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June 9, 2015 Expert FAAB ReviewWeek 10Depending on how long you have been a Baseball Prospectus subscriber, welcome or welcome back to the Expert FAAB Review. Every week, I’m going to take a look at the players and the process behind the expert bidding in LABR mixed, Tout Wars NL, and Tout Wars AL. Bret Sayre and I participate in LABR mixed while I have a team in Tout Wars NL, so I will provide insights behind the reasoning on some the bids. Budgets in all three leagues start at $100 at the beginning of the season. Tout Wars uses a Vickrey Auction system. A basic description of the Vickrey bidding system can be found here. Random Quote of the Week: “One cannot even begin to post figure out a statuesquo ante as to how slow in reality the excommunicated Drumcondriac, nate Hamis, really was.” – James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake LABR Mixed Bret and I focused this week on adding an offensive player to our lineup who we could stream in for Aaron Hill in the short term and for additional bench depth once Wil Myers is activated off of the DL. We put a $6 bid on Gallo. Bret is more optimistic about Gallo sticking than I am, but we both believe that he will be a batting average drain and that his upside in a 15-team, non-keeper mixed league isn’t super high. James Quintong of ESPN.com made the big splash. He was in last place entering Monday’s action and—as I have mentioned in this space before—although it is early June, the time to make a splash with a big impact free agent is now, particularly if your team is struggling. If I’m wrong and Gallo sticks and hits 20 home runs the rest of the way, this is a big boost for Quintong. Baseball Prospectus’ second place squad doesn’t need to take risks like this. Teams at or near the bottom of the standings should. Joey Butler $13. Other bids: $1, $1, $1. Player Dropped: Yangervis Solarte. Pedro Strop $9. Other bids: $4, $4, $3, $3, $1. Player dropped: None. Hector Rondon was pulled from a save opportunity on Saturday and replaced by Strop, who picked up the save. Then Rondon was used in the eighth inning on Sunday, but it was Jason Motte – not Strop – who came into the game in the ninth and picked up the save. I will save you the suspense and excitement of reading through the rest of the mixed league FAAB portion of the article and tell you that Motte was not picked up in LABR mixed. The winning bidder for Strop—Ray Murphy of Baseball HQ—is not the owner of Rondon; this particular misfortune belongs to Todd Zola of Mastersball. Bret and I passed on Strop because with the demotion of Fernando Rodney in Seattle, we now have four closers and already have one of those closers sitting on our bench this week. We need to make a trade, and bidding on what is likely to be a partial share of a job didn’t appeal to us. Joe Maddon has a reputation as someone who isn’t afraid to use a committee, but if you look back at his track record in Tampa, Maddon wasn’t afraid to change horses but generally stuck with one reliever if that reliever was doing well. My guess is that if a change is made that Strop is the guy who will get the first shot, but it is also possible that Rondon gets the job back. In other words, your guess is as good as mine, and I hate bidding piles of FAAB in ambiguous situations where I have no real need to push in the category. Will Middlebrooks $3. Other bids: $2, $1. Player Dropped: None. Michael Taylor $3. Other bid: $1. Player released: Steve Cishek Welington Castillo $3. Other bid: $1. Player released: Andrew Susac. Jeremy Hellickson $2. Player released: Josh Collmenter. Carlos Perez $1. Player released: Tyler Flowers Tout Wars NL
While I bear some of the responsibility for this fantasy faux pas, I got to say: where the heck where you on this one, BP Wrigleyville? I have come to expect this kind of behavior from the cads and scoundrels who unfortunately seem to be all too common within the ranks of BP Boston and BP Bronx, but I thought we had something special, BP Wrigleyville. It was just a month ago that I visited your beautiful city and developed what I believed was a genuine connection with many of you. Harry Pavlidis, you told me we were going to a bar for drinks before a baseball game; instead, it turns out that you secretly planned a “Scared Straight” event at a local bar where a once famous golfer served drinks and gave us all a glimpse into the deepest and darkest corners of our souls. Sahadev Sharma, you won me over five seconds after we met by handing me a beer from a cooler (it’s the simple gestures) and later escorted me away from an extremely unhinged gentleman in the Miller Park parking lot and back to the safety of Chicago, possibly saving my life. Cat Garcia, you took me and Brett Taylor out for the best Mexican food I have ever eaten this side of the Mississippi. Thanks to your late night foray, not a night goes by that I don’t wake up in a cold sweat at 3 a.m. hearing the word “taco” whispered in the wind by a desolate, creaky spirit voice that rustles through the leaves and shakes me to my very core. Rian Watt, you are in London so you probably shouldn’t be part of this conceit, but you have hit the fav button on more than a few of my tweets and I like to think that makes us honorary Chicago buddies. Brett, instead of going home to spend Mother’s Day with my family, I blew off my flight, snuck into your house the following night while you were sleeping and softly serenaded you for four hours nonstop with Death Cab for Cutie’s I Will Possess Your Heart while stroking your beautiful, beautiful hair. OK, I made that last one up (“made it up”, right). I’m a reasonable person, BP Wrigleyville. I’m not expecting you to grant me access to 7-8 hours of the Junior Lake conference calls you surely hold every week in your downtown Chicago offices. Nor am I expecting you to email me all 1,568 pages of your privileged and confidential files on the mystical and magical fantasy baseball force that is Junior Lake. That would be unrealistic and—quite frankly—impractical for all of us. All I’m asking for is an annotated version of your staff meeting minutes on Lake and a one or two-page bulleted summary of what you discuss when it comes to the unheralded outfielder who was a fantasy force, at least for one majestic week in early June of 2015. Perhaps it is too late to mend the fences that you damaged this past week when you neglected to forewarn me that dropping Lake was the wrong move, but hopefully we can patch the holes going forward and make the relationship between the fantasy team at Baseball Prospectus and the writing team at BP Wrigleyville a fruitful and harmonious one going forward. No, not those fences by the big oak tree. Those are broken beyond repair and I’ll need to hire a contractor to put in a new fence entirely. Be realistic, BP Wrigleyville. No, the ones over there, by the southern end of the property line, and that small koi pond that I thought was a great idea when I bought this house but now is just a never ending pain to maintain. Those fences I think we can fix. Those fences I believe we can mend… together. Jorge de la Rosa $7 ($8). Other bid: $6. Player Reserved: Jeremy Hellickson Chris Rusin $4 ($7). Other bid: $3. Player reserved: Mat Latos. Joe Ross $2. Other bids: $2, $1. Player reserved: Sam Dyson. Manny Banuelos $2 ($3). Other bid: $1. Player released: Eric Stults Brennan Boesch $1 ($16). Player reserved: Michael Morse Hand was clobbered last night in Toronto; he seemed like an OK risk as a two-start starter in NL-only, but that risk didn’t work out for Rotoman (Peter Kreutzer). When Marlon Byrd went down with a wrist injury, I thought that Boesch would at least get some of the at bats in left field for the Reds, but Cincinnati has been going with Skip Schumaker almost exclusively in left field. With the news that Devin Mesoraco could be back late this week on the big league club as an outfielder, Boesch and Schumaker’s value will return to zero shortly. Tout Wars AL
The trade market is never a static, predictable thing, but it appears that this is more of a decision in the American League than it is in the National League this year. The Athletics are the only team that seems likely to be in sell mode as the second worst team in the AL—the Seattle Mariners—is only five back in the loss column for the second wild card slot, and just made a buy low move for Trumbo. The dynamic certainly can and will change between now and July 31st, but at the moment it is hard to envision who else is definitely bailing on the 2015 pennant race. On the other side of the fence, the Brewers and Phillies seem extremely likely to clean house, with the Reds and Marlins also possible candidates to sell at the deadline. Alluring names like Carlos Gomez, Cole Hamels, and Johnny Cueto could find their way to the Junior Circuit, and if they do will make for appetite whetting targets in AL-only fantasy leagues all across this great land of ours (and other lands that play fantasy baseball as well). Lawr Michaels of Mastersball won the bidding for Trumbo with an aggressive $89 bid that was tamped down to $83 by Vickrey. He is currently in dead last in Tout Wars AL, and is flailing in the power categories. Trumbo might not cure what ails his team, but in his position Michaels has to try to do what he can to get out of the basement and worry about tomorrow tomorrow. Waiting 4-5 weeks for Gomez isn’t a sensible strategy for Michaels. This isn’t necessarily a universal precept. Two of the bottom four teams in AL Tout did not bid at all on Trumbo. Andy Behrens of Yahoo and Steve Moyer of Inside Edge didn’t bid on Trumbo at all. In Behrens’ case, this was likely driven by a lack of FAAB, but Moyer had $81 to spend and didn’t even place a bid. The argument against bidding on Trumbo if you are at or near the bottom of the standings is that one player isn’t going to save your entire season, and it is probably better to bid strategically on select players throughout the year. I tend to lean toward Michaels’ side philosophically speaking. I bid big when a player like Trumbo comes into the league, and worry about what might happen later when the time comes. In 2012 in NL Tout, there was an expectation that big free agents would get shipped to the National League, but the biggest name to come over at the deadline was then-backup Travis Snider. This usually isn’t what happens, but if I’m in a position where have the FAAB and have the need, pushing most of my chips in for a player like Trumbo is the play that I am going to make 99 times out of 100. Hanser Alberto $19 ($21). Other bids: $18, $11, $7, $0. Player Reserved: Jose Ramirez Tommy Milone $3 ($4). Other bid: $2. Player Reserved: Delmon Young Steve Delabar $1 ($2). Player Reserved: Ricky Nolasco. As I have noted in weeks prior, the $0-1 bids in Tout Wars AL don’t seem to be prolific as they are in Tout Wars NL. Walters could get some playing time with the infield shake up in Cleveland, but Berrios is the player who jumps out here as a later-in-the-season spec play if he can crack the Twins rotation after the All-Star break.
Mike Gianella is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @MikeGianella
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Trumbo is referred to as Morse in the paragraph. May be intentional, I can't tell. ;-)
Fixed