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April 19, 2016 Expert FAAB ReviewWeek ThreeWelcome to The FAAB Review, the series that looks at the expert bidding in LABR mixed, Tout Wars NL, and Tout Wars AL every week in an effort to try and help you, the Baseball Prospectus reader, with your fantasy baseball bidding needs. Bret Sayre and I participate in LABR mixed while I have a team in Tout Wars NL, so I can provide some insight on the bids and the reasoning behind them. LABR uses a $100 budget with one-dollar minimum bids, while the Tout Wars leagues use a $1,000 budget with zero-dollar minimum bids. I will also be including Bret’s winning bids in Tout Wars mixed auction league where applicable. LABR and Tout Wars both use a bidding deadline of Sunday at midnight ET. LABR Mixed
Over the last two months of the 2015 season, Salty very quietly put up a 286/353/571 slash line over his last 117 plate appearances with seven home runs. He’s going to be a cheap play next year in only leagues and a stealth option in two catcher formats if he lands as a starter somewhere. For all of his real-life shortcomings, power behind the plate always plays in fantasy. I was despondent when Salty signed with the Tigers to backup James McCann, but with McCann on the shelf with a Grade 2 ankle sprain, Salty will get at least a month of at-bats as a starter. The hitting shoes Salty donned at the end of last season haven’t come off, as Salty has four home runs in 28 plate appearances in 2016 with a sizzling 269/321/808 slash. The 36 percent strikeout rate shows that Salty will get exposed in regular at-bats, but the power is legit. People often move too far in the negative direction on failed prospects, but that’s what Saltalamacchia once was; Baseball Prospectus had him ranked as the 23rd-best prospect in 2006. This was a long time ago, but the power that excited scouts a decade ago never went away. He’s not going to wrest the job away from McCann, but a 10-14 home run season in limited at bats as a backup/partial starter while McCann heals isn’t a pipe dream. That’s great if you can get those numbers from your second catcher. Mallex Smith $9. Other bid: $2. Mat Latos $8. Other bids: $3, $1, $1. Jhouyls Chacin $7. Tout Mixed Auction: $8. Tout Mixed Draft: $69. Christian Vazquez $5. Other bids: $5, $3. Tout Mixed Auction: $26. Tout Mixed Draft: $27.
This table shows the three hitters in 15-team, 5x5 mixed leagues who earned exactly one dollar in 2015, according to the PFM. In a vacuum, you’d rather have Guyer or Cron’s statistics easily. Taking positional differences into account, these three hitters had the same exact value in 5x5 last year. Bringing this back to Vazquez, while a five-dollar FAAB bid for a defensive-first, framing wizard catcher seems foolhardy, volume behind the dish plays as long as it isn’t attached to a .220 batting average. The Red Sox seem committed to moving Blake Swihart out from behind home plate, so unless Vazquez completely tanks with the bat, he is going to play. This isn’t an exciting bid, but it is acceptable. Baseball HQ has Swihart, but the winning bid belonged to Rudy Gamble of Razzball, who purchased Vazquez to replace Nick Hundley. Ray Murphy of HQ picked up Tony Wolters to replace Swihart. The Wheel in The Sky does indeed keep on turnin’. Eduardo Nunez $4 Jose Ramirez $3 The big news in LABR Mixed was Jake Ciely of Roto Experts flipping Trevor Story and Curtis Granderson to Doug Anderson of FNTSY for Patrick Corbin and Randall Grichuk. I like Anderson’s side of the deal a little better. Even though I anticipate Story will slip (and this has already happened, despite a home run last night) the power is legitimate and Coors Field plays for nearly any hitter. On the other hand, Ciely had a lot of hitting and parlaying his big FAAB bid on Story into a pitcher via trade sooner rather than later was the sound play. Bret and I stood pat. We discussed a couple of pitchers, but no one appealed to us enough to place a bid. We would have been outbid on Latos and Chacin. In Tout Wars mixed, Bret picked up Hardy and plunked down an aggressive $167 bid on Chase Anderson. He also made a small trade, moving $25 in FAAB for Jesse Winker. Here is Bret on the rationale behind his Tout Wars moves this week: I won't lie. I can get a little itchy when I'm sitting on FAAB in a mixed league with zero dollar bids. But my bid on Anderson wasn't about that—it was about trying to add a starter I can throw in there sometimes and trying to keep from getting behind the eight-ball in strikeouts. It hasn't been a great start for me in the category, and I'm sitting dead last right now. Of course, it's mid-April, but strikeouts are a category you can't mess with for too long in a mixed. Anderson may have gotten hit around by the Twins a bit tonight, but I still like him to stick in the Brewers rotation for the full season and be a great option when I don't have any great options to fill out my staff for the week. Beyond that, I added Hardy (via free agency) and Winker (via trade) for a combined $36 FAAB. The former gives me a reason to put Chris Owings on my bench and Aaron Hill back to the waiver wire where he deserves to live for now; and the latter gives me an additional stash with both Pablo Sandoval and Andre Ethier on the shelf for a while. Don't be surprised if we see Winker before Memorial Day—he's off to a fast start in Triple-A and the Reds' outfield is a mess. Tout Wars NL
For one, this is the first non-zero-dollar winning bid I have had all season. I don’t necessarily love Chacin, but he is striking batters out, not walking anyone, and keeping the ball in the park. He posted a 3.47 ERA for the Rockies as recently as 2013, and for his career has a 3.22 ERA in 335 2/3 innings outside of Coors Field. Chacin is unlikely to replicate this, but pitching a big chunk of games in the NL East will help his cause in 2016. Part of the reason my bid was so aggressive is that my pitching has been pounded early. I didn’t buy an ace at the auction, and my most expensive pitcher—Adam Wainwright—has destroyed me thus far. It is far too early to panic, but I like the idea of going with volume early. If Wainwright bounces back, I will have plenty of pitchers to stream on the back end of my staff. If he doesn’t, I am in a position where I do not have to be afraid to cut him. I had a busy week. In addition to this pick up, I completed two trades, sending Jeurys Familia to Phil Hertz of Baseball HQ for Jay Bruce and flipping Yasmani Grandal to Scott Wilderman of On Roto for James Shields. One of my goals post-auction was to get down to two closers and two catchers early. The Familia trade completes my goal on the pitching side while Grandal leaves me with three catchers. I am rarely this active this early, but I saw opportunity and decided to pull the trigger in both cases. There is a difference between panicking and making strategic moves. In this case, I believe I am doing the latter. Despite my ERA and WHIP being torpedoed by two weeks of bad results, there is still plenty of season left. Tony Wolters $88. Other bids: $32, $15, $11. LABR NL: $1 Logan Verrett $35. Other bids: $25, $19, $7. LABR NL: $2 Dan Straily $32. Other bid: $11. Charlie Morton $32. Other bid: $11. Brandon Barnes $31. Other bid: $15. Mac Williamson $22. Alexi Amarista $22. Other bids: $20, $7. LABR NL: $1. NOPE! I can’t do it! I can’t write another 100-200 words about a player like Amarista, which will basically boil down to “pick him up because it’s NL-only, and a warm body is better than a hole on your roster.” Uh uh! I quit! Looks like it’s time to storm into Sam Miller’s office and… Um, this is problematic. Baseball Prospectus doesn’t have offices. Or phones, for that matter. The only thing I can do is fire off an email to Sam telling him that I’m tired of writing The FAAB Review and politely ask if it would be possible to write about something more fulfilling than Amarista’s chances of being worth four cents or eight cents this week in NL-only. I could certainly do that, but where’s the personal connection? Where’s the opportunity to gird my loins, build up my nerve, and storm into Sam’s office asking him if I can grab that brass ring and show him some moxie? Where’s the opportunity to get yelled at by Sam, as he chomps down on a cigar, peers angrily at me from behind his typewriter and tells me that in his day you had to go through the School of Hard Knocks to get anywhere in this vale of tears that we call life? Where’s that award he won from Crusty Old Journalism School hanging on the wall, staring down menacingly at me, making me realize that Sam is right, and how can I possibly have the temerity to even share the same oxygen with an iconic baseball writing God like Sam Miller, let alone ask him for more than I am already getting from this wonderful baseball institution that I should feel honored to write 50-word player blurbs for, let alone 3,000-4,000 word incoherent and rambling FAAB Reviews? We humans used to wonder about what a virtual future would be like: a reality where the line between physical reality and the astral plane would be blurred. But are we not there already? Do we not live in that world, when it is impossible to angrily storm out of a job and quit without typing an email or a Gchat message and hitting send, waiting hours before the response comes, if that response even comes at all? The physical realm as we once knew it is gone, replaced instead by an impersonal void where we can see reality in front of us but where the vast majority of our interactions take place in the cold, impersonal void of the series of tubes that the late Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska (R) claimed made up the Internet. We laughed at Stevens, but was he not correct? Is not most of our life spent within this series of tubes, playing make believe that the interactions we have are “human” and not the product of pointless technology layered upon more pointless technology? What’s the point? Of anything, really? I should just go back to writing The FAAB Report. It is all I will ever accomplish; this is all I can ever be. And even it isn’t, what’s the difference? Humanity has severed the already tenuous bonds between reality and illusion, thanks to layers upon layers of pointless technology. Good going, science. Thanks for nothing, jerks. Sigh. Amarista should be picked up in NL-only, because a warm body is better than a hole on your roster. I hope you’re happy, universe. Zach Davies $13. Tout Wars AL
Rick Wolf/Glenn Colton $151. Released Erik Kratz. Oswaldo Arcia $113. Other bids: $51, $32. Eduardo Nunez $22. Other bid: $0. Drew Hutchison $12. Brett Nicholas $12. Other bid: $0. LABR AL: $1. Ryan Dull $5 Long live the stash! Motter won the 2016 Al Lopez Award for most outstanding Rays rookie in spring training. He’s ancient for a prospect, but age has never stopped the Rays from squeezing the most out of a serviceable player. Motter can play anywhere on the diamond but catcher, and even if the power from the minors doesn’t hold, he could be a nice source of a cheap 10-15 steals. Murphy signed a minor league deal with the Twins, and could fit in if the mess in Minnesota’s outfield lingers. The defense will be good enough for a corner outfield slot, and this isn’t exactly the case of a dead cat bounce. Murphy hit .283 last year with 10 home runs in 391 plate appearances. The defense has eroded to the point where Murph isn’t a viable regular for most teams, but for the Twins he may have to do in the short term if Buxton continues to flounder.
Mike Gianella is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @MikeGianella
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