Tout Wars

I have just about checked off every item on my check list except one, Tout Wars. Simply put, Tout Wars is the single hardest fantasy baseball league in the world. The roster of players consists of the very best. It is by invitation only and I cherish that invitation. Everything I have done since the end of the 2008 Major League season culminates in a weekend in Manhattan.

As of today, everything has been pushed aside. I am living and breathing Tout Wars. In this article, I’m going to discuss the rule changes because they are critical.

The Mixed League has had significant changes for 2009. While on the one hand, those changes are good. On the other hand, everything I’ve learned has gone out the window.

The fundamentals of the league have not changed. It is still a standard 5×5 Roto league. Last year, Tout Wars was a 12-team league. This year it is a 16-team league. That change is huge! I have three seasons worth of data which I would use to help compile a set of benchmarks. Those benchmarks have been thrown out the window and I will have to do them from scratch.

Another big change is something I fought for over the offseason and was happy to see that it was approved. That change is a DL move. Under the old rules, you would set you lineup every Friday for the whole week and it did not change. If by chance you lost some on Sunday, you were unable to replace that player until the next Friday. In a shallow 12-team Mixed League where you were looking for 3-to-5 RBI per week per position, loosing someone for a week was brutal. I called for a rule change allowing managers to move a player from their bench onto their roster to replace a player that went on the Major League DL. That has been approved, so the bench has some usefulness.

You can read the Tout Wars Constitution here.

So, I need to develop some new benchmarks and look much deeper. I need to study more. The old pool was 348 players. That has now expanded by 116 players to 464. It is going to be fun!