(*) ROTISSERIE: 'Pivoting' through the 2022 Tout-AL auction

Rotisserie

Patrick Davitt

Mar 27 2022 12:03am

(*) ROTISSERIE: 'Pivoting' through the 2022 Tout-AL auction

Patrick Davitt

Mar 27 2022

One of the greatest scenes in the TV show Friends was when Ross was directing Chandler and Rachel as the three tried to carry a sofa up a flight of stairs. As they get past the first landing, it gets harder to turn the sofa around the corners, and as it gets more and more wedged into place, the exasperated Ross shouts “pivot ... pivot ... PIVOT!”

Last Saturday, I was Ross, and the Tout Wars AL-only auction was kinda both the sofa and the flight of stairs.

Let me quickly explain my strategy. After last season’s draft, which I didn’t like for a variety of reasons, I wrote myself a letter, to be opened when I started planning this year’s auction. The letter was very long, which won’t surprise anyone who has endured some of my past writing at BaseballHQ. But here are the high points:

Set a detailed budget.
Don’t pay more than $29 for any player. (Partly spread-the-risk, partly to avoid too many $1 guys.)
Be patient at the auction.
Nominate the guys you want.
Don’t spend money on big-dollar OFs.
Be more mindful of position scarcity and abundance.
Focus on players in the low- to mid-teen values.
Be better on $1 players.
Choose one projection system.
Consider a low-cost SP plan. All the projected pitcher profit in the 2021 draft was on $1-$14 SPs.
Don’t base decisions on whether you have the player on other rosters.
Don’t buy anyone at a price he’s never earned (corollary: Be more confident in a guy who has).

‘Pivot...’

With all of that in mind, my first pivot was to alter my usual stars-and-scrubs auction plan to a much more spread-the risk approach—no player more than $29. I set up my detailed budget, though without specific player targets:

C1 15 SP1 24

C2 3 SP2 20

1B 24 SP3 8

3B 24 SP4 5

CI 5 SP5 4

2B 24 SP6 4

SS 24 CL1 16 (second-tier closer)

MI 5 CL2 8 (third-tier closer or next-in-line guy)

OF1 12 P9 1 (best available, probably LIMA short guy)

OF2 12 90

OF3 9

OF4 7

UT 3

SW 3

170

That’s a 65-35 split, about where Tout-AL has been in the last few auctions. The 1B/3B slots and 2B/SS slots were actually combined into $48 for both, so if I got, say, a 1B for $22, I could bump the 3B to $26. My general aim was to maintain control over my draft finance status as much as I could early and late.

Generally, I think I succeeded:

In this chart, green areas represent higher ranks in dollars remaining, while yellow is middle-of-the-pack and red is the lower ranks. You can see I started with Jason Collette (COLL), Mike Podhorzer (PODZ) and Ryan Bloomfield as holding onto the most bidding units during the early going. I had a spending spree at around picks 70-120 that dropped me near the bottom, then moved back up and finished the draft with good leverage in the mid- to late-game. “JOE” is Joe Sheehan, back in the league after several seasons away, who was at or near the top of the available-money ranks from about pick #100 to the end.

‘pivot...’

My next pivot came at about the 35^th nomination, when NYY CL Aroldis Chapman went at $22, $5 over HQ’s projected value. Chapman was the seventh closer off the board, all except KC’s Scott Barlow going for $21-$23. Barlow went for $14, $6 over HQ value, and about what I had budgeted for a solid second-tier guy. It turns out there were no second-tier closers, solid or otherwise, just six top-tier guys like Pressly and a bunch of third-tier guys like Barlow.

So pivot #1 was to eliminate my two closer slots, and redistribute their $24 among the pitchers, bumping SP2 to $22, SP3 to $18, SP4 to $13 and SP5 to $7, with four pitchers (SP or RP) at $2 each.

I got my first player, Kevin Gausman, at pick #41—last in the draft to get off the schneid—for $22, on budget and a $2 profit by HQ projection. Within the next 13 picks, I rostered three more pitchers:

Framber Valdez (#44) as SP3 for $17, a $1 budget gain and a $1 HQ loss (I didn’t actually want Valdez at $18, but got caught clicking the “+$1” button during a rapid run of +1 bids, and my +$1 got buffered until after them, pushing my bid past my intended top bid of $15)
Chris Flexen (#46) as SP5 for $6, another $1 budget gain and $1 HQ loss
and Jose Berríos (#53) as SP2 for $23, $1 over slot and $4 over HQ value.

I felt better about Berríos' overpay when Dylan Cease went soon after for the same $23 and Frankie Montas went for $24, both significantly short of HQ projected value. That left me with an SP4 to fill, and I was delighted to get Shane Baz for $15, $2 over slot but $1 over projection with a ton of ceiling. Of course, we all know how that turned out.

‘PIVOT!’

Another action item that developed was the SBs ebbing away quickly in the early going. Around pick# 45, I decided to pivot hard to a bags-acquisition approach. Four picks later, I got Cedric Mullins, for what seemed an awfully low price of $26.

In this instance, I wasn’t just on tilt for SBs; I believe the projection is just incorrect. Mullins earned just short of $35 last season by going 30/30. The projection doesn’t believe in a full repeat, and neither do I. But I can’t see why Mullins would fall to 23/23 and lose a quarter of his fantasy value. One analysis noted, Mullins hit 22 of his 30 HR in Camden Yards, which boosted lefty HR by 35% over the last three seasons. But he’s still playing 81 games there, and will presumably benefit from the same Camden boost, so I don’t see how this should cause him to lose HRs. A drop to 20 SBs has no explanation beyond noting he has 90th+ percentile speed and an excellent SB% near 80%.

Anyway, I don’t foresee the 25% decline in value, but we’ll see. In the meantime, the $26 was way above the $12 slot price and forced a radical on-the-fly budget realignment that pushed back towards stars-and-scrubs.

‘PI-I-V-O-O-OT!’

By pick #96, I had only $55 left for my last 13 players. We were in the teen-dollar value tier, where I had originally hoped to land several hitters, but I decided to pivot again and sit it out for a while, bidding to just under value on lots of hitters and landing Yuri Gurriel (#133, +$6 budget, +$5 HQ).

As the chart shows, by pick #170 or so, I was back in the top echelon of managers with money left, and I stayed that way for the rest of this draft, accomplishing the goal of not being forced into position-related bad gets and grabbing some useful values.

I had intended a 65-35 split, and nailed that at 169-91. My hitters project to ring up $178 in value by HQ projections, a profit of $19, my pitchers are +$3. I like the shape of the team, although punting saves on the pivot will require some FAAB successes and/or trades. And losing Baz is a real blow, ameliorated only slightly by the Tout rule that has an IL for injured players and doesn’t require us to use up reserve slots.

Here’s the full roster, excluding reserves, with short (I promise) final (I promise) notes:

Pick Player Pos Bid HQ +/- Note

49 Mullins OF 26 20 -6 I’m taking the (way) over on 23/23

61 SPerez C1 23 12 -11 Another overstated decline

65 Bogaerts SS 27 24 -3 650 PA = $30

67 JRdrguez OF 6 7 +1 Prob in AAA to open, but a PT risk to get SBs

73 BLowe 2B 26 22 -4 35/8/.340 works

96 KevSmith 3B 13 12 -1 Another dart but who else in OAK?

133 YGurriel 1B 13 16 +3 Dependable, always overlooked

138 Mateo MI 7 5 -2 Gene McCaffrey recommendation

187 Mejia C2 3 3 0 Best of what’s left, not an OBP killer

194 Choi CI 5 12 +7 Another boring veteran (BV)