Collette Calls: AL Tout Wars Recap

This article is part of our Collette Calls series.

In the case of Park, I know Jeff Erickson was in on that bid with me which is appropriate considering he and I brought up the rear in the standings last year as we both suffered from a similar lack of at bats. Single league formats necessitate you compiling as many at bats as you possibly can because you cannot win without it. You could punt steals, but lack of at bats means low production in multiple categories. Last year, Jeff and I were the only two teams with fewer than 6000 at bats and his were due to injuries while mine was due to ineffectiveness. When we saw one another on Friday evening, he made mention to me that he felt the two of us had similar plans for the auction the next morning. Honestly, that gave me some pause because I knew I would be competing with Glenn Colton and Rick Wolf on similar players as well as Steve Moyer because both owners tend to go around $200 on hitters, but adding a third competitor to that pool was going to make it that much tougher to execute the plan.

The 2017 plan was multi-faceted and one that I had been tweaking throughout the offseason. The goal on offense was simple at a high level: accumulate at bats. I thought I had done so last year, but in hindsight, taking on the lack of track record in Park, DeShields, and Tyler White without doing anything to offset those plays in the reserves cost me. I wanted to avoid part-time players this time around and go after those with track records or at least a decent recent sample size of improvement while getting speed and leaning toward experienced players over shiny new toys.

On the pitching side of the ledger, the Tout Wars rules ultimately decided what I would do. The initial plan this offseason was to draft a Tier 1 closer and a Tier 2 closer and then grab seven relievers projected to work in swing roles with good ratios who would get me strikeouts and a shot at a cheap starter or perhaps more saves.

This plan essentially builds around the theory that baseball relief habits may be changing, which is something that Ben Lindbergh wrote about at The Ringer. Baseball is a copycat sport, so what works for one team is quickly copied by others. Pitchers that flourished in this role last year were guys such as Chris Devenski, Brad Hand, David Phelps, Hector Neris, Carlos Torres, Joe Blanton and Brad Brach. The problem with this strategy is that many were National Leaguers and when I ran the numbers of the guys I liked in the American League, I couldn't come within 100 innings of the 950 innings minimum that Tout Wars requires. The plan was then altered to include one starter from Tier 2, one closer, two speculative relievers and five back-end starting pitchers with upside.

I budgeted $205 for hitting and $55 for pitching and told myself I would adjust to $200/60 if need be in the auction but would not make the mistake from last year and end up with a big name just because I liked the price early in the auction. This is what that budget looked like by position when the auction began:

Here is how the plan went by position. I'll show what I had budgeted, who I had targeted, and the italicized player(s) in each table are the players I actually rostered.

Catchers - $15 budgeted

Third base was for Valencia since he has 1B/3B eligibility and he has been announced as the starting first baseman in Seattle. Valencia is known as a guy that rakes lefties and has issues against righties, but that has changed in recent seasons. Over the past two seasons, Valencia has been above league average against both righties AND lefties. The table below shows how he has stacked up against righties over the last two seasons against two mystery players:

Profar was the target at the corner because he qualifies at three positions on draft day and could pick up more very quickly into the season and thought I could fall back onto Pearce if Profar did not work out since he too had multi-positional flexibility including second base since Tout Wars uses a 15-game rule on draft day. Ideally, I could roster both – one at CI and one at MI – and have multiple moving parts throughout the season. I was the penultimate bid on Profar and Pearce, but was not going to reach for either guy that was not guaranteed a starting position despite my love for their positional flexibility. Instead, I spent the money on Gurriel who does have a job and is in a very nice lineup albeit in the bottom third of it.

Middle Infield - $78 budgeted

Utility/Swing - $12 budgeted

Lastly, the closer role was filled with Cody Allen at $18, although he was not my primary target. I had four names listed for the spot (shown in table below) and Allen happened to be the first of them that came out after we had seen Kelvin Herrera go $18, Edwin Diaz go $20 and immediately after Aroldis Chapman went for $25. I had budgeted up to $20 for the spot hoping to get Diaz or Giles but had gotten caught in the odd-numbered bids on Diaz and did not feel like paying $21 when there were three other names out there. I did not nominate Allen, but he ended up on my team because I got into the even-numbered bids this time but would have bowed out had it gone to $19 and tried again with the remaining names.

The final tally was $199 on hitting and $61 on pitching. I grabbed Jose DeLeon in the reserves as an insurance policy against Snell and Andriese. I also took JaCoby Jones, who may see more playing time with J.D. Martinez on the disabled list to begin the season. Jones is having a good spring and qualifies at 3B and CI with outfield eligibility coming along later this month. My last two reserve picks went to Jesse Hahn and J.T. Chargois, both of which were farmed out by their respective clubs the day after the auction.

Can I finish higher than 11th place this year? Can I once again at least beat Jeff Erickson? Stay tuned throughout the season as I reference the ups and downs of my squad to help you do improve your own.