2013 Tout Wars Mixed Draft – Team Razzball

Tout Wars – one of the two most prestigious fantasy baseball expert leagues (along with LABR) – invited Razzball to participate in its inaugural 15-team mixed league online draft (they also have AL-only, NL-only, and 15-team mixed auctions).

The 2013 Tout Wars mixed draft format is very similar to our mixed-league LABR expert league except for one notable quirk – OBP instead of AVG.  While this marks our first expert league with OBP, we felt comfortable with it given we answer so many OBP-related questions on the site and have run rankings/auction values using OBP per reader request.

Tout Wars only allows individuals to draft so we decided Grey would be the head of the team and I would help with the prep work, write the post-draft review, and look over his shoulder throughout the season.  Consider him our Sam Walker and me his Nando (if you don’t get that reference, buy Fantasyland now).

Like most of our drafts, this team ended up being an amalgam of both our rankings.

Our biggest (and only) pre-draft disagreement can be blamed on getting the unenviable 15th pick in the draft.  We have an agreed-upon top 12 players for 2013 – all of which we assumed would be gone by our pick (and which was the case).  So we had two picks in a row and no consensus on whom to pick.  My pre-draft wish was for Bryce Harper and Jason Heyward but 1) Harper went at #11 and 2) Grey’s imaginary friend is a clown and resents Harper’s disparaging use of the word.  Grey wanted nothing to do with my Tulo suggestion (too brittle…which is fair) nor my suggestion of Verlander or Strasburg (they are not hitters…which is true).  I rejected Grey’s suggestion of Adam Jones because I think he is a member of the Bernie Williams/Curtis Granderson/Dexter Fowler all-stars (seemingly fast guys who just are not good at stealing bases).

Post-draft, I am warming up to Grey’s pick of Jose Bautista (great for OBP, seems over the wrist injury) and glad he took Heyward for both OBP and because I think he has potential to go 30 HR/25 SB this year.

After the 15th/16th pick hurdle, the rest of the draft went as I hoped.  Yeah, I would have taken the safer Sabathia over Chapman but my $ estimates were pretty close for those pitchers (and that’s with a conservative 140 IP for Chapman).  I think Grey drafted a well-balanced offense and the pitching staff has a lot of depth at SP (10 SPs).  We also corrected what I felt was a flaw in our LABR draft by picking two solid closers (Axford/Reed) instead of waiting too long to take a 2nd closer and ending up with a likely dud in Rondon.

Here are links to the final draft results and all our leaguemates.