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

After the roster fix-up flurry of last week things calmed down. In my mind, the biggest news item for AL only leaguers was the signing by Detroit of Jose Valverde to a minor league contract. Valverde is by no means guaranteed his closer job should he make it back to the Majors after extended spring training, but given that he is coming off a 35-save season and 6 straight seasons of at least 25 saves, one at least has to take a chance on the righty.  Valverde is now 35 and has been amidst a seven-year decline in strikeout rates that endured a two-plus point drop from 8.6 to 6.3 strikeouts per nine innings in 2012. So caution is definitely warranted. At $9 the risk is a pretty good one to take, though admittedly I expected him to cost in excess of $15 this week. If it were announced immediately he would be closing, it would no doubt require a bid even higher..

NATIONAL LEAGUE

PLAYERS AWARDED

 UNAWARDED CONTINGENCY BIDS

Brian Walton's Commentary

Replacements were not to be found on the free agent wire. Only one hitter with more than eight at-bats was available to FAAB. Every NL stolen base last week was collected by players already rostered in Tout.

The only home run and RBIs from an unowned hitter were logged by Cincinnati's Xavier Paul. The reserve outfielder had all of four plate appearances during the period and went to Baseball Prospectus' Mike Gianella for $1 ($3 Vickrey). Chris Heisey is the primary beneficiary of Ludwick's misfortune, but like so many others, he was already rostered.

The high bid for the week was from Rotowire's Chris Liss, who was willing to pay up to $9 for Yuniesky Betancourt of the Brewers. Liss ended up getting the shortstop for a single buck. As long as Corey Hart and Ramirez are out, Betancourt should receive some at-bats. Whether he does anything with them remains to be seen.

Speaking of Milwaukee, the closer situation is unsettled as John Axford struggles. Having missed out on potential first option Jim Henderson last week, I made a tepid $0 bid on another Brewers set-up man. However, I lost out on Brandon Kintzler due to a $1 offer from Gianella.

Instead, I added Marlins' fill-in starter Alex Sanabia. The right-hander's job will likely evaporate as soon as Henderson Alvarez or Nathan Eovaldi returns. Sanabia's assignment this week will be a challenge - facing the Braves at home. Here's hoping this was not a bad decision.

MIXED LEAGUE AUCTION 

PLAYERS AWARDED

 UNAWARDED CONTINGENCY BIDS

Zach Steinhorn's Commentary

Only one week into the season and we already have a number of bullpen controversies around the league. So it was no surprise that the Brewers’ Jim Henderson fetched the highest FAAB bid in Mixed Tout Wars this week, $35 from Seth Trachtman. The vickrey system reduced Henderson’s price to $13, still a significant investment considering that a closer change in Milwaukee remains just speculation at this point, despite John Axford’s awful start to the year. The saves speculation game continued with Nick Minnix’s purchase of Jose Valverde, who was recently signed to a minor league contract by the Tigers, a team that is still searching for a reliable stopper. Valverde’s experience in the role suggests that it’s only a matter of time before he returns to being Detroit’s closer, but manager Jim Leyland has also expressed confidence in Joaquin Benoit. Still, $7 is a more than reasonable price to pay for what could very well be 30-plus saves. I’ll take Valverde at $7 over Henderson at $13 any day of the week.

Minnix wasn’t done with his shopping spree, as he also snagged Chris Heisey for the vickrey adjusted price of $9. With Ryan Ludwick on the shelf, Heisey will be given every opportunity to seize the Reds’ starting left field job, but he has struggled so far this year and we’re already starting to see Xavier Paul take away some of Heisey’s playing time.

Last but certainly not least, Jose Fernandez’s splendid big league debut did not go unnoticed, as Eric Mack opted to throw a $17 bid his way. My $7 bid for Fernandez turned out to be the second highest, so Mack ended up paying just eight bucks. The Marlins seem committed to Fernandez sticking with the big club for good, but it would be a mistake to not expect growing pains as Fernandez, at just 20 years of age, is making the enormous jump from Single-A to the Majors.

With Aramis Ramirez heading to the DL, I was forced to go to the waiver wire to find a third base replacement. I settled on Chris Johnson, and Freddie Freeman’s trip to the DL was the major reason why, as Johnson will take over everyday first base duties while Freeman is out, at least temporarily removing him from a third base platoon situation. Hopefully, Johnson will provide me with some pop while Ramirez is sidelined.

After witnessing Steve Cishek’s disastrous weekend, I also opted to grab Jon Rauch as closer insurance. Rauch hasn’t exactly impressed during his past closing stints, but at least he has some ninth inning experience. I consider him to be next in line for saves. Cishek’s job appears to be safe for now, but I didn’t want to be left without a No. 2 closer.

Todd Zola chimes in as well:

Something I do is check out bids of fellow competitors whose opinions I trust. A FAAB bid is the equivalent of an opinion. Cory Schwartz of mlb.com is a great example. I find it very telling that Cory eschewed the action on Jose Fernandez and instead snuck in a cool $1 bid on Jeremy Guthrie. Perhaps Cory knew it would cost more for the Marlins' rookie phenom, but he didn't even put in a token bid. This tells me he prefers the tried and true Guthrie over the shiny new toy, which is a philosophy I share.

MIXED LEAGUE DRAFT

PLAYERS AWARDED

 UNAWARDED CONTINGENCY BID

Perry Van Hook's Commentary

Jose Fernandez great first outing plus the one week delay in teams being able to bid on him led to a winning bid of $24 by Eno Sarris of Fangraphs. That’s a lot of a $100 FAAB but Fernandez albeit young is a very talented pitcher and getting him in April means that should be a lot of strikeouts with decent ratios, even if Marlins' wins will be hard to come by.

But Eno must be a believer because his bid was actually $26 reduced by Vickrey to $24 to top the $23 bid of Tom Kessenich (NFBC). In all there were five double digit bids on the young Miami hurler.

I was lucky on one of my acquisitions. I bid $4 for Atlanta’s Evan Gattis who currently only qualifies at OF but has already caught three games thus needing just two more to be C eligible. While I have two good catchers in Salvador Perez and A.J. Pierzynski, depth is a wonderful thing as well as having Gattis having a lot of trade value, especially to the Brian McCann owner whoever he might be.  But Brent Hershey (BHQ) who bid $7 for Gattis had him second on his list behind Chris Heisey who he won and apparently no one else wanted Gattis as an OF/U so my bid was reduced to $1 by Vickery.

My second winning bid was also reduced, this time from $2 down to $1 as I landed Cub pitcher Travis Wood who has two nice starts this week – home vs the Brewers and Giants in nice cold Chicago weather.

The first week of baseball is over and set in the record books and man, was it a fun week to watch. There were some major surprises throughout the week, including an oh-so-close perfect game thrown by Yu Darvish, multi-homer games by more than just a handful of sluggers, and the drama of the ninth inning never ceased to entertain. But the most surprising of all? Witnessing aces left right and center (or should I say west, east and north) getting absolutely destroyed by hot bats and longballs. The list includes names such as Cy Young award winner, R.A Dickey, the Rays’ go-to hurler, David Price, and strikeout phenom, Stephen Strasburg. Here’s a look at the earned run averages of some of the best pitchers in the game.

Matt Cain (SF) – 8.38
Jered Weaver (LAA) – 4.91
David Price (TB)  – 8.18
R.A. Dickey (TOR) – 8.18
Stephen Strasburg (WAS) – 4.38
C.C. Sabathia (NYY) – 3.00 (Okay, so this one doesn’t look so bad, but if you watched his opening start, you’d see why his name is included in this list….not good)
Cole Hamels (PHI) – 10.97

Putting together a combined ERA of 6.89, this is not what most of us would expect from the elites of pitching. With what seemed to be the longest spring training in history, you’d expect the all-stars to be up and ready to dominate, not to be dominated. I hope for the sake of fantasy baseball players that these aces get settled in sooner rather than later, because no one wants to be shown up by the guy who owns all third starters.