Tout Wars Mixed Auction 2025: Bret Sayre’s Recap

The classics are classics for a reason. It’s why both of my kids still have a month-long unit in seventh-grade English on Edgar Allan Poe in the year 2025, when they otherwise only communicate in acronyms and memes. It’s why there’s an undeniable joy when you see someone exploring The Beatles or Led Zeppelin for the first time. It’s why we all eat pizza way too much. 

And while the game of baseball itself has continued to evolve, the fantasy baseball classics are still very much still on display. None of the things that helped me win my fourth Tout Wars championship in 2025 were of my own invention. We’re kind of beyond that. After 40+ years of fantasy baseball, everything has been tried in some form or another and, in my opinion, there are several laws of mixed leagues that I used that still very much hold true today:

The stars and scrubs approach works, if you commit to it

When I wrote this column back in 2023, I wrote about the rule of thirds and how you build an offense in a mixed league. Let’s take a trip back in time because it was incredibly relevant once again:

There’s a good rule of thumb here when you’re assembling a true stars-and-scrubs team in a mixed league auction, and it’s the rule of thirds. You have 14 spots available to accumulate stats and they’re going to break down into three groups: 

Stars you can rely on for high-end production

Players who will be good enough to start every week

Players who end up on the waiver wire by May

This is simplistic, but directionally accurate. It also doesn’t mean all of your stars or your “good enough to start” players are created equal. Without one or two of that middle group popping off, relatively speaking, there’s not going to be elite enough production from your offense as a whole. So, let’s count. Here’s my draft day offensive lineup, how much they cost and where they fell:

C – Endy Rodriguez ($3): Played 15 games on my active roster, got hurt and got dropped.C – Hunter Goodman ($2): Did not leave my lineup all season. Finished as the #2 fantasy catcher and a top-60 overall hitter.1B – Tyler Soderstrom ($2): In the lineup every week and finished as a top-10 first baseman, even though he slotted into the OF for most of the second half.2B – Jake Cronenworth ($2): Started over 90 percent of the time when healthy. He was fine.SS – Elly De La Cruz ($40): Was expecting a little more, but still performed like a star.3B – Jose Ramirez ($45): Stud.CI – Luke Raley ($2): Spent about a month in my lineup before getting hurt and replaced my reserve Ryan O’Hearn.MI – Jorge Polanco ($2): Started all but one week for me and got to 25 homers.OF – Corbin Carroll ($43): 30-30 superstar.OF – Jake Fraley ($2): Six weeks and out.OF – Jesus Sanchez ($2): Rarely out of my starting lineup although he was the least valuable of the bunch.OF – Wilyer Abreu ($2): Started when healthyOF – Trevor Larnach ($2): Also started when healthy (unless there were an upcoming slate of lefties).UT – Brent Rooker ($26): Still a shocking bargain on draft day and he raked all season.

For those of you counting along at home, that is five star-level players, six players who rarely left my lineup, and three boomerangs who went out faster than they came in. That’s how you end up with 67 points of offense out of 75 total. It’s a numbers game and if you’re confident with your projections (using PECOTA helps, for sure), you’ll hit on a few of those $1-2 guys just by accident. In other words, Jorge Polanco wasn’t a target, he was a bystander.

And it’s a good thing I did, as the waiver wire for hitters this year was thin to begin with and I only got one real lineup stalwart out of it:

Apr 21 – Agustin Ramirez, $24

That pickup loomed large as Ramirez would finish as a top-12 catcher even in an OBP league, but only happened because I had just seen the news of his call up (which was reported about 5pm on Sunday, three hours before our 8pm FAAB deadline). Did I like his prospect pedigree and need a catcher? Absolutely. But sometimes just knowing a thing is happening can make a huge difference. Of course, this is a young man’s game and I ended up on the other end of this more than a handful of times later in the season, but for one week I had a throwback moment and it worked.

Be very risk-on with starting pitching in the auction

This has absolutely nothing to do with the pitchers I selected in the auction, as you’ll see below, as I list out how many innings each of my pitchers threw while in the active lineup for my team:

For those of you counting along at home, that’s about 560 IP of the 1280 IP my team threw this year, for a whopping 44%. And if you’re thinking, “oh I’m sure he was just pretty active on the trade market,” you’d be wrong. I made one trade all year and got 90 innings out of it, which gets me to 50%.

“Oh but what about his reserves,” you say? That got me 38 ⅔ IP between Camilo Doval and Hayden Wesneski.

So what’s the point of all this? It’s that you can get nearly 50 percent of your team’s innings off the waiver wire in a mixed league and still have a good enough pitching staff to win if you’ve constructed your offense properly. There’s just one way to give yourself the best chance at it.

Spam the starting pitcher waiver wire

It’s May and you’re starting five relievers because of injuries and underperformance. It’s ok! The plan is working! (I’m obviously joking, yes, but this is also where I was at.) 

However, it’s much easier to paint on a blank canvas–there’s just much more real estate. That leads to spending $1,067 of FAAB on pitching throughout the season, with $1,037 coming on starting pitching. (The total I spent was $1,295 despite there being a $1,000 budget because you get FAAB reimbursement at a 10:1 rate for dropping injured players. Burnes accounted for most of this.) Here’s how those starters worked out, along with their stats while in the lineup for my team:

Yes, that’s 14 starting pitchers I grabbed off the waiver wire, but let’s talk about the most interesting ones.

Lucas was my first attempt. It was a two-start week and oh how I wish it was only one.

Henderson sat in my lineup without any stats the week of 4/21 because he was optioned back to the minors right after the FAAB deadline. He’d eventually get me a few good starts later in the year before disappearing again.

Warren, Springs, and Priester were bets on pedigree and they were the ones that paid off best of that group. It did not hurt that Warren and Priester rolled out every fifth day for 90+ win teams as I tried to scrap for wins.

Sale was a rules-based gamble and it paid off as well as I could have imagined. He had been dropped for FAAB just four days earlier as he was still recovering from a cracked his rib and was looking at a mid-August return at the earliest. While on the IL, he was eligible to be picked up as long as he was started that current week. I used the short All-Star week to my advantage and snagged him to stash while missing just one inning of a bench reliever. As always, know your league rules and understand how you can use them to your advantage.

McLean was where I chose to spend a large chunk of my remaining FAAB, which worked out about as well as I could have hoped. The next highest bid on him was $95 and I could not have cared less. Early got the rest. These guys were two of my favorite sleeper pitching prospects heading into the year.

Even with a handful of true busts, my waiver wire spamming for starting pitching ended up getting me a 3.86 ERA, 1.26 WHIP, 38 wins (49% of my team total) and 563 strikeouts (43% of my total). But if you turn your back quickly on the busts and move on to the next thing, eventually those next things in mixed leagues will turn into every-week starters.

Look ahead in categories and do the math

The end of any close race in a roto league is not about evaluation or talent. It’s about math. I was hovering about five points back of Brent Hershey and then Frank Stampfl after the break and I was fixated on where the realistic points I could pick up were, and I figured if I really focused on it, I could grab almost 10 points between steals and strikeouts without losing many points elsewhere. Towards the end of July, I had 9 points in steals and 3 points in strikeouts. 

I kicked this off with my only trade of the year, and it was a substantial one. I dealt Brent Rooker, Carlos Estevez, and Luke Raley for Logan Gilbert, Josh Lowe, and Kyle Bradish. Bradish was still a month away from returning, but I’ve always been a huge fan of his and his upside was unmatched as a side piece in this deal.

I was so far ahead in saves at that point, it didn’t really matter that Clase got suspended (although I would have loved to trade him rather than just let him waste away on the restricted list) and I sat Muñoz a couple of weeks just to get more starts in there. The goal became to put my closers in the lineup as little as necessary to not lose any points, and I still won the category by 6 saves. But it gave me the runway to spike 70+ strikeouts in each of the first three weeks of September, which ended up helping to get me 9 points there, for a gain of +6.

On the steals side, Lowe netted me 11 steals over the last two months of the season and Blake Perkins added a handful from the waiver wire as well. With those guys added to my run-heavy stars in Ramirez, Carroll and De La Cruz, I was able to finish with 13 points in the category, a gain of +4 from my earlier decision point. And the best part was that I only lost one point across runs, homers and RBI so it was almost a true standings gain.

While the final standings had me ahead by 10 points, I was down a half point as late as September 15. It was a slog the whole way through, as you would expect in a league this deep with bright and experienced managers. That’s what makes a win like this special, and now I’m extremely fortunate to be able to call this my fourth championship since starting in Tout Wars 10 years ago. 

All I know is that if there’s going to be a fifth, it’s going to happen very similarly to this. But, then again, my leaguemates know this already. 

I’d be remiss not to give a huge thank you to Peter Kreutzer, Todd Zola, Jeff Erickson (the auctioneer extraordinaire), Justin Mason, Ron Shandler, Brian Walton, and Nick Pollack for their efforts in continuing to run and organize Tout Wars. It’s a lot of work and we all truly appreciate it. See you all again in March!