Tout Wars Mixed Auction Recap 2026

From the outside, the setup of the Hotel Edison conference room looked the same as it had the last few years. There were the surprisingly good kettle chips, the tray of desserts that were barely touched and the minifridge that once probably held a lot of water but was now empty. (The perils of the afternoon auction include thirst, for the underprepared.)

However, once I called out the first name (Corbin Carroll, for the record), it looked rather different from the inside. This was finally the year my recent success caught up with me. Not only did the stars go for real star prices, but I got price enforced pretty strongly on some of the guys who I might have gotten for greater values in prior years. Winning two of the last three years, and finishing second in the other, will do this to a person. 

So what do I do? The boring answer is really nothing different–I just ended up with a slightly different swath of players, but kept the general philosophy the same. Unlike the AL LABR auction from two weeks ago, I did not employ a true spread-the-risk philosophy, but I had only done that in LABR because that’s where the values were and it’s more appropriate in an only league. Spreading the risk in a mixed league just means you don’t have enough firepower at the top and you’ll probably end up with too much money at the end. 

There are two reasons why I’m a frustrating person to emulate in an auction. The first is that I don’t go in with any particular plans or desires to have certain players or positions or categories. So if I have Juan Soto valued at $52, and I can get him for $50, I’m thrilled. If he goes for $54, which he did this weekend, I move on to the next guy. And the next guy. And the next. Eventually, there will be players who show themselves to be bargains, Which brings me to my real advantage for a strategy like this: my patience. A stars-and-scrubs approach requires a ton of patience and waiting in an environment that is exceedingly exciting and fast. It’s hard, Sometimes you can go 70-80 players without winning a single one, and losing patience means losing the strategy.

So while I didn’t spend $40 on a single player this year, I also ended up with 11 players at either $1 or $2. Let’s see what the high end of my roster looks like this year:

That’s $214 gone on seven players, which was even more extreme than the $211 I spent on eight players last year, and it buttoned me up for a little while. So what was the theme here? Again, it looks like OBP gets overvalued in an OBP league. Yes it is more stable than AVG, but just because it compresses the swings. It’s still inherently unpredictable, and even more so in younger players who can make real gains in that area.

Kurtz and Caminero are great examples here. Sure, Kurtz needed a .290 AVG last year to pull a .383 OBP, and the AVG will likely regress. But he also posted .500+ OBPs in college and could recreate or improve on that OBP even by giving back 20-25 points of AVG. Caminero showed extreme pop and paired it with a pretty unappealing OBP for a star, but he had a .338 OBP in the second half of his first full season and increased his walk rate by almost 50 percent. At $29, he doesn’t need to have a .350 OBP to return profit, but it’s certainly achievable for him.

The second and third hours of the auction may have seemed to be boring but I continued to try to push and find values around the edges before I got into dollar days. The list was short, but I was very happy with it:

I had Pivetta as a $20 pitcher and Snell at $15, which meant I got to at least play a little in the pool that I misevaluated, but we’ll get back to that later. Closers were more notably expensive than last year, even the bad ones, so getting Hader at that price was a thrill. Jeffers was a $12 catcher on my sheet and my preference was not to end up with one of the dollar guys at the end. Speaking of dollar guys, let’s see what’s behind Curtain Number Three!

I wanted to come away with speed in a few of these spots and boy did I. I also ended up with 4 guys with .330 OBP projections or higher, which may not sound like something to write home about, but projection systems are conservative by nature and there’s upside with all of them. I am not a big Simpson guy, but I kept holding back from throwing him out until the guys who had the big stacks were gone and I was able to get him for $10 below my value price. That was the biggest gap, but wasn’t the only one. 

On the pitching side, well, it wouldn’t be a team of mine this year without Jacob Lopez on it. He’s been my favorite endgame pitching target so far this year (we’ll get to another one in the reserves), and has the right upside for a mixed league. Martin has a coinflip of a chance at the closer job in Texas and I needed at least a shot at something after getting mostly shut out during the auction. 

So what were my big takeaways this year? I have three and you’ve likely noticed at least one of them so far.

Have a plan that can survive some traffic.

From the jump, I knew this was going to be a high-flying auction – and it was. But the aggressiveness that I build into my values, and the fact that I tend to be pretty agnostic about which high-end players I end up with, just gave me a slightly different lane to occupy. With Aaron Judge going for $63 and Shohei Ohtani going for $58, the values just showed themselves in the second-level of stars, which was neither an issue nor by design. This is why it’s important to make sure that if you’re going to be aggressive, it’s a spread-out version of it. You can’t just say you want to spend on stars, price the top guys at $50 or $55 and shrug when you don’t get them. 

The extra spending on stars came out of the mid-range starting pitching bucket.

As much as you think you know what is going to happen in each auction room, you never really know – the game is about preparation. Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar eats you. The bar ate me a little on this one. I got what I thought were pretty good values on Woo and Sale towards the early part of the action – I had them both as strong $4 values. I did not foresee some of the other pitchers I like becoming $8-12 values later on when the middle of the pitching pool dropped. I got in on Snell and Pivetta at those bargain prices, so I don’t feel like I came out empty-handed, but Dylan Cease at $13, Kyle Bradish at $11, Matthew Boyd at $6 and Kevin Gausman at $16 all jumped out as being ultimately better values than the ones I got on Woo/Sale. Though considering I have Woo and Sale as my SP4 and SP6, respectively, this year, I’ll still take it. 

Beware the NFBC-ification of standard roto leagues.

Pardon me for a little diatribe here, but it’s relevant. I don’t like the standard NFBC format – I’ve disliked it since it was first introduced and I’ve disliked it as it’s taken over more and more of the industry. Injuries are a part of baseball, and NFBC leagues punish teams with injured players to the point where it becomes significantly harder to compete because of it. It’s bad enough to have players get injured in a league like Tout Wars, when you just lose their potential stats, but when they need to jockey for bench spots with reserve players in an NFBC format, it rewards luck over skill more than I like in fantasy baseball. There’s a reason I don’t really play fantasy football beyond just the fact that I don’t like or follow the sport as much as I used to. Your mileage may vary, personal preferences, etc. I know roto isn’t for everyone either, but this is my column so you’ll suffer a little bit of this. 

Tout Wars, however (thankfully), is not an NFBC format and has an unlimited IL. Yet, it didn’t seem that way from the discounts available on players with injury risks/issues. There should always be discounts on players like this and many fantasy writers have been cautioning against signing up for known injuries when unknown injuries pop up all the time. (Not a sentiment I disagree with, for the record.) But in a mixed league, the replacement level is reasonable enough that there is a lot of opportunity now with those who have drank the NFBC Kool-Aid. Here are the guys I’ll need to replace on Opening Day, along with the reserves who will likely take their place:

And if those reserves don’t work out, there’s plenty more where that came from; it’s a mixed league after all. Some of these injuries are more serious than others and some are just players being brought along slowly. Westburg is a complete question mark, but the remainder of these guys should be back in their roles by around mid-May. If they were all 100% healthy (remember, no one is ever 100% healthy), this group probably goes for $100 total. In this auction, they went for $18. If two of them are back on that timeframe and play up to their expected performance based on their projections and their career, the whole gambit will have been worth it. If not, there’s always FAAB reimbursement. On top of that, it leaves me space to spam the waiver wire during April and May to find guys to complement the injured players and the other underperformers in that $1-2 group, which is absolutely my jam.

I also didn’t feel like I had to grab as many potential replacements as I did, but that’s where the most interesting players were. I love the upside of Harrison and Leahy in their potential spots. I will continue to be a Jung-head forever and always. Plus, someone has to close in the Minnesota bullpen–might as well be Sands and as the final pick of the reserve round, he was free.

So, in the end, three times was the charm in dragging more of the room with me into the strategy that I love to employ. And maybe some of them will do it better than me this year–there is no shortage of smart folks around that table. But either way, the auction is only Step 1. It’s what you do with it over the next six months that truly matters. 

As always, the whole Tout Wars experience is an extreme amount of fun–and thank you to Peter, Todd, Jeff, Ron, Justin, Brian and Nick for all their work in putting the leagues and weekend together. The title defense is now in full swing. Let’s go.