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.
