ASK ROTOMAN: My Team Is Terrible. What Can I Do?

Hello,

I feel like my team is jinxed this year. I have all the underachievers on one team. It’s kind of amazing. Anyways, its a 10-team 7 x 7 league with 4 keepers each year. What would you do with these guys?

Zobrist
Jennings
Myers
Aramis Ramirez
Beltran
Butler
Craig
Segura
and Mauer

They all are playing mediocre or awfully. Not really sure of a move to make here. Thanks!

“Stinky”

Dear Stinky:

I’m assuming your pitchers are okay, since you don’t mention them, but still, this is a bad team because you have mediocre players having bad seasons at every position.

Mediocre, you might mutter, or splutter, trying to come up with a clever riposte, but don’t bother. In a 10-team mixed league, you need to have some stars, and you don’t have any. Look at your list:

Zobrist is maybe the eighth best second basemen. Seven teams have better keystone players.

Jennings, Beltran and Wil Myers were ranked in the 40s among outfielders going into this season. I assume your league rosters 30 outfielders (10×3). We’re talking below replacement level. Good players in baseball, because they have 90 starting outfielders, are not good players in a league your size.

Aramis Ramirez was the 17th best third baseman going into this season. Too old.

Billy Butler was the second best DH, out of three, and probably should have been third.

Allen Craig at first base was in a similar position as Ben Zobrist at second. Bottom three in your league going into the season.

And Joe Mauer ranked seventh among catchers.

In fact, your best player among their peers is Jean Segura, and he ranks sixth among shortstops.

I detail all this not to ridicule, really, but to shine the harsh light of reality on your roster. None of these players is a player you would want to keep for next year, even if they were having a typical year.

Which tells us what we need to know: You can’t wait for a rebound.

You thus have two choices.

1) Try to trade your way to a better team this year. This is a hard thing to do, probably impossible at this point in the year, but a worthy challenge if you like to deal. The secret is to unlock the value you have in mostly name brand players, to make speculative plays on young unproven players who are showing signs of breaking out this year. You might try Gregory Polanco, for instance, who was just called up, if he’s available. For a team so stinky, maybe Rougned Odor would be a good fit.

2) Set up your freeze list for next year. This involves a similar process, but means going for guys who might have value next year. Matt Harvey, coming back from Tommy John, is a illustration of this type of candidate. Risky, but worthless to any team that has him this year, so perhaps cheap now and possibly excellent in 2015.

You know better than I how your keepers are valued in your league. Whichever way you go, and you can combine the two approaches up to a point, be bold and uncompromising. Take risks, but jump only if the possible outcome is excellence. In a league your size, anything less is doomed.

Sincerely,
Rotoman

 

ASK ROTOMAN: What is FAAB Worth?

Dear Rotoman:

I was thinking about redeeming the DLed Nate Jones in Tout Wars AL, which got me thinking about FAAB, Vickrey bidding and being in last place a few weeks after the season starts. I wrote about it here at USA Today.

Does it make sense to add Jones’ $14 now? Or should I wait to see if he can get healthy and reclaim the closer job in Chicago?

“Ron Shandler”

Dear Ron,

I had some thoughts about your recent column and thought they made a better topic here than at your various discussion boards. Though perhaps I’ll show up at those, too.

You raise a few interesting issues that I wanted to touch on.

I will admit that I thought the Tout Wars redemption process was going to be a disaster. It has instead been a great success. (I thought the same about FAAB trading as well, and was wrong about that, too.) In Tout Wars teams are allowed to cut any player on the DL and reclaim their draft day price as FAAB up until the All Star break—after which they can reclaim half their draft day price as FAAB.

The  usual dynamic for redemption is determining how long a player will be out, versus his utility when/if he returns, filtered by the value of the added FAAB. This means that guys who are out for a while, but who may not be out all season, can reside on a team’s unlimited DL reserve until it becomes clear that the extra FAAB is going to matter (as we approach the break, and the interleague trading deadline).

What makes Nate Jones interesting is that he could return to the bullpen eventually and not gain the closing job, which would pretty much waste his $14. That’s a good reason to cut him and reclaim his bid price, though at this point he’s not close to returning, and it is pretty unlikely that the $14 you add to your FAAB total will have any utility at all until much later in the season.

For those reasons, I suggest waiting until he’s either done for the year, close to returning as a non-closer, or you need the $14 to buy something better.

As for Vickrey, the bidding auction system that we use in Tout Wars, it awards the FAAB player to the highest bidder, but reduces their cost to $1 more than the second highest bidder. Cory Schwartz was quoted earlier this week about how he thinks Vickrey just randomizes the process, and he doesn’t like it, but his bidding last week in Tout Mixed Auction is a prime example of Vickrey’s importance and why you and I like it.

As we all know, there were some closers available in last week’s bidding. Cory decided he needed one of them. Zach Steinhorn agreed with Cory that the best available closer was Francisco Rodriguez. Zach bid an aggressive $33, but Cory trumped him by bidding $60, which was then reduced a la Vickrey to $34. One can look at this as Cory “saving” $26, but it is a fairer evaluation of Vickrey to say that Cory bid aggressively because he wanted K-Rod most. Such overbids are made knowing that someone else who did the same thing would raise the price of K-Rod a lot, but that was a price Cory was willing to pay. The stated intention of Vickrey auctions are to limit system rigging, since bidders are encouraged to bid the absolute most they’re willing to pay (knowing that if they value more than the market they won’t have to pay their full price). Cory bid what he was willing to pay, and since no one else would pay as much, he ended up with a discount, as it were. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Where Vickrey excels is when there are a number of bidders. Where Vickrey falters is on the players for whom there is a limited market. With only 12 or 15 teams in a league, many without holes at particular positions, there may only be one or two teams looking for a player at a particular position. There may only be one or two of those players at that position available. One of those teams may value one of those players a lot, but chances are, even if he bids aggressively, his bid will be reduced to $1 or a few dollars because there was no market for that player. That seems to me to distort the bidding process.

For a couple years we played in Tout Wars with a $10 floor on bidding. If you bid $10 or less, that was the price you would pay if you won, with no reductions. If you bid $10 or more and no one else bid more than $10, your winning bid would be reduced to $10. If two bids exceeded $10 the standard Vickrey rules applied. The idea was to increase the cost of roster churning at the low end, where the market is less than robust. Many objected to this, saying they thought that if we were going to play with Vickrey we should play pure Vickrey. After a rule change, that’s the way we play now, and while I still think it makes the low-level bidding somewhat arbitrary, it isn’t really a problem.

I recommend Vickrey bidding for the most contested players, but the use of a floor for the cheap bidding. That’s the best balance in my opinion.

Okay, back to FAAB and inseason values. One rule that might help us find the balance between Draft Day dollars and FAAB dollars would be to combine the two. Let’s say teams are given $360 on auction day, and are told that they can spend as much of that as they like, with the balance ending up as their available FAAB balance. How much would they actually spend on Draft Day?

Or, less radically, you’re restricted to the $260 for your regular team, but then can bid FAAB $ for the reserve rounds.

By increasing the porousness between Draft Dollars and FAAB budgets, we open up ways for teams to play different strategies at the draft table, in the reserve rounds and all season long during waivers and claims.

Earlier this year I looked at how many stats were available via FAAB and claims in the NL and Mixed Leagues. This is what our money goes to buy on draft day versus what we’re able to add as the season progresses. Would that number change if we spent more cash on draft day and had less available for inseason buys? It sure looks to me that paying more on draft day is the way to go.

Sincerely,
Rotoman

 

 

Thoughts about LABR 2014.

I looked at the AL LABR results and had a sense of deja vu all over again. Hitters were expensive, top pitchers were cheap, and some midlevel aspirational pitchers got bid up beyond their risk level because they throw strikeouts or have yet to prove vulnerable or both. I’m looking at Danny Salazar, Sonny Gray, Alex Cobb and Dan Straily, who Steve Gardner cites in his roundup at usatoday.com.

What’s interesting about this Groundhog’s Day expert league auction experience is that there is not a surefire counter to it. Try to beat it on values and you end up with too many pitchers. Adjust your values properly (this year the AL split 69/31, the modern classic split, after going 71/29 last year), and you squeak out a nice-looking but uninspiring team, as Larry Schechter did.

Larry’s potential downfall is a pitching staff that lacks a clear standout starter. I like all his pitchers and their prices, but when David Price is $23 you need to keep pushing. It sounds like I’m blaming Larry here, and I’m not. Just saying that if David Price is $23 then Masuhiro Tanaka should be $13, not $19. But the real thing is that Price should be more, and it’s a mistake he isn’t.

But that AL mistake is a common one, and reflects everyone’s wariness about pitching (except when they’re excited about a shiny new toy, like Salazar, or able to push up his price because there is unspent money). In the NL LABR auction, Gardner chronicles the air coming out of the top tier hitters as well as pitchers. Cargo was the top price at $36.

At the end of his story, Steve points out that there are three new owners in the league, as a way of perhaps explaining this bizarre turn, which made me think about the decline of auction fantasy. With more people playing mixed leagues and daily games, the hands-on familiarity of the auction is diminished. But the LABR NL field, it turns out, is full of grizzled veterans of rotisserie play. These guys didn’t just hop over from a Yahoo league. So what happened?

I made two charts to show where the money went. The first shows, from left to right in descending order, what was spent for each pitcher in each league and each hitter in each league. If you want to see it larger you can click on the image.

Screenshot 2014-03-05 12.33.29The chart shows that the highest priced pitcher in the NL cost much more than the highest priced pitcher in the AL, but the NL was outspent on pitchers who cost from $27 down to about $10. The NL spent more in the high single numbers, the AL a bit more in the low singles.

In hitting the AL clearly outspends the NL on hitters above $27 and is clearly outspent on hitters from $22 down to $15 (the prices are the y axis). The NL then crushes the AL between $8 and $3.

Another way of looking at it is to line the grafs up so they show cumulative money spent starting with the highest priced player and adding on down to the lowest priced player. The chart moves from left to right. You can click it to see a larger version.

Screenshot 2014-03-05 12.39.33To give you an idea of the difference in the two streams, at the $500 mark, where the AL it seems to be most outspending the NL on high priced players, the AL has spent $515 to the NL’s $483. That’s $32, or six percent. Not a huge amount, but obviously a distinctive difference if the talent pools are equal.

Also notable that by the end, the NL outspent the AL in hitting by $28. So that’s a $60 difference on players who cost less than $27.

Screenshot 2014-03-05 13.41.23I made an ugly little chart that tracks how much ahead or behind the NL is in spending at various points.

The red line, series 2, shows the pitching cumulatively, while series 1, the blue line, shows the hitting. The x-axis is the rank of players from most expensive to cheapest. If the quality of the two leagues were the same it seems like these lines would be flatter, but we’ll have to look at other leagues to know what to make of that.

If the pools are congruent and the NL pays more money for the $3 to $8 players than they’re worth because it has money to burn, that has to be a mistake. Then a team like Ambrosius/Childs, last year’s champs, which spent widely on expensive players and picked off useful pieces in the later stages of the less heralded, has a big advantage.

But what if the pools aren’t equivalent. Certainly the A/C team is risking a lot building around the oft-injured Troy Tulowitzki, Bryce Harper and Hanley Ramirez, with the leaden Ryan Howard to boot. So, if these guys are too risky at these prices ($28, $32, $31 respectively), what would have happened if less money was spent on them?

And if the expensive guys are mostly risky (I’m not sure Paul Goldschmidt is that risky, for instance), then doesn’t it make sense to spread money across the board, buy at bats and cross your fingers (as the NLers seem to have done, a little)?

I don’t have an answer. I dove into this to find out just how different the results were of these two apparently dissimilar expert auctions. It turns out that even though they look different, the dynamics are pretty close. The split for both leagues was similar. Either 68/32 and 69/31 (AL/NL) if you count the money left on the table, or 69/31 and 70/30 based on all the money available. These crusty auction vets are trying to get a foothold, a bit of advantage, but apart from Billy Hamilton’s fast feet the surface is pretty crumbly.

ASK ROTOMAN: Should I take a pitcher or hitter?

Dear Rotoman:

Having trouble deciding who to take first round. Its a 6×6 H2H league and a 4 keeper league, so technically the first round is the 5th. I have the first pick and here are the best available in the order I like them.

  • Jose Fernandez
  • Alex Rios
  • Adam Wainwright 
  • Jose Bautista 
  • Steven Strasburg
  • Ian Desmond
  • Hunter Pence
  • Matt Carpenter
  • Chris Sale
  • Sin Soo Choo

My keepers are already : Ryan Braun, Jay Bruce, David Price, and Adrian Gonzalez.

“Sitting Pretty”

Dear Sitting,

I’m flying a little blind here, since I don’t know what six pitching categories you’re playing with. Some leagues add Holds. If that’s the case in your league I would definitely take a hitter with your first pick, but even if your sixth category is Quality Starts (another popular choice) I would probably take a hitter.

That’s because you already have a quality starter as a keeper, and in Head to Head you want to pile up quality at bats. Obviously pitching matters, you want quality starts, but as we’ve seen, there will be plenty of starting pitching available late in the draft, in the reserve rounds and off the waiver wire for you to stream against weak offenses in pitchers parks week after week.

There won’t be power speed guys like Alex Rios, or power/on base guys like Jose Bautista after the next round or two. So load up while you can.

That said, I’m not sure Rios and Bautista are your best hitters in this spot. Rios had a fine year again last year, perhaps escaping the yoke of an every-other-year reputation, finally. But given his age, shouldn’t he be more in danger of one of his inexplicable extended slumps? While Bautista has the injury time bomb ticking beneath him.

Don’t get me wrong, both are reasonable picks at this point, but I think the durable Hunter Pence is a better, more reliable pick, and not as good as Ian Desmond, who may be the youngest and best offensive player of the bunch and a shortstop to boot. That’s who I would take.

Ohbladi!
Rotoman

ASK ROTOMAN: Mr. Consistent Choo vs. Wildman Gomez?

Dear Rotoman:

Which of these 2 outfielders would you rather have for 2014?

  Average HR SB Runs RBIs
Player A .284 19 20 97 60
Player B .277 21 38 76 67

Player A is Shin-Soo Choo.  Player B is Carlos Gomez.  These statistics are their averages over the past 2 seasons. Gomez has the advantage, perhaps, but if you extend the timeline to four years Choo is clearly superior.

Shouldn’t we value consistency more?

http://fantasyassembly.com/

Dear Fantasy Assembly:

As you can see from the above signature, I cheated. You, Fantasy Assembly, didn’t write asking my advice. I happened upon your site today and was interested in your story about consistent players. Hat tip to Ray Flowers, too.

Not because you (and he) are necessarily wrong, but because I think if you frame the question differently (as they slyly do, in fact) you’ll see that you clearly don’t want consistent players.

Here’s why.

Let’s say everybody in your league knew the right price of every player. And let’s say that they price enforced so that every player was bid up to the exact right price. If every owner knew exactly what the player was actually going to, say you were drafting last year’s stats, then every team would pay $260 for $260 talent. You’re looking at a 12-way tie!

Of course, players aren’t predictable. They have good years, bad years, better and worse years. Sometimes it’s luck, good or bad, sometimes it’s injury or distraction. But in our experience some players are more consistent than others.

One guy may earn $24-$26-$27 over a three year period. An average of $26.

Another might earn $38-$15-$24, also an average of $26. Now, if the down year was due to injury, it would be tempting to say this guy is a $26 player, too. Or close.

On draft day, both players are taken for $25. A $1 bargain, their owners think, but what is likely to happen?

Mr. Consistency might lose a couple of dollars or earn a couple of dollars. Not bad, but fairly low impact.

On the other hand, the wildman could earn $15 or he could earn $37 or he could earn $27, depending on which year you land him. That obviously hurts if you catch the bad year, but championships are won with clusters of good years. A midseason look at how the Tout Wars teams who had last year’s biggest breakouts were doing showed that one big win was not enough to drive a team to the top.

So maybe spending par to buy consistent players to shore up your stats isn’t the right way to go. Maybe taking riskier guys, with a bigger swing of potential outcomes, gives you a better chance of winning. Sure, in years where it all goes wrong, you’ll get killed. But in the years when things go right, you’ll have a dominating team.

Now, Fantasy Assembly kind of nods to this way of thinking, when it suggests you buy some consistent players and then make your upside plays in addition. Which may be enough, but I’m just not sure. The logic suggests that if you get fair prices on the erratic guys, they’ll give you a better chance of winning than the consistent guys, who give you a better chance at fourth place.

Of course, one great challenge is figuring out who is truly inconsistent, but with potential (not on his way down).

Tilting wildly,
Rotoman

Doings Over at Tout Wars

If you missed them, Doubt Wars final standings are posted over at ToutWars.com.

Perhaps more importantly, the Leaderboards have been been updated to include the 2013 results. Larry Schechter has increased his wide lead in lifetime earnings. I decided to make the default sort the career earnings, since that is the goal all of us aspire to.

Jeff Erickson says the Leaderboard page is the best argument for reading Schechter’s book. I agree, but can also say while in the midst of reading the book that the book recommends itself. He’s done a really great job of being informative, straightforward, sophisticated and clear. You can order it here:

Playing for the Middle

A few years after I joined the American Dream League I had a decent season and finished in fourth place. I’d battled pitcher injuries and failures all year long, and had the sense that–in this 4×4 league–I was losing ground in wins. I had struggled valiantly to hang in there.

A few days after the season was over I received (in the mail! that’s how long ago this was) the final report from Heath Data, which confirmed the numbers those of us who were in the hunt got when we updated the stats each day manually during the final week. I wasn’t happy about the result, but I was glad to be in the money. But then I looked at the report that Heath called the hypothetical standings, based on our teams’ rosters coming out of the draft, as if we’d made no moves all season long. The hypotheticals are a good way to look at the team you were dealt, as it were. If you suffered a lot of injuries or PEDs suspensions that year your team would suffer in the hypotheticals.

But the draft day hypotheticals are also a good way to see how you played during the year. If you suffered a lot of injuries but turned your poor hypothetical showing into a strong real showing, you did good. Or vice versa, which is what happened to me in that long ago year. In fact, when I looked more closely, I discovered that if I ranked my draft day stats in the actual end of year standings against the actual non-hypothetical stats of the other ADL teams, I’d bought enough stats in the draft to have won the league. Another way to put it: if a safe fell on my head as I left the draft at O’Reilly’s that year, I would have finished first even with the other teams picking up injury replacements and making trades all season long.

Instead I had finished fourth. I found this to be profoundly depressing.

Screen Shot 2013-09-21 at 7.43.29 PMI bring this up now because something similar is happening in the American Dream League this year. onRoto.com, our current stats service, sensibly offers up hypothetical standings all season long. Push a button and you get the draft day standings up to that date. I was aware all season long that I was hypothetically doing much better than I was in the real game, but I chalked that up to a disastrous series of moves I made back in May. That was when I traded Elvis Andrus and Junichi Tazawa for Justin Verlander. I knew I had a big surplus in steals and I thought adding the best pitcher in baseball would help my team. I was able to leverage Tazawa’s presumed role of closer to swing the deal, and was glad to see my hunch pay off and Tazawa didn’t hold the job. Unfortunately, Verlander didn’t do the job–perhaps distracted by girls–but that wasn’t my mistake. I made the right move but it didn’t work out. My actual mistake came from the blind side.

At that point in the season, mid May, my pitcher Felix Doubront was looking dismal. His velocity was down, his control stunk, his ERA was something above 6.00 with a giant WHIP. I had liked him a lot coming into the season, but I despaired that he was damaged and killing my pitching stats. Also, a few weeks before, I’d picked up Cleveland’s Corey Kluber, who had looked like a strong strikeout pitcher with good skills for a few games, but then he got pounded in a game and his ERA ballooned up above six, too. Which pitcher would he be going forward? I figured with Verlander and Shields I didn’t need the risk.

Another factor was our rule that teams that don’t get seven saves during the season get zero points in the saves category. This isn’t a huge deal, but points are points and having just traded Tazawa, who I assumed would get a few, I was scouring the waiver wire and found two potential sources in Oliver Perez in Seattle, where Tom Wilhelmsen was struggling, and fireballer Josh Leuke in Tampa Bay, where Fernando Rodney had suddenly gone all, um, historical-Rodney-like with his control. I decided to go after these putative closers, deciding to release Doubront and Kluber–who each had two-starts against tough teams coming up that week–if I got them (another rule we have limits you to three Special Reserves a season of players who aren’t on the DL or in the minors). I got them.

Both Doubront and Kluber pitched surprisingly well in their four games that week, but to my satisfaction didn’t win any of them. The next week I made a substantial bid on Kluber but was beat out. I didn’t bid on Doubront because I was still convinced he was damaged, but he soon showed he wasn’t. He immediately, punishingly, became the pitcher I had frozen to start the year, thinking, hoping, I had a major breakout candidate. Kluber pitched very well until he got hurt, and certainly would have helped my staff a lot if I’d Special Reserved him, and until a rough patch in September, Doubront was excellent. Perez and Leuke turned out to be nothing, which is why I thought pitching was the problem with my team. But when I looked more closely at the hypotheticals today, they show something different:

My team has 14 fewer homers and 18 fewer steals now than I bought on draft day. I do have 18 more wins, but my ERA and WHIP are both higher than the team I bought back then, even after trading for Verlander. That’s in part because when Verlander was on my team he had a 3.91 ERA, just barely better than my team’s, and a hurtful 13.24 Ratio. (I subsequently traded him for Chris Sale, who will be a decent freeze next spring.) But the real damage to my team came to my offense, which was the result of a series of trades with which I intended to add homers and batting average.

Following Andrus and Tazawa for Verlander and Marwin Gonzalez I did the following:

jacoby_ellsburyI traded Jacoby Ellsbury and Mike Zunino for Alex Rios, Ryan Lavarnway and John Jaso. Rios had 10 homers and 10 steals at that point, Ellsbury 1 homer and 24 steals, and didn’t hit for much power last year. I needed homers badly, I thought, even though I expected the weakling speed-corner Hosmer to hit a few and the feckless DH Butler to get going at some pointuy-=. Nothing happened for a week, and then Rios started running like crazy and hit no homers for the 89 at bats I had him for. Ellsbury went crazy and hit .350 over the next month, with a few homers, and has now hit seven homers for the Peppers. I needed catcher at bats, too, and while Lavarnway was a long shot Jaso was getting them. Zunino was not hitting in Triple-A, so who knew when he’d get the call, and even if he did, he might not hit .200.

Five weeks later I traded Rios, Tommy Milone and Jimmy Paredes for Ian Kinsler, Erasmo Ramirez and Leury Garcia. Kinsler would surely hit some homers, I thought, and with him and Zobrist and Asdrubal Cabrera my infield was pretty strong. There was a lot of griping in the league about the Milone for Ramirez component, the team that got Milone badly needed pitching and had for some reason had been talking up Ramirez up like a huckster, but I thought there was a pretty good chance Ramirez would be the better of the two the rest of the way. I wanted him in the deal and I was right, though Milone set a low bar landing in the minors for most of the second half.

A few weeks later I traded the newly FAAB-acquired speedster Jonathan Villar for Derek Jeter, who was just back off the DL. That didn’t work out, since the Captain proved unable to play, but I’m still second in steals at this point, so it wasn’t too costly.

The problem is that if I’d stuck with my draft day team I would have seven points in HR, instead I have two, and I would have 12 points in BA, instead I have eight. My draft day team inserted into the current real world standings against the actual stats of the other ADL teams would have 60 points, a solid fourth place, instead of 52 and a mad six-team scramble for places four through nine.

That team includes Al Albuquerque, Jake Arrieta and Brett Anderson, active all year, as well as Tommy Milone and Fernando Martinez a big hole on offense. Just adding Cory Kluber to the mix for Arrieta (AL stats only) and sticking with it would move the team up a few points and into solid contention with the BBs, Veecks and Jerrys for the championship. Yeesh.

The real mystery is how did I add 225 AB on the year and lose 14 homers (and seven RBI) and .007 of BA when what I was trying to do was add homers and BA? The answer is timing.

In 470 or so AB for my team, Jacoby Ellsbury, Elvis Andrus and Ryan Flaherty hit one homer. In 900 at bats not for my team, that trio has hit 19 homers. Plus Alex Rios, who hit zero homers in the 90 AB while I had him, hit 11 in the 246 AB before I acquired him, and six in the 250 at bats since I traded him. There was a power outage at Bad K Park this year, to be sure, and to catch up I churned the waiver and FAAB wires, trying to add homers, and didn’t succeed while damaging my BA.

The result is that rather than fighting with three other teams for the money spots, I’m in a wrangle with six teams for fourth place. I’m not sure what the lesson of this is. I played aggressively and got burned by bad timing. Verlander’s ERA when I traded for him was 3.17. For me he was 3.91. Since I traded him he’s been 3.74, but his WHIP during since I traded him was by far his best of the year (1.15). Whether or not it was my fault, clearly my activity was damaging.

Maybe next year I’ll practice stillness, and see how that works out.

Bad K’s American Dream League Team

At dinner after our annual American Dream League draft, Hacker owner Steve Levy asked me if Tout Wars was tougher than our neighborhood league, the American Dream League, which started in 1981. The ADL is not an experts league, but between Alex Patton, Les Leopold, Peter Golenbock, and moi, I doubt any league has gotten more books and magazines published about fantasy baseball over the years. And that is a disservice to the creds of the other members, who have written professionally about baseball for longer than the league’s 33 year tenure.

But therein lies the crux of my answer. The ADL is as chock full of canny baseball and fantasy analysts as any league, but the pace is different. In the ADL we go seven rounds deep on reserve, and no one struggles to come up with viable names, but during the auction the ADL lopes, with plenty of patter, recaps, and counting of the money. The Tout Wars auctions are played at a gallop. And time matters, because time pressure undermines those with poor organization.

That, of course, is one way to look at it. The other is to say that an AL only auction that takes six hours to complete is full of time for chatter, banter, badinage and riposte. It also offers plenty of time to consider what’s going on and try to adjust and beat it. In an auction where the bidding proceeds quickly there’s plenty of pressure and opportunities to make mistakes. In this slower format, mistakes may be made, but it’s also possible to discern trends and strategies and counter them.

Which leads us to my 2013 American Dream League team.

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