What Happened to the Fantasy Baseball Team That Stunk to High Heaven?

As a followup to my previous post about my awful Fantasy Baseball team, we're actually still in playoff contention (barely) at 9-10.  (After losing six of eight to open the season, we went on a 7-2 run, but have lost the last two in a row.)

I'm not whining when I publish the list of how things have gone.  I'm just amused.  Here are my draft choices and how they've done:

1st round:  Paul Goldschmidt, Diamondbacks:  Broken hand a week and a half ago, out for the year.  Waived for that reason - he was having a fine season until then.

2nd round:  Carlos Gonzalez, Rockies:  On the disabled list for the second time this year, and according to The Denver Post, probably out for the year.

3rd round:  Hanley Ramirez, Dodgers:  Also on the disabled list.

4th round:  Jay Bruce, Reds:  Well, he's active (he was on the DL earlier this year).

5th round:  Shelby Miller, Cardinals:  Active, but certainly a disappointment from last year.

6th round:  Martin Prado, Diamondbacks:  Now on the Yankees.  Also a disappointment.

7th round:  Hyun-Jin Ryu, Dodgers:  One of my better picks.  However, he had a DL trip earlier this year and is injured now.

8th round:  Jeff Gyorko, Padres:  Oft-injured, a huge disappointment, gone.

9th round:  Zack Wheeler, Mets:  Another decent pick, and he's done okay for the most part.

10th round:  Jim Henderson, Brewers:  Stripped of his closing job as spring training ended, horrendous in middle relief for the first few weeks.  I dropped him in early May; he went on the DL a few days later and hasn't emerged from it.

11th round:  Wilin Rosario, Rockies:  Disappointing.  Dropped when Travis D'Arnaud started hitting.

12th round:  Bobby Parnell, Mets:  Made one appearance Opening Day, then went on the DL with Tommy John surgery.  Gone.

13th round:  Kyle Lohse, Brewers:  The last of my good pitcher picks with Ryu and Wheeler - although he managed to tweak his ankle last night during an at-bat.

14th round:  Charlie Morton, Pirates:  Started out lousy, dropped, picked up again two weeks later, and he's been up and down ever since.

15th round:  Carlos Quentin, Padres:  On the DL into June, then was lousy.  Dropped in July, and he's now back on the DL.

16th round:  Wandy Rodriguez, Pirates:  A few lousy starts, and I dropped him (why, oh why didn't I take Jonathan Niese, who I'd picked for four years running?).  Also dropped by the Pirates, and out for the year after undergoing surgery.

17th round:  Dan Uggla, Braves:  Dropped early on when it was apparent he wasn't turning it around.  Braves and Giants have also since dumped him from their rosters.

18th round:  Archie Bradley, Diamondbacks:  In the minor leagues all year.  Dropped when I was short of players and he was on the DL.  Might come up in September, but by that point, who cares?

19th round:  Cody Asche, Phillies:  Dropped early on (perhaps before the season even started) when I needed help in other areas.  Hasn't been horrendous, but no regrets for pulling the plug.

20th round:  Kris Medlen, Braves:  This was a mistake -- he was already out for the year, but somehow CBSSports' fantasy game decided I'd picked him.

21st round:  Nate Schierholtz, Cubs:  Thought he might have turned a corner after hitting 21 homers last year.  He hadn't; I dropped him in May, and the Cubs have dropped him too.

What to Do When Your Fantasy Baseball Team Stinks to High Heaven

 

 

I’ve been in the same head-to-head fantasy baseball team every year since 2004 (and the same head-to-head fantasy football league each of those years, too).  Before that, I had a couple of fantasy football teams in 2001 and 2002, and I was in a Rotisserie baseball league from 1988 to 1998.  So I’ve been doing this for a while.  (Note I’m in one league, not many leagues.  I like being in the same league with the same people, and not having to remember who’s on what team.  I did multiple football leagues as a favor for a few years, and it was a pain owning a certain player in one league, while having him owned by your opponent that week in the other.  And I’d rather forget the year the live drafts for both leagues occurred simultaneously.)

For the first six years of both leagues, I was pretty much in the middle of the pack – nothing great, nothing horrendous.  I made the playoffs occasionally in both leagues, but no championships.  Starting in 2010, however, everything changed.  I hit upon a strategy in fantasy baseball (which I cannot reveal, of course), and my teams became powerhouses.  I twice had the best team in the league in the regular season (and we folded in the first round of the playoffs both times), once had the highest-scoring team in the league and missed the playoffs (finishing in last place in the division with a 13-11 record), and once went 12-2 in the first half of the season and 0-10 after the All-Star break, mostly due to an unprecedented barrage of injuries and close contests (two of the ten losses were wins up until the last pitch of the week’s final game).  Meanwhile, in football, I had no strategy, but won three championships in four years.

Which brings us to 2014.  And my fantasy baseball team this year – blows.  We’re 1-3, and we’ve scored fewer points than any team in the league.  I know why, too – I didn’t do as good a job of employing the strategy I’d used in years past, and I picked a lousy pitching staff.  (Two teams picked pitchers to start the live draft, I went with a hitter, and then in the next 18 picks – over 60 percent of which were autodrafts – nine starting pitchers were chosen, which means 11 starters overall had been picked by the time it got back to me.)

I really haven’t experienced this in a while, but I’m sure others have.  Here’s what I’m going to try to do the rest of the season, and what I recommend others in a similar predicament do.

1)      Don’t tank.  Not if you want to be invited back.  Years ago, we had a couple of teams that stopped adjusting their lineups sometime around July.  Not surprisingly, it was very annoying to teams still in the playoff race that their nearest competitor for the final spot was facing a team with five players in their starting lineup on the DL.  Those teams were not subsequently invited back.

2)      Don’t whine - or if you do, make sure everybody knows it’s tongue in cheek.  It’s nobody’s fault but your own if your team’s horrible.

3)      Do put the best team out that you can every week.  Keep shuffling around those guys, keep looking at who they’re playing, and who your two-start pitchers are.

4)      Don’t propose ridiculously one-sided trades in your favor.  No one will take you up on them.  And even if they do, the trades will be rejected by majority vote of the league.

5)      Don’t propose ridiculously one-sided trades in someone else’s favor.  For the same reasons.

6)      Do propose trades if you’ve got a surplus in any area.  For example, I have three guys on my team who have two things in common (Judd Gyorko, Dan Uggla, Martin Prado) – they all play second base, and they all stink right now.  However, they may not all stink the whole year.  If two of the three of them ever get their act together, it’s time to start dealing.

7)      Do scout the waiver wire.  Daily.  Maybe even three times a day.  Now, there’s a big difference between my baseball and football leagues here: 10-team Fantasy Baseball league with only one league’s worth of players (National League, in my case) is very different than a 12-team Fantasy Football league with all of the NFL players available.  In the latter, there are going to be a ton of guys available week to week, and in some positions (quarterback, tight end, kicker, perhaps even defense), you can play mix-and-match depending on the opponent.  No such luck in baseball – if all the teams have 12 position players and 9 pitchers on the roster, that means virtually all of the starting position players will likely be taken (12 players/team times 10 fantasy teams = 120, 8 positions times 15 NL teams = 120), along with roughly ninety percent of the starting pitchers and probably the best 20-25 relievers – and you don’t really want the rest.  That said, injuries occur, players get sent to AAA, and guys become available when they mosey over from the AL.  Now, it’s not likely you’ll latch onto three Yasiel Puigs in one week.  But it might not hurt to put a top prospect or two that seem ready to make the jump to the bigs on your team, and hope for the best.

8)      Wait until next season.  Cause my team’s gonna be awesome in 2015.

My Rant About Baseball Announcers

I like most baseball announcers, I really do (with the exception of Tim McCarver, but hey, he's retired now).  But one thing that drives me crazy is when one of them gets off into an "in my day."  Baseball has consistently changed over 44 years I've been a fan - and many of the changes have been for the better.  (Believe me, you don't want to watch the winning run score on a walk, a sacrifice, a balk, and an infield groundout.)  Let's not compare the 1980s to the game thirty years later - and if the comparison is made, make sure the facts back it up.

I was listening to the Mets-Braves game on the radio today.  The broadcasters (I would guess Jim Powell and Don Sutton, but I really don't know) started talking about the Mets' Eric Young Jr., noting he lead the National League in stolen bases last year with 46.  Then one of them - I would guess Sutton - started talking about the tail end of his career in the 1980s, saying that in that era, 46 stolen bases wouldn't have gotten him in the league's top 25.  (The other said 46 stolen bases might make you a candidate for release.)

Thinking this might be an opportunity to call bullshit, I looked it up - and per Baseball Reference, the lowest 46 stolen bases would have ranked in the years 1975 through 1999 (excluding 1981, the strike year) would have been 12th.  And that's combining the leaders from both leagues, NL and AL.  The average spot 46 steals would have gotten you in that time frame would have been somewhere between seventh and eighth.  Which is around where Young ranked last year in MLB - there just wasn't anybody in the National League ahead of him.

Here's the thing.  In the 1970s and 1980s, broadcasters could make these "in my day" claims ("In my day every pitcher threw nine innings, every day, and struck out 12 each game) without worrying about having backup, unless someone brought a Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball with them to the game.  Not anymore - those stats can be looked up in five minutes on a cell phone.  So I'm recommending that broadcasters have a firm grasp on the facts - they aren't going to want a web site pointing out errors all the time.