward.

Marsh, like Bohm, “did exactly what he was supposed to do,” but also he absolutely didn’t. Instead of exclusively occupying the strong-side platoon and mashing righties, he looked more like a full-timer, eclipsing 500 plate appearances for the first time. It meant that he incurred the downsides of facing more lefties along with the upsides of accruing more volume (i.e., more plate appearances, more counting stats). It ended up being a lateral move, value-wise.

I was able to avoid incurring hardly any of Friedl’s plunge into the abyss, but I would be lying if I said I knew this would happen. I thought it would go quite a lot better, to be honest. Oh, well.

Like Contreras, I had every intention to draft Schwarber, pretty much at all costs. I was willing to overpay for the floor, and I did. There were oohs and ahhs on draft day, but he did exactly what he was supposed to do. He actually earned first base eligibility later in the year, but I ended up not really needing the flexibility. I will be lucky to be able to say the same in 2027.

Here’s the thing about pitchers these days. Pitcher evaluation is so much better than it was even two years ago, let alone five or 10. I think the one area in which it lags — or, maybe not lags, but simply where it has not reached a consensus in how it should be incorporated — is the reliance on capital-‘s’ Stuff models.

I try not to rely on pitch models too much, but I did want to use them in my draft prep as a way to uncover potential market inefficiencies. As I noted earlier, I knew I would not outmaneuver my opponents; they are simply better at this than I am. So I needed to gamble on a particular edge that I couldn’t even be sure existed. I wanted to buy the stuff, i.e., the skills, and I would pray to the baseball gods that the innings would supersede any injuries and service time manipulations.

I nearly ended up with a sweep of the non-closer categories: 1st in ERA (3.31, 0.27 points ahead of 2nd) and WHIP (1.143, 0.030 ahead of 2nd), 3rd in strikeouts, and 4th in wins. The ratios would have been 98th and 97th percentiles, respectively, in the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) Main Event overall standings, and my entire pitching staff would have ranked 50th out of 900 — great, but not elite. (Not apples to apples, either, as NFBC leagues are snake drafts and this was an auction. But the context is helpful.)

The bedrock of my pitching strategy was to corner the three upshot stuff darlings: Burns, McLean, and Jacob Misiorowski. It’s hard to say I got two of them right when the third one will end up being the Cy Young, but, yes, I got two of them right.

Farther down the draft board, others who fit this bill: Weathers (PitchingBot stuff score [“botStf”] of 61, on the 20-80 scale, in 2025) and Early (58). Incidentally, their stuff degraded in 2026, such that they were merely good enough to not be a detriment to my team. Even for younger pitchers who have yet to confront their aging curves, their stuff was neither static nor predictive.

I actually grabbed Rodriguez early in the draft, before Weathers or Early, pouncing on what I thought could be a steal if he panned out. (He was horrible. You can actually see in the table above that I literally never started him… really dodged a bullet on that one.) This left me with a little more money than I wanted to have along with self-imposed to pressure to not waste my final starting pitcher slot. I ended up drafting Holmes almost purely out of desperation to spend the rest of my money. That is not a good reason to either draft someone or overspend, let alone both. Call it fatigue. Holmes is not bad, he’s just not “$2 good,” let alone “$9 good.” He was great for me while healthy, but, again, I don’t think results should supersede process, and this was bad process. I should have simply drafted one of my bench pitchers instead, all of whom I liked more than Holmes.

I basically used the same premise here as I did for starting pitchers, except that I wanted to identify stuff merchants who could steal the closer role outright due to (1) sheer quality of stuff and/or (2) sheer lack of quality of stuff from other guys in the bullpen. Megill fit #1; O’Brien fit #2. Garcia could have fit #1, but he didn’t see any save chances early in the season, then got hurt. I’ll actually have my eye on him again in 2027. His change-up is spectacular.

As for Megill, he, like Butler, is someone I told myself that if I cut him and he later wrested control of the closer gig, I’d hate myself. Sure enough, he did. My lead was comfortable enough that I didn’t need the 18-or-whatever saves he accrued in the final couple of months, but it gave me peace of mind, certainly.

The bench portion of the draft is a snake draft conducted according to last year’s standings. Here, I just wanted to supplement what I considered my weak spots with another third baseman, outfielder, and relief pitcher. The last three slots would go toward starting pitcher depth.

McMahon sucked. I may have used him for half of one week.

If I hadn’t jumped the gun on G-Rod, I would have simply drafted Wacha. He ranks 10th in ERA over the last five years among 55 pitchers who have thrown at least 600 innings. He has basically picked up where Kyle Hendricks left off, a crafty veteran with a superlative change-up. He, like Carpenter, is a ride-or-die for me.

Sterner, like Garcia, had (and has) solid stuff, but he was atrocious. The peripherals disagree — a 14.2% swinging strike rate is much healthier than his 21.7% strikeout rate would otherwise suggest — but those things don’t matter in the heat of the moment. A 6.12 ERA is hard to stomach, no matter the cause. I held him for a while, waiting for opportunities and positive regression, but neither came.

I loved, absolutely loved, Henderson coming into 2026. I was drafting him everywhere I could. It was after the snake turned for the third time that I had a moment of clarity: if I can simply be patient for a month, or even three months, to hold Henderson and wait until the Brewers promote him, he could change the trajectory of my season (assuming he’s anywhere near as good as he was in 2025). This proved prescient: the kid is possibly a bona fide ace.

Gurriel was supposed to be a sneaky lil’ IL stash. Obviously I thought he’d be better than this, which is why I drafted him, but by the time he returned — which was quite late in the season — my outfield was already set in stone. Then he sucked. Cut.

I’m embarrassed to say I thought Detmers got drafted. It happens. So when we reached this final pick, I thought my eyes had deceived me upon seeing him still available. He fit not only my criteria (stuff darling) but also the criteria of a classic, almost cliché, bounceback/buy-low player: someone whose outcomes fall short of his peripherals. I just had to risk sounding like an idiot in the event that he was already drafted, which, thankfully, he wasn’t. The rest is history.

My draft was excellent, but my bench pitchers — Wacha, Henderson, Detmers — put my team over the top.

FAAB

I’ll try not to waste too much more of your time. I am not good at navigating waivers and optimizing my FAAB dollars. I am, in fact, very bad at it. Like clockwork, I did not get many of the big-ticket free agents this year. There were a couple of weeks where I forgot to bid entirely. But I wasn’t a complete screw-up. Here are my big three acquisitions, in chronological order:

Troy Melton (EOS value: $6.9). To me, Melton was worth a fairly healthy bid given his success in a limited sample last year. I was cautious of his peripherals, and frankly, I still am. But he managed to produce a perfect carbon copy of his debut across 20 starts. Lucky, this. FAAB bid: $39.

Royce Lewis (EOS value: $3.6). This one is tough to evaluate because I can’t see Lewis’ value pre- and post-demotion; he was definitely much worse than $3.6 before being demoted and definitely much better than $3.6 after. Someone cut him, though, and I nabbed him after his massive performance at Triple-A, where they supposedly fixed his swing. I’m not sure his swing is actually fixed, but at least he helped shore up my middle infield while Lindor was injured. FAAB bid: $82.

Heriberto Hernández (EOS value: $10.5). I had been watching Hernandez for a couple of weeks because of some explosive bat speed numbers. Suddenly it seemed to click, and everyone everywhere was racing to add him all at once. What else can I say other than he was fantastic for me in the summer. It will be interesting to see where he goes in ADP next year.

Josue De Paula. At the risk of bragging, it appeared I had the league locked up at this point, and I had the FAAB hammer (with exception to the person in last place), so why not have a bit of fun? I got to enjoy a couple of weeks of De Paula. He look really, really good, in case you were wondering. FAAB bid: $215.

Here are some guys I grabbed who were not nearly as good as advertised or I cut prematurely:

Esteury Ruiz (EOS value: $1.0). I noticed Ruiz was playing periodically and stealing a ton, so I grabbed him. Of course, as soon as I did, he stopped playing… so I cut him, at which point he began playing nearly every day, and was running like crazy all the while. That felt bad! Really, though: I should have cut someone else, not him. But it was early enough that FAAB bid: $27.

Jacob Gonzalez. One of the best hitters in the minors this year, Gonzalez’s appears to have been one of the prime beneficiaries of whatever juiced-ball-ish situation was happening down there. After a few games at the MLB level, it was clear he lacked the bat speed to be hitting for that kind of power. I was cautiously optimistic he could fortify my lineup, but he did the opposite. FAAB bid: $27.

Luis Lara. You can almost copy-paste Gonzalez’s comment here. Lara also appeared to have a power-related breakout. I had spoken to Eric Longenhagen privately (one of the perks of the job, I suppose), and he was pessimistic about it based on the data. Fortunately I was able to temper expectations. He was… fine, for a 21-year-old. The plate discipline is probably still above-average, if not plus. But whatever you wanted from him in the power department, you should cut in half. FAAB bid: $81. Apparently I like multiples of 27.

* * *

What’s the lesson here? Crush your draft?

I do think one of the big takeaways — which I hadn’t highlighted until now, so I think I’m burying the lede a bit — is that my roster lacked a clear superstar or marquee breakout. No Yordan Alvarez, no Pete Crow-Armstrong, no Ben Rice, no Misiorowski or Cam Schlittler. I would venture to say that my roster was, to say it plainly, very boring. On name value alone, does my roster look like a 1st-place squad to you? Even with the benefit of hindsight, probably not. There are countless paths to victory. Mine was very unglamorous.

I also had a great year regarding player eval. It ebbs and flow; my 2023 season was horrible, while this season was great. My oldest, who is now six, was two back then, and going through a bad, prolonged sleep regression. It’s the intangibles. These things matter! Sometimes you gotta give yourself a little grace.

Lastly, I did a much better job of combating my biases and mental pitfalls. This was probably the best job I’ve done in this regard in a very long time (definitely before I had kids), and it’s hard to deny that my mental nimbleness made me much better-suited to navigate the twists and turns of the draft without getting flustered.

* * *

So, there you have it: the story of how some idiot won a Tout Wars championship. Does he have it in him to do it again? We’ll see. I hope this wasn’t a complete waste of your time.