Three Ways to Lose Your Fantasy League

Coming up in less than two weeks, I'll be participating in the Tout Wars NL-Only league for the third time. Apparently they don't kick you out for finishing 10th out of 12, which is nice. But that means that while other Touts can use their experience in the competition to offer advice on how to win your league, I'm not well-positioned to do that.

Instead, I offer the following post-mortem, which looks back at three things I did wrong which each individually could have sunk my season. If you find yourself wanting to lose your league for some reason, I'd suggest following in my footsteps. Otherwise, I'd suggest doing something else.

We'll get to the list in a moment, but first, a quick look at the standings to congratulate Tout Wars NL-only winner Ian Kahn, and a quick look at my initial roster on draft day, which might give some hints as to where the rest of this article is going:

1. Overreact to Your Mistakes from Last Season

My debut season in Tout Wars back in 2023 went well enough for a rookie. I never really threatened the lead after the All-Star break, but I spent most of the year fighting for podium positions and still managed to finish in the top half (fifth out of 12) even after a late-season swoon. Given the caliber of competition in the league, I was happy to finish above the midpoint in year one, but I set my sights higher in year two.

My 2023 team had some things going for it, as you'd expect for a team that finished better than average, but it also had a massive hole. Zac Gallen ($22) and Blake Snell ($15) proved to be an excellent and underpriced pair of aces, by my rotation after that — Eric Lauer ($8), Tylor Megill ($5), JT Brubaker ($4) and Vince Velasquez ($1) — offered next to nothing. Grabbing Eury Perez in the reserve rounds kept the rotation competitive, but I knew I needed to do far better with starters three through six if I was going to give myself a chance to win in 2024.

That meant I entered the auction comfortable with being on the high side in terms of how much I spent on pitching, and it did indeed play out that way. With $95 of my $260 budget (36.5 percent) going to hurlers, I was well above the league-wide average of $82 (31.5 percent), trailing only Derek Carty and his $107 staff.

Derek won the league in 2023 and finished a respectable fifth in 2024, which I'll take as proof that there's nothing inherently wrong about the way I budgeted. But if you're going to overspend on pitching, you have to get it right. Instead, each of my four most expensive starters wound up being an overpay, with the quartet returning a combined zero dollars from the $77 I spent. Even nailing some budget buys like Ranger Suarez and Gavin Stone couldn't make up for the hole I dug for myself with Bobby Miller and Walker Buehler in particular:

Landing Suarez and Stone (as well as grabbing Spencer Schwellenbach off waivers in early July) meant that my pitching didn't actually bottom out. Despite managing a combined four points (out of a possible 24) in ERA and WHIP, I volumed my way to a combined 18.5 in Wins and Strikeouts. While I didn't get what I paid for with my expensive pitching staff, that wasn't this team's primary problem. The bigger issue is that by spending so much on my pitchers, I left myself unable to assemble a competitive offense: 

My $3.58 spent per pitching point was 42 percent worse than average, but even if I'd been as efficient in converting my pitching dollars to points as league winner Ian Kahn was, my offense would have kept me from contention. $95 at $1.70 per point comes out to 56 pitching points, which would have given me a total of 75 due to my pathetic offense, merely enough to finish fourth. 

Rather than assuming my 2024 team would struggle in the same areas as my 2023 squad, I should have remained balanced and given myself the chance at competing on both sides of the ball. While Derek Carty did manage to pull off a competitive enough offense on a shoestring budget, that proved beyond my capabilities. Given that a 12-team, NL-only league is on the extreme end in terms of how few at-bats are available on waivers, let alone quality at-bats, I don't think this was the correct environment for me to try such an unbalanced strategy.

2. Put Too Much Faith in Pitchers Coming Off Injury

The only example of this specifically hurting my NL Tout Wars team was with Walker Buehler, but it deserves a point all to itself, as many pitchers fit into this category last season, and many more will fit into it this upcoming campaign.

Buehler was returning from Tommy John surgery, but he'd undergone the procedure all the way back in August of 2022 and had seemingly completed his recovery, even coming close to appearing late in the 2023 season before the Dodgers elected to shut him down. They decided to ramp him up slowly in the spring, but he seemed to be for all intents and purposes healthy, just targeting a May debut in order to keep his innings total low enough that he could help the team deep into October.

While Buehler did indeed show up in early May as advertised, he simply wasn't very good, either immediately upon returning or at any point later in the year. He finished with a 5.38 ERA and 1.55 WHIP in 16 starts, including a 5.84 ERA and 1.51 WHIP in eight starts prior to a two-month absence with hip inflammation and a 4.93 ERA and 1.59 WHIP in eight starts after returning from that injury.

I was comfortable drafting Buehler, and even specifically sought him out in leagues with injured list spots like this one, primarily because he'd cleared the first hurdle in his recovery and had already begun throwing. The same was true for Kyle Bradish, who was diagnosed with a sprained UCL in mid-February and given a PRP injection but had already resumed throwing within a week. Bradish returned at the start of May, just like Buehler, and gave drafters a 2.75 ERA and 1.07 WHIP over his first eight starts. Those would be his only eight starts of 2024 and possibly 2025 as well, as the elbow troubles resurfaced and he underwent Tommy John surgery in mid-June.

Kodai Senga (shoulder strain) and Gerrit Cole (elbow nerve irritation) were also popular injury stashes, though I personally avoided them as neither had even played catch until the day before Opening Day in Senga's case and early April in Cole's. That clearly foretold longer timelines, and that was how it played out. Senga was delayed by triceps issues, returning for just one start in late July before straining his calf while running to cover first base and missing the remainder of the regular season.

Cole was the biggest success of the four, though he didn't make it back until the second half of June and struggled to a 5.40 ERA and 1.46 WHIP over his first seven starts back. He finally gave you a Gerrit Cole-like 2.25 ERA and 0.93 WHIP over his final 10 outings, but one strong 60-inning stretch from him plus 39.1 good innings from Bradish make for a pretty unimpressive return from this quartet of pitchers. 

Keep these four in mind when drafting this year's set of injury returnees such as Spencer Strider, Shane McClanahan and Sandy Alcantara. I thought I'd scored a gem in an underpriced Buehler as my SP4 and set myself for a monster of a pitching staff for the final five months of the year, but it turns out Buehler was in fact significantly overpriced and I would have been better served spending those $11 on a healthier player.

3. Don't Make Enough Small, Early FAAB Moves

In my initial draft of this article, I'd titled this section, "Don't make enough FAAB moves," as there's a clear correlation between those of us who made the fewest total FAAB moves (myself, Scott Pianowski and Brendan Tuma) and those of us who finished at the bottom of the standings (myself, Scott Pianowski and Brendan Tuma). But analyzing it at that level is akin to pointing out the fact that NFL teams who run the most tend to win the most. It gets the causation backwards, as fantasy teams that are well out of the race come August are unlikely to toss in that extra $1 or $0 bid while the teams fighting it out until the bitter end are likely to try even harder to find every small edge.

Instead, I want to focus on just the number of moves we each made prior to July 29, the first of two FAAB periods on either side of the trade deadline which featured heavy spending on players coming over from the American League. Here's how many total players we'd each acquired prior to the deadline spending spree:

I show up as a frankly embarrassing outlier on that table. You might think that I was negligently skipping FAAB periods or intentionally hoarding my money, but that's not the case. I was regularly winning one or two players most weeks on medium-to-large bids. But what I wasn't doing was supplementing those with enough cheap bids to improve my roster around the edges. 

Through the end of May, for example, I'd spent $391 of my $1,000 budget, middle of the pack compared to my four busiest opponents (who were also the four highest finishers at the end of the year), but I'd purchased far fewer players than any of them:

The specific players I paid up for largely didn't work out, with only a $22 Matt Waldron (who I never managed to use at the right times and eventually cut) standing out amid a group of disappointing young players who quickly got hurt or were sent back down, including Robert Gasser ($222), Luis Matos ($73) and Christian Scott ($33, a few weeks before his debut). But it's the overall strategy that I'm most disappointed in. 

Anyone can mess up an expensive FAAB buy, and each of the four top-four finishers who so active on the wire in the early going had a few duds. But they made up for it with sheer volume, which allows you to stream the final few spots of your roster based on matchups rather than being stuck with Jared Triolo and his .611 OPS just because he's in the lineup regularly. It also gives you more chances for a cheap buy to unexpectedly become a key contributor and wind up sticking on your team the rest of the year. By focusing almost exclusively on expensive rookies who could make a big impact, I didn't give myself a chance to produce the small wins which are evidently so vital to a strong finish in a league such as this one.