More Tout Wars (N.L.) Round by Round

A couple of weeks ago, Toz was kind enough to post the round-by-round results for N.L. Tout Wars. This dovetails nicely with something Shoresie had asked back in March:

a more helpful tool, perhaps, would be to get someone to list the order in which players were nominated. This would give us the texture of the auction, help explain anomalous prices and prepare us with a layout of what to expect at our own auctions.

I went back and put the N.L. Tout Wars round-by-round results into a Google spreadsheet. The players are listed in the order they were nominated, along with who bought the player. The BID column was my bid limit for that player, the salary is what the player actually went for, and the DIFF column is my bid minus the Tout Wars Salary.

Here are what the results look like broken out into 23 rounds of 13 players each:

N.L. Tout Wars Round by Round 2011

Round	Value	Salary	+/-
1	$322	$331	-9
2	$260	$279	-19
3	$330	$326	4
4	$259	$259	0
5	$219	$220	-1
6	$297	$298	-1
7	$181	$189	-8
8	$201	$210	-9
9	$160	$177	-17
10	$168	$185	-17
11	$177	$177	0
12	$121	$129	-8
13	$121	$120	1
14	$101	$115	-14
15	$93	$68	25
16	$83	$78	5
17	$59	$51	8
18	$67	$48	19
19	$42	$39	3
20	$39	$27	12
21	$27	$20	7
22	$30	$18	12
23	$21	$13	8

When laid out this way, this is one of the tightest auctions I've ever seen. After some tentativeness in Round 1, there's a slight frenzy in Round 2. But then the Tout Warriors behave like the experts they are and prices stay stable up until the next pricing spending spree in Rounds 9 and 10. The final spending jump comes in Round 14.

Inevitably, the money has to flow in the other direction, and every round from Round 15 to the end of the auction comes in with bargains. But as I've said in the past, these aren't the kind of bargains you're waiting to swoop in on and save your team. Or, if you are, you're going to leave $100 on the table.

Getting back to Shoresie's statement, where there any moments where the room pushed hard or got soft, or are most of the prices one-shot anomalies?

For the most part, we are looking at one or two player jumps for most of the first few rounds. The only mini-pocket of price wars occurred until Round 10:

119 Javier Vazquez ($13, -8), 120 Ricky Nolasco ($16, -4), 121 Casey McGehee ($24, -4), 122 Dexter Fowler ($22, -5).

Vazquez and Nolasco are part of a pitching rush that saw owners chasing pitchers once the arms market got thin. McGehee was the last solid 3B on the board, and Fowler the last big speed guy.

Round 15 saw a small pocket of bargains:

193 Anibal Sanchez ($5, +5), 194 J.A. Happ ($4, +2), 195 Mike Minor ($3, +3).

Here is the other side of the pitching wars we saw a little earlier. Owners spent their cash earlier on guys like Vazquez, Nolasco, Chad Billingsley ($20), and Yovani Gallardo ($23) and aren't spending here. Or they decided - like Lenny Melnick/Paul Greco and I did - to dollar out their pitching staffs.

These were the only two pockets of the auction where three players were consecutively purchased at an aggregate plus or minus $10. While you could certainly attempt to drill further into the spreadsheet and try to find more patterns, I believe that it is difficult to do so in a league as talented as Tout Wars. If your league is this tough, then your strategy is going to have less to do with finding a pattern in an expert auction that might help you out and more about getting your bid values as strong as you possibly can before your own auction.