Expert League Auction Recap: Tout Wars: General Impressions

Table 4: AL Expert Closer Prices 2015

Some of the reason I suspect that the prices in Tout went up on the closers is because there is more stability in AL bullpens than there was last year. Cecil wasn’t a certainty as the closer in Toronto when LABR convened; he seems to be at the moment. Sean Doolittle and Jacob McGee were actually the more expensive bullpen options in CBS and/or LABR over Clippard and Boxberger, but otherwise there haven’t been too many emerging situations in Spring Training. Closer prices are generally too conservative in expert leagues, so reacting to uncertainty in the starting pitcher market by pushing money to relievers isn’t a bad play.

On the whole, AL Tout was fairly predictable, and probably didn’t offer any great eureka moments for home league auctions. I moderated a live chat for a few hours on Saturday during the AL auction, and there weren’t too many crazy reactions to the prices or to what was happening on the whole, besides a strange argument over a fairly reasonably priced Alex Gordon at $21. I suspect I would have been pushing Larry Schechter’s bids the most had I participated in this auction, which makes some sense since Schechter builds the kind of teams that I usually do in my home league auctions.

National League
Unlike in the AL, it was quite obvious what the big difference was in the National League. Where NL LABR went kind of crazy on hitting, in Tout Wars, the NL experts scaled back.

Table 5: Hitter Dollar Distribution, NL LABR versus NL Tout, 2015

An $18 difference between AL LABR and AL Tout is a yawner. A $79 gap between the NL LABR and NL Tout hitters is a huge headline.

To be sure, some of this has more to do with what happened in LABR rather than what happened in Tout. Doug Dennis’s $30 pitching strategy in LABR threw off the entire room and created artificial bargains all over the place on the pitching side. But this doesn’t explain it entirely. There was definitely a reticence to spend money on the top hitters in Tout Wars. This is particularly true when you factor in OBP.

Anthony Rizzo got a mere $1 pay raise from LABR. Andrew McCutchen was paid the same price as he was in LABR. Paul Goldschmidt received a $1 pay cut. This happened despite the fact that all three of these players have significantly more valuation potential in OBP leagues. While I don’t advocate paying the full freight for the value wrapped up in OBP players, it does seem like there should have been more of an adjustment made in the National League than there was.

Table 6: Biggest 2014 OBP Differentials and 2015 Auction Prices

This table doesn’t even include Goldschmidt, who finished 14^th in NL 5×5 OBP despite missing a significant chunk of time due to injury in 2014. After the auction, some of the experts on Sirius XM were going on and on about how much of a bargain Kris Bryant was at $18. But in this format, Carpenter at $21 is the guy I’m kicking myself about after the fact. With the exception of Curtis Granderson, the market didn’t pay for OBP for the hitters on this table.

Granderson wasn’t a pure OBP buy, either. The three-time defending champion—Tristan Cockcroft of ESPN—wound up with a significant amount of money to spend and was wise enough to try and spend it somewhere. I had Granderson ranked a little lower, but if Cockcroft’s OBP adjustment was more aggressive than mine, then the price was only a touch high and not significantly so.

It wasn’t just Cockcroft. A good chunk of the teams in the league spend a good portion of their cash early while another portion of the teams in the league waited and waited, buying a handful of players early but then sitting back. The money had to go somewhere, and for the most part it was siphoned off in a couple of key areas:

Table 7: $3 or Greater Differentials in Tout/LABR (Tout Higher Spend)

You would expect there to be some greater differentials at the bottom of the pile, but most of those price shifts are usually due to playing time or role changes, and there were very few changes between LABR and Tout. The big pricing differentials came mostly in two buckets: the $25-29 hitters and the $15-19 pitchers.

If you’re not going to pay for the big hitters, the next tier is where the money is often going to get spent. This group of six hitters was Matt Kemp ($29), Joey Votto ($29), Carlos Gonzalez ($27), Buster Posey ($27), Jason Heyward ($26), and David Wright ($25). Some of this is the OBP bump with Votto, but most of these hitters are fairly expensive given past injury concerns in the cases of Kemp, Cargo, and Wright and limited ceilings in the cases of Posey and Heyward. One thing the expert market is good at is spending its money. Dollar allocation is where the experts (including me) sometimes tend to have issues, overcompensating for not spending in one area by overspending elsewhere.

This leads directly to starting pitching. In this case, the expert market didn’t overspend but rather made a course correction based on what happened in LABR earlier this month.

Table 8: Pitcher Dollar Distribution, NL LABR versus NL Tout, 2015

It doesn’t look like much from one tier to the next, but it adds up. And it adds up in particular in the second and third tiers.

My instincts tell me that the prices in the second and third tiers are better in Tout Wars, but based on past results I suspect that my instincts in this instance are garbage. Pitchers in this price range typically incur bigger losses than pitchers in any other tier do.

So while we all gushed over the second tier pitching prices in Tout Wars, historically speaking it is more likely that Matt Harvey at $19 and Jon Lester at $19 are going to fail than it is that Johnny Cueto or Jordan Zimmermann at $21 are going to fail. It is probably the pitchers in the $16-19 tier in Tout who are going to cause the most trouble. These pitchers include Jake Arrieta at $19 ($16 in LABR), James Shields at $18 ($15), Jacob deGrom at $17 ($12), and Lance Lynn at $16 ($8). The LABR prices do look too low, without a doubt. But—like the ball—history doesn’t lie. The likelihood of the pitchers in this price range failing are great.

Something that gets lost in the hitting/pitching splits is that when two separate leagues have such a disparity like NL LABR and NL Tout do, it’s more than just a three dollar split with a pitcher like Clayton Kershaw you should be looking at. Kershaw’s $40 took up 4.5 percent of the entire pitching pie in LABR. In Tout Wars, the $37 I spent “only” took up 3.8 percent of the pitching spent at auction. This makes a big difference. The low spending in LABR on pitching chews up the advantage of owning Kershaw, since the bargains elsewhere will be better (or, at the very least, the losses will be less prevalent). In Tout Wars, the more “traditional” hitting/pitching split combined with Kershaw’s lower price means that this isn’t quite the case.