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.

A Football Post? Heresy!

This will be an interesting year for me to watch the playoffs – I have no team for which I have strong feelings for.

I have three teams I root for a lot (Bears, Giants, and the Jets – I’ve tried to let them go, but their scrappy performance and Rex Ryan’s coaching job have brought me back in) and three teams I passionately root again (Dallas, which was due to growing up in the ‘70s and my father’s JFK assassination-fueled dislike of the city; Oakland, because of Al Davis, and a third team to come).  So, in order of least liked to most, here’s who I’m rooting for – and against:

12. New England Patriots:  the Jets’ arch-rivals, exacerbated by Bill Belichick, whose cowardly departure from the Jets to coach the Patriots after one day to coach the Patriots (admittedly, Bill Parcells had done something similar in reverse a few years before, but this was far more blatant) was nauseating.  Can’t stand him, can’t stand the team.  (My father, on the other hand, was a big Patriots fan, but he died before Belichick took over.)

11. Philadelphia Eagles:  Long-time irritating rival of the Giants.

10. Cincinnati Bengals:  The Browns have done such an awful job running this team.  They’ve done better the last few years, but I have a feeling what you’re now seeing is as good as it’s going to get.

9. Carolina Panthers:  More a geographical annoyance; I spent two years living and working in North Carolina while my wife went to Duke, and they weren’t fun.

8. New Orleans Saints:  Don’t hate them – Drew Brees is a good guy, and the city’s been through a lot – but don’t have any strong feeling for them, either.

7. Seattle Seahawks:  No strong feelings one way or another.   I’d probably like them more if they hadn’t had seven players suspended over the course of this year for substance abuse.

6. San Francisco 49ers: Might rank a little higher if Jim Harbaugh weren’t such a pain.  On the other hand, if Harbaugh weren’t the coach they probably wouldn’t be in the playoffs.

5. Kansas City Chiefs:  It’s been a long time since they were in a Super Bowl – the only teams of the original NFL-AFL merger that have been out longer are the Jets (by a year) and the Lions (never) – and KC is a nice town.

4. San Diego Chargers:  I have a lot of friends there.  Pittsburgh would have ranked higher; they’re an admirable organization and I have relatives who are huge Steeler fans.

3. Indianapolis Colts:  Relatively local.

2. Denver Broncos:  Denver’s also a nice city, and Peyton Manning’s a good guy who deserves a second Super Bowl win.

1. Green Bay Packers:  Surprise!  Despite yesterday’s loss and the rivalry, I like the Packers.  Locally owned by the city is a big reason, but they also have the history (I’ve read Instant Replay three or four times), and I liked them before moving out here.  Yes, there will always be bitter feelings between Green Bay fans and Chicago fans, but there’s also a ton of respect.

 

*****

 

Now, onto today’s bowl games:

-          Armed Forces Bowl (Middle Tennessee v. Navy) – this start in about fifteen minutes, so I guess I ought to post this soon.  Navy’s had a pretty good record in bowl games, and I try to root for the guys in the armed forces whenever I can, so it’s an easy call here.  It’s about the lousiest of the games left to play, however – the only one ranked lower is the Heart of Dallas Bowl, which is inexplicably being played New Year’s Day opposite three other bowl games and the Rose Bowl parade.

-          Music City Bowl (Georgia Tech v. Ole Miss) – hard to get excited about this, but it’s in Nashville, so the fan bases won’t have too far to travel.

-          Alamo Bowl (Texas v. Oregon) – this should be a good game.  Oregon had BCS hopes at the beginning of the year, and then fell apart at the end.  Texas and Mack Brown are parting was, because once you’ve won a championship, nothing less will do after that.   I guess I’d like to see Oregon win.

-          Holiday Bowl (Texas Tech v. Arizona State) – almost always a good game, but it starts so late (9:15 PM Central?!?) that I doubt I’ll watch much.

The Future of The Yankees

Apparently, they've finally figured out they need to develop prospects.

In the last 40 years, the Yankees have had two great runs - the 1976-1981 teams that won five division crowns, four pennants, and two World Championships, and the 1995-2013 teams, that have made the playoffs all but one year and brought home five World Championships.  The first group was put together with a couple of free agent acquisitions and savvy trades (Sparky Lyle for Danny Cater, Graig Nettles for a bunch of prospects and has-beens, Chris Chambliss for a bunch of prospects and has-beens... wow, the Yankees should have sent Cleveland a thank-you note), the second with an amazing core of prospects that all panned out (Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, and Bernie Williams from a year or two before).  But they've been doing it lately with free agents and guys that signed too-long contracts (yes, we're looking at you, Mr. Rodriguez).

It may take a few years.

Miami Cold

Cold is the best description of the feelings Florida residents have for the Miami Marlins, who built a new baseball park (primarily at the residents' expense) and brought in several high-priced free agents, then dumped them all within a year.  And things aren't getting any better, per Buzzfeed.

This Is Why God Invented Snowblowers

Carl Pavano will likely be out six to eight weeks after rupturing his spleen shoveling snow.

Not to get too far upon my high horse, but Pavano made eight and a half million dollars last year and over 70 million in his career, per Baseball Reference.  (He was still a free agent up until now for this year, however - think teams will be lining up to sign him now.)  You think it's possible to hire somebody to shovel the driveway, or buy a snowblower?