Mastersball

Each week, your friends at Mastersball will post the results of the weekly Tout Wars FAAB run, featuring the winning bid as well as the runner-up bids. There are four Tout Wars leagues, a 12-team AL only, 12-team NL only, 15-team Mixed Auction League and 15-team Mixed Draft League. The Mixed leagues use on-base-percentage instead of batting average. You can see the complete standings for each league by clicking on the appropriate heading, located just under each player photo.

Tout Wars uses a Vickrey system to award bids. For a complete description of the Vickrey system, click HERE for the Tout Wars constitution.

Included with each league report will be commentary from a Mastersball staff member participating in that league. We invite you to ask questions and post comments at the bottom of the report.

All contingency bids for awarded players are included. Sometimes, this is a bid tied to a player that the owner received, so at times the bid amount is larger than the winning bid. We are including it to provide as much information and context as possible with each report.

AMERICAN LEAGUE

PLAYERS AWARDED

 UNAWARDED CONTINGENCY BIDS

Rob Leibowitz' Commentary

David Phelps generated a lot of attention this weekend as he officially moved into the Yankee’s rotation with Ivan Nova on the disabled list. Despite not having earth shattering stuff, Phelps has actually been able to miss bats at the MLB level. Earlier in his minor league career he showed above average control, but regressed in that department as he moved to Triple-A and the Majors. Nova is due back in about two weeks, so Phelps could be useful as just a short-term fill-in. If he pitches well, then it’s possible he could knock Nova into a relief role, so the righty’s definitely worth taking a shot on in AL only leagues.

Zach Britton is replacing Jake Arrieta in the Orioles rotation tonight. The lefty has a 1.98 ERA in Triple-A, but that is far from any reason to get excited when you consider he’s walked more batters than struck out.

Kevin Gausman has been absolutely crushing it in Double-A with a 9.1 K/9 and 0.3 BB/9 (not a typo!) over 5 starts. With Dylan Bundy having some health question marks, the 22-year old Gausman could be promoted through the system quite rapidly. So a nice stash moves by Andy Behrens here.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

PLAYERS AWARDED

 UNAWARDED CONTINGENCY BIDS

Brian Walton's Commentary

Once again, the big National League addition this week was already rostered in Tout Wars. The Rockies purchased the contract of third baseman Nolan Arenado from Triple-A and inserted their top prospect into the Sunday lineup, batting seventh. Derek Carty paid $3 for Arenado on draft day. In the corresponding move, a surprise, Chris Nelson was designated for assignment. Interestingly, OnRoto's Scott Wilderman spent the same $3 on Nelson, who is bound to land on his feet elsewhere.

Kevin Gregg's three saves last week went uncredited. The question of how long a man who was jobless two weeks ago can retain the job of closing games for the Cubs is a real one. Kyuji Fujikawa's imminent return did not temper bidding on Gregg by at least half the league. My paltry $11 bid was left in the dust as Lenny Melnick of Fantasy Pros 911 spent $32 ($61 Vickrey) to secure Gregg's services.

Retread Brandon Inge has been seeing time at second base for the Bucs with Neil Walker out. He probably should also play at the hot corner when sub-Mendoza line power threat Pedro Alvarez is in one of his deep slumps, but probably won't. I was willing to pay $3 to add Inge, but Rotoman Peter Kreutzer went $9, reduced to $4 by Vickrey.

Pitching prospect Robbie Erlin was called up by the Padres this past week. Though the left-hander is slated for relief duty initially, the prospect of Erlin joining the rotation later was worth up to $33 to BaseballHQ's Phil Hertz. He paid $5 via Vickrey.

A stray save for Tony Watson of the Pirates last week plus ongoing solid peripherals led to at least three bids being placed. The lefty went to Yahoo's Scott Pianowski on a $3 tiebreaker.

Despite a solid debut outing for the Dodgers on Saturday, right-hander Matt Magill is likely a one-and-done case - at least for now. Chris Capuano's imminent return may push Magill back down. Still, Magill was worth a dollar to Steve Gardner of USA TODAY.

MIXED LEAGUE AUCTION 

PLAYERS AWARDED

 UNAWARDED CONTINGENCY BIDS

Zach Steinhorn's Commentary

For me, the question heading into this week’s FAAB period wasn’t whether or not Kevin Gregg would net the highest winning bid but rather how much would someone be willing to pay for a guy who, despite racking up three saves, has yet to be publicly anointed as the Cubs’ new closer. Gregg does have closing experience but his ninth inning track record is mediocre at best and it remains to be seen what will happen once Kyuji Fujikawa comes off the DL. And don’t forget about Carlos Marmol. Yeah, I was willing to spend $7 anyway, but last week’s $19 purchase of Edward Mujica by Paul Singman looks like without question a safer investment.

The last time John Lackey deserved a mixed league roster spot was in 2009, but one strong performance versus the lowly Astros was enough of a reason for Eric Mack to throw $7 his way. I could be proven wrong on this, but I have very little confidence in Lackey and wasn’t about to drop any of my current players to acquire him.

Outside of Gregg and Lackey, all of the other winning bids were for $1 or less, so I guess I wasn’t missing much by putting in only one bid. Well, I’m hoping I wasn’t missing much. On the whole, this week’s FAAB choices were uninspiring to say the least.

MIXED LEAGUE DRAFT

PLAYERS AWARDED

 UNAWARDED CONTINGENCY BID

Perry Van Hook's Commentary

A save is a save – no matter who gets them – and for fantasy players wherever they can get them thus five of the TOUTS in the Mixed draft league putting in bids for Kevin Gregg, now closing some games for the Chicago Cubs.  Greg Ambrosius (NFBC/Stats Inc) had the high bid of 14 for Gregg which was reduced by Vickrey to the $9 winning bid.

My squad lost Houston outfielder Justin Maxwell while it was making its way to 1^st place, so I bid $4 on another Astro to take his place this week and won Fernando Martinez for $1. I too bid for Gregg and two starting pitchers – David Phelps and Justin Grimm – but was outbid for all three pitchers.

In the last few days I have seen several questions about Jarrod Parker and the poor start he is off to this season.

First let’s look back a year – 2012 was Parker’s first full season in the major leagues and he pitched 181.1 innings for Oakland notching thirteen wins with a 3.48 ERA and 1.26 WHIP and striking out 140 batters while walking 63.

Parker was thus a very valuable starting pitcher especially in AL only leagues. This year fantasy players drafted him based on that – in 15 team mixed NFBC live drafts Parker ranked #200 with an pick average of 201.51 or 14^th round. For comparison with other pitchers that was just after Homer Bailey and Ryan Vogelsong, but ahead of Alexi Ogando and Alex Cobb.

But there were two warning flags largely ignored by most fantasy players:

A very poor spring training – an 8.10 ERA and 2.140 WHIP in five starts totaling 23.1 innings. Parker had 14 strikeouts and 13 walks in those innings. While I don’t always think spring training stats are predictive or more important than MLB stats, remember 2012 was Parker’s first major league season and,

A very large increase of innings pitched from 2011 to 2012 – 78 innings according to Tom Verducci whose research on the increase of innings for young pitchers – now known as the Verducci Effect was noted in his January column at SI online.

You can read Verducci’s history on this but the previous year he identified fourteen young pitchers coming off workload increases of 30 innings or more. Nine of them suffered injuries or significant regression (Derek Holland, Dylan Axelrod, Jaime Garcia, Liam Hendricks, Eric Surkamp, Chris Schwinden, Daniel Hudson, Zach Stewart, and Michael Pineda).

Of course you have to realize not everyone on the list has problems – Jose Quintana was third on the list behind Chris Sale and Parker and he is off to a fine start. And Matt Harvey, seventh on the list with only an increase of 32+ innings is one of the early seasons leading pitchers.