I drafted my AL Tout Wars squad on Saturday morning at the MLB.com headquarters in Manhattan - they have a pretty sweet office area at Chelsea Market.  Full results can be found here. AL Tout is a 12-team, AL-only auction league. One difference between Tout and other leagues is that it only takes 15 games to qualify at a position, which was actually a pretty big difference this year - Vladimir Guerrero, Adam Lind, Luke Scott and Ryan Raburn all picked up a position because of that difference.

Unlike Chris in the NL, I went with more of a Stars-and-Scrubs approach to my team, in part because I thought that the early values were a little soft. It's not an entirely unusual phenomenon - I tend to think that the elite players go for $3-5 too cheap in many expert leagues, particularly this one. If anything, I wish I would have bought one more elite player, but we'll see.

There was one mistake I made, and that was ending up with three catchers. I already had Martinez and Pierzynski, and threw out Russell Martin at $5 to get some money off the table. I expected he would go for around $10, given that he went for $12 in LABR. As you can see, I got stuck with him at $5. It's not a bad price, so it doesn't kill me, but it really hampered my roster flexibility later in the auction.

Here's the full squad:

The other consequence to the direction I took was that I had to go ugly with saves. Closers were fully priced (Rivera and Soria for 24, Valverde for 20, Feliz 22 (if he closes and not starts, I'm not sure), Chris Perez 19). The one bargain might have been Papelbon at $19.  I'm not cowed by that though - as is the mantra, saves come into the league, so I'll be aggressive on the waiver wire.