Month: March 2012

Ah, the best laid plans.

I really thought I had a shot at buying the team. No problem on Posey, Aramis Ramirez, Stephen Strasburg and the young and blooming starting pitchers, but either I didn’t play the auction right on Ian Stewart, Aaron Hill, Willie Bloomquist, and Jordan Schafer, or the dynamics of this particular auction doomed me.

What I know for sure is that Nate Ravitz spent a lot of money early and then repeatedly tried to pick off guys off the lower auction tiers by surprise, and thus I lost Jesus Guzman.

I thought I had Loney at my price for him, but then Phil Hertz blurted $17 and I let him go. Phil didn’t love the purchase. I would have been happy at $16.

And that was the point of this exercise. To try to identify soft spots and get players who play at prices below par. The problem was that I lost Hunter Pence to Lenny Melnick, who adopted a My Guys at Any Price approach. So I ended up with Drew Stubbs and Jason Heyward rather than Pence and Jose Tabata.

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I am participating in Tout Wars NL auction this Sunday. I think it’s my 13th NL draft and I’m sorry to say that I’ve never won. I’ve finished second once, fourth once and fifth five times. I’ve had a few very bad years, too, usually because of injuries, though it is fair to say that the good years were at least in part because of lack of injuries.

Tout Wars drafts are the toughest. The pace is unrelenting. Keeping up on the live blog, which you’ll find during the auctions on Saturday and Sunday at toutwars.com, is tough. But the pace actually makes the auction fun. It is go, go, go, time only for action, when your moment comes. And then you are brushed aside, like a newspaper in a strong wind, and the room is onto something new, and maybe you are, too.

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