2026 Fantasy Baseball Draft Prep: Tout Wars H2H points auction recap

Chris Towers breaks down his expert league Salary Cap Draft results

When you get into a snake draft for Fantasy Baseball, you generally know what you're going to get. The order won't always be identical, but the ebbs and flows will happen more or less the same way every time. There will be three pitchers in the first round; there will be a bunch of outfielders taken early; there will, at some point, be a closer run; and on and on.

Auctions/salary cap drafts? Well, those are different every time. They're different because of the different temperaments in the room, but also because the order the players are nominated in can change how people value them – if every single elite player goes off the board in a row at the top, you might see more aggressive bidding as people realize their chances of winning those elite players are minimized with each one that goes.

But sometimes, you'll have a situation like the one we had in my Tout Wars draft this weekend, where somehow, Shohei Ohtani wasn't nominated until well after all of the other elite hitters are gone. That meant Ohtani was up for grabs at a time when a lot of the teams in the room had already spent a big chunk of their budget, which is how you end up with a $50 player going off the board for $42. 

When I saw that happen, you bet I kicked myself for already having spent most of my budget. I spent that budget on Jose Ramirez and Gunnar Henderson and Garrett Crochet and Ketel Marte and Kyle Tucker, and I felt I got good prices on each and every one of them. But I could have gotten an even better price on Ohtani if I had the money to play with there -- or I could have at least pushed a rival to spend a few more bucks. 

Maybe I should have gone all-in anyway. It might have been worth it – it's rarely ever the case that having Shohei Ohtani on your team isn't worth it, in fact.

Which gets to what my strategy in auctions has evolved to: I want to pay up early and aggressively for the true difference makers, and then I want to mostly sit out the middle class of players. That's why I bid aggressively on those five first or second-round players I mentioned earlier (and you can throw James Wood in there, even though a H2H points format isn't his ideal one). You simply cannot replace the production first and second-round caliber players give you; you can probably replace the production seventh or 11th rounders give you, though.

So, in most auctions, I'm going to be very active early, bidding up to my limit on nearly every one of the 25 or 30 best players. I want as many of those guys as I can fit onto my roster … and then I'm going to sit on my hands. It's hard to do – I am not a patient person by nature – but discipline is necessary at times. I want to have an elite core for my team locked up, and I'm willing to spend big to do it. 

But I'm not necessarily advocating for a "stars and scrubs" approach here. Because the nice thing about an auction is, there will always be good values available at some point, and you need to be ready to pounce on them when they happen. I wasn't ready for Ohtani, but I was able to be patient enough to give myself a shot to pick and choose which players in that middle class fell. Spending aggressively early and then keeping the rest of my powder dry for a while (like, an hour in the room), gives me the ammunition to bid aggressively once again for guys in the $5-10 range. Having the flexibility to go that extra dollar for Christian Yelich and Brandon Nimmo, for example, paid off huge for this particular build – those are must-start players in this format, and I got them for probably $5 or more less than what I would be willing to pay otherwise. 

Here's what my team looks like in this 12-team league with $260 budgets, Roto-style rosters, and CBS Fantasy's H2H scoring rules. Tout Wars is a series of Fantasy Baseball contests featuring some of the most notable analysts in the industry playing against one another:  

• C - Francisco Alvarez $9
• C - Kyle Teel $1
• 1B - Willson Contreras $11
• 3B - Jose Ramirez $39
• CI - Noelvi Marte $3
• 2B - Ketel Marte $24
• SS - Gunnar Henderson $29
• MI - Jackson Holliday $2
• OF - Kyle Tucker $34
• OF - James Wood $18
• OF - Brandon Nimmo $9
• OF - Chandler Simpson $1
• OF - Christian Yelich $8
• UT - Marcus Semien $3
• P - Garrett Crochet $37
• P - Sandy Alcantara $9
• P - Joe Musgrove $3
• P - Blake Snell $1
• P - Luis Castillo $5
• P - Matthew Boyd $4
• P - Trevor Rogers $4
• RP - Trevor Megill $1
• RP - Ryne Nelson $3

Reserves

• UT - Ivan Herrera
• CI- Isaac Paredes
• SP - Andrew Painter
• OF - Owen Caissie
• SP - Jameson Taillon
• SP -  Adrian Houser

For full results for this draft, head here for the complete draft board for every team. 

And I'm pretty thrilled with that. I got one of my favorite breakout catchers for a single-digit bid, and I was able to pair him with a fringe top-12 guy who slid thanks to a hamstring injury that will keep him out for likely the first month of the season. I'll have to find a fill-in on waivers for a few weeks, but in a H2H format, I figure to have five months of borderline elite catcher production out of this tandem. I can wait for that.

I'm in a similar spot with Holliday, Musgrove, and Snell. I didn't necessarily set out to target any of those three – in fact, I threw them out when I did precisely because I was hoping to spend some money on players who won't be available for the start of the season. But here's the thing: Nobody bit, and I got all three for exactly what I nominated them for. Holliday will be back before the rest of them – potentially by Opening Day! – but nobody was willing to go to $3 on him; Snell will be out until May, in all likelihood, and I couldn't get anyone to even spend $2 on him.

So I'll take them all at what I view as pretty sizable discounts in a league with unlimited IL spots. I'm not thrilled that I have three or four players I'll be immediately putting into an IL spot to start the season, but I'm not opposed to it, either. The early waiver wire runs are always the most important of the season, and now I've got extra roster spots to take chances on the early names that pop up. This is something to keep in mind in leagues with a lot of IL flexibility: You can essentially give yourself a few extra picks by picking guys on the IL for cheap and giving yourself extra bites at the waiver wire apple.

I was also pretty lucky with how the reserve rounds fell. Ivan Herrera going undrafted in the auction was a big surprise, though the way it happened made sense – by the time someone thought to nominate him, everyone's Util/DH spot was already filled, so he wasn't actually eligible to be bid on. I benefited from that little bit of oversight, and I was able to pair him with Isaac Paredes, a terrific points league player who slides because of concerns about playing time. However, with Jeremy Pena likely out to start the season with a finger injury, Paredes' path is a little more clear. 

I think both Paredes and Herrera are starting caliber players, and I'll be moving at least one of them into my starting lineup for Week 1 – Marcus Semien will move to MI to replace Holliday, and I'll likely start Herrera there if he gets past his knee inflammation issue. If not, I'm happy to slide Paredes in there early. 

On the whole, I'm very happy with how this worked out. There are a few players I don't necessarily love – Chandler Simpson and Noelvi Marte most notably – but there aren't any values I'm upset with. The closest thing to that is Willson Contreras, but he was also one of the last viable first basemen available when he was nominated toward the end of the draft, so I didn't really have a better alternative to pivot to – Sal Stewart, my hoped-for answer at first, ended up going for $14 at a point where I only had $17 to fill three spots. I passed on him for Contreras, and was able to go an extra buck to get Nelson (the best SPaRP in the player pool, a big edge in a points league) and Semien (whose plate discipline plays well in this format).

So, here's what I want to highlight about this particular draft that you can apply to your own: 

1. Know your format. I'm very familiar with the CBS H2H points scoring format, obviously, which I think gives me a bit of an edge on my competition here. 
2. Go into your draft with a plan. Not a plan for which players you want, because you can't control that. But a plan for how you want to spend your money. 
3. Stay flexible. I didn't necessarily plan on getting multiple IL stashes, but the prices were so good, and the unlimited IL spaces in this league make managing that so much easier. 

I think I executed my plan very well here, and I'm very excited about my team as a result. Now it's just down to how I manage the next six and a half months until the end.