You know it’s late in the season when a Fantasy Baseball blogger can’t think of anything more constructive to do than recommend a Rockies pitcher. But stay with us for a moment, because we think we’re on to something.

More precisely, we think Mike Petriello, late of Fangraphs and dweller in stat Valhalla, was on to something six months ago. In early March of this year, a Denver Post article about Rockies’ starting pitcher Jorge de la Rosa caught his eye. As you no doubt know, Coors Field is a real tough place to pitch. And so it was for De La Rosa from 2008, when he joined the Rockies, through 2012. His home/road splits were big, though not really different from anyone else’s. Then, in 2013 and 2014, a very strange thing happened: De La Rosa was lights-out in Coors, but sub-mediocre everywhere else. Merge his 2013-2014 Coors stats and you have a Cy Young candidate: 29 starts, 20 Wins, 3 Losses, 2.92 ERA, 1.24 WHIP. Merge his two-year stats on the road and you’re in Jeremy Guthrieland: 33 starts, 10 Wins, 14 Losses, 4.66 ERA, 1.38 WHIP. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve reached the Naked Lunch point of the Fantasy Baseball season—that moment when everyone sees what’s on the end of every fork. That of course doesn’t mean that we all know where we’re going to finish in our leagues. But it does mean that we know pretty much whom we’re going to finish with or be finished by. Sure, there will be unforeseen September call-ups galore, and also some waiver deals that send role players to contenders. But except for the prime prospects—Hector Olivera isn’t in the majors to sit on the bench, and Javier Baez probably isn’t either—no one knows which of the newly-summoned hitters might play regularly, or which pitchers might get plugged into a starting rotation and have some chance of success there.

Anyway, we certainly don’t. And this created a quandary for us, in our capacity of would-be timely bloggers. Thirty blog installments in, we’ve already told you about the guys we like and don’t like who’ve been around during the season. We don’t know any more than you do about who among the newbies is going to (a) play and (b) be good. And if you’re reading this, need stolen bases and nothing else, and thus can afford to have an otherwise-uninhabited spot in your starting lineup, you’ve probably already acquired the amazing Quintin Berry and his spotless SB record; you don’t need our input.

So we had nothing to blog about, until we heard that one of our heroes had died. That would be the writer/neurologist Oliver Sacks, the Mickey Mantle of his hybrid profession. Casey Stengel, marveling at Mantle, said that he “has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster.” Similarly, Sacks wrote better than any doctor—we mean English prose, so don’t tell us about Chekhov or William Carlos Williams—and doctored better than any writer. His specialty was describing the strange things a brain can do when its owner isn’t looking or hasn’t been nice to it. And this, needless to say, made us think of Justin Morneau. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s about a month to go, and maybe you need some Wins—usually the closest category—in your Fantasy league. Or perhaps your counting stats aren’t going anywhere, and your only chance to finish in the money is a sudden and decisive bump in ERA and WHIP. Or maybe, as was the case for us last year, your league has an innings maximum, your adversaries are nudging against it, you’re not, and you’ve got a chance to jump several points in Strikeouts, but you don’t want to torpedo your rate stats to do it. Or possibly you’re a DFS player, and you’re tired of putting Mike Zunino and Starlin Castro in your lineup because the only pitchers you can stand to use are the ones who cost too much and Zunino and Castro are all you can afford.

Yes, most of us need starting pitchers, and there are always plenty of them out there. The established good ones are, of course, happily wedded to their owners, none of whom is you. And the young and glamorous ones—Henry Owens, Aaron Nola, Manny Banuelos—command a Spitzeresque premium that you’re unwilling to pay. The rest of them are lined up, winking at you like the crew of a North Vegas brothel. Most of them are cheap, all right, but some have obviously been irreversibly damaged by life, and your problem with the rest of them is how to avoid infection. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, we began our quixotic attempt to design the Universal Baseball Association—the ideal full-season Roto-style Fantasy league. This quest was interrupted by a vacation, or, more accurately, “vacation.” The chief benefit of doing something you don’t especially want to do in someplace you don’t especially want to do it in is that circumstances induce you to imagine you’re doing something you’d prefer to be doing in a place in which you’d prefer to be doing it. So there we were, being nibbled upon by sea lice in the saltiest water this side of the Dead Sea. Suddenly and magically, the similarly-immersed children who’d foolishly been placed in our care seemed to vanish—don’t worry; they reappeared all too soon–and we were transported, in the kingdom of our minds, to our desks and computers, free to brood further about the categories and rules of the UBA.

Herewith the results. First, though, a quick summary of the criteria by which we judge our success; if you want more of the same, check last week’s post. The categories in an ideal league should, we think, be as few as possible; be susceptible of appreciation by both the average baseball fan and the stat geek; be “primary,” in that they reflect the building blocks of baseball performance, rather than being “derivative” stats that massage these primary categories to and beyond the vanishing point; focus on a player’s individual achievement rather than the team-based context in which that achievement occurs and can be distorted; yet produce stats that, in the aggregate, look roughly like the stats that a Reality Baseball team would produce over a full season.

Read the rest of this entry »

To distract ourselves from the relentless midpackness of our NFBC Main Event Team, we have been ruminating about loftier matters. What, we wonder, should be the stat categories and rules of the ideal full-season roto-style Fantasy Baseball League, which let’s call the Universal Baseball Association? We invite you to play along at home, or, as is more likely the case, at work.

First, let’s consider categories. There are five criteria by which we judge our choices of categories. These are:

Fidelity. We’ve often said that, in Fantasy Baseball, you’re not drafting “players” or “teams,” but rather proper names that represent collections of stats. That’s too facile, though. What you’re drafting (or claiming or FAABing) is a bunch of stat collections that, in the aggregate, are supposed to look something like a Reality Baseball team’s aggregate stats do. For one thing, you want your league to reward player performance that corresponds to performance that succeeds on the field. For another, you don’t want your teams to lack the balance that successful Reality Baseball teams have. You don’t want to leave out anything important, except to the extent that Reality teams do, and you don’t want to overemphasize any stats. For example, you don’t want categories that encourage you to do without relief pitchers, or (important point) relief pitchers who happen not to be closers, or players who can run.

Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t, and won’t, play in Fantasy Baseball keeper leagues that permit trades. Too much time-suck, too much rancor when the team in last place trades, say, Carlos Gomez to your main rival for, say, Wilmer Flores and Zack Wheeler, and neutralizes your impeccable draft planning and brilliant in-season maneuvering. But Reality Baseball itself is, of course, a keeper league that permits trades, and the run-up to the trade deadline is always pure entertainment.

But now the trading tsunami is over, the seas are once again calm, and here come the Birchwood Brothers in their trawler, dragging the bottom as usual for submerged exotica, and hoping the net brings up more than toxic oysters, dead toadfish, and sea lettuce. Mike Leake? Alex Guerrero? Shane Peterson? Even Mike Foltynewicz? Go to! All of those catches are too easy, and let’s toss them back and leave them for the weekend anglers to hook (although we admit it’s possible that the Braves, and hence Foltynewicz, won’t win another game this season).

No, we are interested only in the phosphorescent sea slugs that are too far below the surface to attract anyone’s attention but ours. And we think we’ve caught some. Here they are, in no particular order:

Tyler Holt, Indians OF. The promotions of Holt and Tyler Collins (who came very close to making the cut here) are significant, because they mark the first time that the population of MLB players named after the third-to-last slaveholding President of the United States has exceeded 1% of the total. But Holt makes it on the merits, too. Holt’s two-season (592 total PA) stats in Triple-A: .296/.378/.371, 40 SB, 9 CS. He’s very fast—his SB/CS numbers are very close to Jose Ramirez’s, and if you think that’s a criticism, check Jose’s MLB SB/CS numbers—and is a plus fielder in center field, too. The only thing blocking him there is the superannuated Michael Bourn, over whom Holt will be an improvement in every aspect of the game. Bourn, however, isn’t going anywhere, in either sense of the phrase, since he parlayed his superb 2012 season into a four-year, $48M contract that no one, including the Indians, now wants. So with the departure of Brandon Moss and David Murphy, Holt should really have become the Indians’ everyday right fielder. But their current bright idea is apparently to put Lonnie Chisenhall there, on the long side of a platoon with Holt, and we can almost understand, since it’s hard to give up on those first-round draft choices with power. Moreover, when Holt does start, he bats ninth, which isn’t the best way to use his speed. Even so: Bourn is just a sunk cost, and Chisenhall is Chisenhall, which means he’s capable of long slumps and his fielding may undo him. So it’s not impossible to see Holt winding up as the Indians’ full-time CF or RF, stealing some bases, scoring some runs, and producing a high OBP.

Bruce Rondon, Detroit RP. With Joakim Soria gone, the candidates for Tigers closer are Alex Wilson and Rondon. Wilson’s been great this year, but is a softish thrower and doesn’t strike people out. Rondon, conversely, has a triple-digit, but somehow very hittable, fastball. Yet Rondon’s got too much going for him to be passed up: 13.15 K/9 (a top-10 figure), a 2.54 FIP (right next to Chris Archer and Corey Kluber), and, most significantly, a bottom-10, .429 BABIP, which has no place to go but down. We think he’ll take over from Wilson as the Tigers’ closer at some point soon–and why not? Why wouldn’t the Tigers take a look at what they’ve got?—and do fine.

Aaron Sanchez, Toronto SP/RP. Sanchez began the season in the Blue Jays’ rotation and pitched well, contracted “upper body soreness” in early June, spent about 7 weeks on the sidelines, and has been near-perfect in four appearances as a set-up guy since his return. The prevailing wisdom is that he’s just a setup guy unless and until Roberto Osuna, the anointed closer, begins to struggle. Maybe so. But we think the Blue Jays are cannier. Their pickups of Mark Lowe and (we’re serious) LaTroy Hawkins suggest that they’re contemplating a bullpen with a Sanchezless future. Conversely, take a look at the Toronto rotation, even as supplemented by David Price. Can the Blue Jays really afford to have Drew Hutchison (1 QS in his last 9 starts) in their rotation? Not, we think, if they’re planning to make the playoffs, and Lowe and Hawkins free Sanchez to take over from Hutchison (or Buehrle/Garza/Dickey if anyone gets hurt). Make him a starting pitcher again on that team and he will have serious value.

David Holmberg, Cincinnati SP. Here is yet another starting pitcher—he was preceded by Michael Lorenzen, Jon Moscot, and Josh Smith—summoned from Louisville to fill a hole in the Cincinnati starting rotation, which at this point has more holes than filling. We can’t figure Holmberg out, but we like him. He’s a lefty, and is, of course, described by scouts as a back-of-the-rotation type, but we suspect they didn’t mean the back of the rotation on a Triple A team, which is where he’s been for two successive subpar seasons. He doesn’t have overwhelming stuff, he doesn’t miss bats, and he doesn’t give up many fewer walks than the norm. And yet: Called up by the Reds last September, he had four consecutive excellent starts against contending teams; called up again last week, he just had another one against Pittsburgh. Over those five starts, he’s got a 2.12 ERA, which is roughly half of what he had at Louisville. Why is this happening—why is he a different pitcher in the majors than he is in the minors? Our answer lacks analytical rigor, and doesn’t satisfy us, but it’s the best we can do after reviewing his numbers: he rises to the occasion. In all of his starts, he’s put some men on base, but then, in those high-leverage situations, he doesn’t let them score. Maybe, when you’re a second-round draft choice pitching poorly in Louisville and wondering where your career’s gone, there aren’t enough occasions to rise to. Or maybe Holmberg’s run of good starts is a blip, and he turns into a pumpkin tomorrow. But we touted him on Twitter last week, and we’re staying with him.

“I had rather be right than President,” famously stated Henry Clay, even as he was (1) going out of his way to be wrong, in order (2) to become President, a ploy that (3) still didn’t work. We ourselves had rather be trapped in Tartarus with only George Steinbrenner and Bill O’Reilly for company than President, but we’d rather be right than pretty much anything else. And there’s an extra frisson of pleasure for us if we happen to be right when most other people aren’t. So it pains us not only when we are outright mistaken, but also when we are less than certifiably correct, and the consensus comes closer to the mark than we do.

We are nonetheless committed to giving you a precise assessment of the accuracy of our in-season opinions. The opinions in question are those with respect to what we call Pick Hits (if they’re players we suspect you don’t own but might want to) and Muscular Boys (if we suspect you might own them and won’t miss them, should you need to clear a roster spot). To keep ourselves contrarian, our Pick Hits aren’t owned in more than 25% of Yahoo leagues, and our Musts to Avoid aren’t owned in fewer than 50%.

Our opinions probably can’t be described as comically erroneous, though go ahead if you insist. But we are forced to admit that only one of them demonstrates the preternatural shrewdness to which we aspire. Otherwise, once we mentioned them, the guys we mentioned did pretty much what the common run of pre-season predictions envisioned they’d do, however well or badly they’d done theretofore.

We are undaunted, though, and at the very end of this installment, we roll out our latest Pick Hit, Tomas Telis, whose promotion by the Rangers we hoped for last week. Our wish was granted. First, though, the bookkeeping. The dates in parentheses are the dates on which we identified these guys; the stats are this season’s, starting with those dates.

Pick Hits

Jake Marisnick (April 22nd). 181 AB, 18 R, 15 RBI, 4 HR, 8 SB, 3 CS, .221 BA, .266 OBP. Buoyed by his past minor league success, his hard-contact improvement in the second half of 2014, and his superb spring, we thought Marisnick would be a mainstay in the Astros’ lineup and hit about .270, with perhaps 10 home runs and 20-plus stolen bases. Instead, he lost his center field job to Preston Tucker, went on the DL, and hasn’t hit well since his return. He’s doing about what everyone besides us thought he’d do—a little worse, actually—with about the same strikeout and hard-contact rates as in past seasons.

Brett Oberholtzer (May 12th). 38 1/3 IP, 2 W, 2 L, 2 QS, 44 H, 17 W, 19 ER, 27 K, 1.59 WHIP, 4.46 ERA. Only one of his eight starts was really bad, but only one of them was really good, and now he’s in the minors. We haven’t given up hope on him, and can imagine flagging him again if he returns to the bigs. The difference between what we thought he’d do and what he did is largely attributable to his ballooning walk rate. This sudden spike has happened to him a couple of times before, in the minors, and he’s always managed to correct whatever was wrong. His starts at Fresno since his demotion suggest that he’s doing so again.

Jose Urena (May 19th). 39 1/3 IP, 1 W, 4 L, 4 QS, 39 H, 17 W, 16 ER, 19 K, 1.42 WHIP, 3.66 ERA. We expected a bit better, because, like the rest of his rooting section, we keep thinking he’ll convert his 97 MPH fastball into strikeouts. As you see, it didn’t happen. But he didn’t pitch badly at all, and may attract our interest again, if he finds himself with a team that can get him more than 14 runs in 7 starts, which probably isn’t the 2015 Marlins.

Welington Castillo (May 26th). 1118 AB, 15 R, 15 RBI, 5 HR, .261 BA, .328 OBP. This one worked out even better than we’d hoped. When last we discussed Castillo, he’d just been traded from the Cubs, where he was the third-string catcher, to the Mariners, where he was the second-string catcher, but figured (we thought) eventually to work his way into some sort of job-sharing with Mike Zunino. Our expectations were modest, and our reasoning wasn’t abstruse: Zunino is overused, and Castillo’s a good catcher and at least as good a hitter as Zunino. We failed, however, to reckon with the fabled acumen of the Mariners’ brain trust. Castillo played one game for Seattle, then got shipped to the Diamondbacks in the Mark Trumbo trade. He won the Arizona job by virtue of having a pulse, and then started channeling Yasmany Grandal. Meanwhile, if you don’t own any of the three Seattle players and want a sadistic chuckle, check out the June/July stats for Trumbo, Zunino, and Castillo’s replacement Jesus Sucre.

Jefry Marte (July 15th). 15 AB, 2 R, 3 H, 1 HR, 4 RBI, .200 BA, .250 OBP. So far, so not too bad. Brad Ausmus seems to like the idea of having Marte in the lineup against lefthanders, in which role we think Marte will thrive. Hope you followed our exhortation and had him last week against J.A. Happ, whom he destroyed. Hope you didn’t have him this week again against J.A. Happ, whom he didn’t destroy.

Musts to Avoid

Mat Latos (April 22nd). 4 W, 3L, 7 QS, 72 2/3 IP, 62 H, 19 W, 30 ER, 64 K, 1.12 WHIP, 3.72 ERA. Latos’s first three starts of the season were so awful that we figured the guys who noted his declining pitch velocity were on to something. The pitch velocity is still down, and it’s not like his post-April stats have healed the sick, raised the dead, and made the little girls talk out of their heads, but he’s performed roughly to consensus preseason expectation, which means he’s had some value.

Anthony Gose (April 29th). 216 AB, 30 R, 10 RBI, 1 HR, 10 SB, 6 CS, .273 BA, .318 OBP. We weren’t exactly wrong about what this guy would do, but we were wrong about what its effect would be—so far. Gose had a very fast start this season—an artifact, we felt, of his otherworldy April BABIP of .500. Invoking his career OBP of .302 and 30% strikeout rate, we surmised that he’d hit a slump and lose his job. He had an epochally horrible June–.169/.213/.183, with no RBIs in 71 at bats—but kept his job, and now he’s hot again. We defiantly insist this can’t continue. Gose’s BABIP, even excluding his hot April, is .364, which figures to go down, and his batting average and OBP figure to go down with it. His SB rate is nothing special, and his fielding stats suggest that he’s not doing what got him the center field job in the first place. We expect another slump, and don’t think the underperforming Cabreraless Tigers will be able to carry his bat the way the underperforming Cabreraful Tigers could. And as before, Rajai Davis is ready to take Gose’s job whenever he’s done with it, or it’s done with him. Will that happen soon enough to make him worth jettisoning now? Who knows?

Ian Kennedy (June 4th). 2 W, 4 L, 5 QS, 45 1/3 IP, 42 H, 11 W, 15 ER, 37 K 1.17 WHIP, 2.98 ERA. Kennedy’s had a pretty soft schedule since June 4th, and some of the 9 unearned runs he’s given up since then are due to his decompensation once his fielders got things rolling. So perhaps he hasn’t pitched as well as his numbers suggest. But still: could we have been more wrong about him? We concluded that the Ian Kennedy of 2014 (a pitcher who could get left-handed hitters out) had vanished, and the Ian Kennedy of 2012-2103 (a pitcher who couldn’t) had returned. As of June 4th, lefties’ slash line against him was .297/.366/.637, which over the course of an entire season would make Lefties Against Kennedy the MLB MVP. Now, the slash line is .245/.311/.511—but for the occasional home run, he’s been unhittable against them. We were lucky: we had enough dead spots on our roster that we didn’t have to unload Kennedy when we went shopping, so we’ve still got him. If you listened to us, we apologize.

Melky Cabrera (June 10th). 131 AB, 12 R, 15 RBI, 3 HR, 1 SB, 0 CS, .313 BA, .366 OBP. It looks like we got this one wrong. We concluded that Cabrera could no longer hit (1) fastballs, and (2) left-handed pitching. He’s still having trouble with fastballs, but he’s started to hit left-handers again, just like he used to (Melky’s OBP against them since we slagged him is .450 in 40 plate appearances, which elevates him roughly to his norm for the season). Is the old Melky back? His power seems to be gone, probably for good, but he can apparently still hit.

So in light of the foregoing, why would you listen to us about Pick Hits or Muscular Boys? Beats us. But just for yuks, bear with us as we add Tomas Telis to the Pick Hit list. Telis is a 24-year-old switch-hitting catcher, just promoted by Texas to replace the injured Carlos Corporan on the roster. We first mentioned him during the pre-season. He’s being labeled a back-up catcher, just like Corporan. We see him the way we saw Welington Castillo: as a guy who could easily find his way into a job-sharing arrangement with supposed first-stringer Robinson Chirinos, and maybe even become the undisputed starter. Chirinos is 31 years old, and essentially a career minor-leaguer. He’s a right-handed hitter with a slash line of .214/.304/.429, which means he’s got some power but that’s about it. He’s nothing special at throwing runners out (30% caught-stealing rate), and ranks near the bottom of the league in pitch-framing. Telis doesn’t have much power, but he can hit: .291/.327/.404 at Round Rock this year, .345/.377/.489 last year. (In 2013 at Round Rock, Chirinos was .257/.356/.400.) The knock on Telis has always been his catching skills. But he’s been throwing out 48% of would-be base-stealers this season, as opposed to 18% last season, so he seems to have figured something out. Has he also learned to frame pitches? We don’t know; but how bad would he have to be at it to neutralize his other advantages over Chirinos? Can the Rangers possibly see themselves not only as contenders, but also as contenders whose contention depends on having Chirinos in the lineup? We propose not, and we’d make Chirinos an official Muscular Boy if he had enough Fantasy owners to qualify.

Next week, we’ll forbear posting on our customary Wednesday, preferring to wait until Saturday or Sunday, August 1st or 2nd, on the theory that we might have something to say in the wake of the July 31st trading deadline that everyone else isn’t saying. If you can’t stand the unaccustomed wait, please stop by @birchwoodbroth2 on Twitter.

“Who knows how his audit stands save heaven,” says Hamlet as he contemplates offing Claudius in light of the latter’s prospects for a pleasant hereafter. We’ve always loved the idea of God as the ultimate IRS agent: dissemble as much as you like, but he knows that you’ve been paying the nanny off the books and that you made out like a bandit at your garage sale.

We think of this now because it’s time to review our first-half ledger, and since by definition we’re examining how the players we’ve recommended in this blog have done, there’s no place to hide. This week, we’ll take a look at players we recommended during the pre-season, either in our Cold Predictions post or at some other point—everyone we went out of our way to discuss and promote before April. We don’t think we missed anyone; correct us if we’re wrong. Next week, we’ll give a full statistical report on our in-season Pick Hits and Muscular Boys, who are the guys we’ve been endorsing or dispraising if you need, respectively, to fill or unplug a roster spot. We may also issue a progress report on our preseason list of “Unusual Prospects,” who were huge-longshot minor leaguers to consider in abyssally deep drafts. But the only takeaway worth taking away on that one is that you may want to grab catcher Tomas Telis if the Rangers ever get around to promoting him, as they should. Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t know whether there’s a heaven, but if there is, we’re pretty sure it’s got Fantasy Baseball. Moreover—eliding for the nonce the question whether “fantasy” is a viable concept in the realm of Pure Essence—we figure that most of the stuff that can make things go wrong with your team, like the whips and scorns of time or the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, isn’t problematic in Paradise. So if you draft Miguel Cabrera in heaven, you get the indestructible 2012-2013 model, not the still-sublime but more fragile 2015 version.

Here in the fallen world, though, injuries happen, and, as you undoubtedly know, a significant one just happened to Cabrera. He’s out for six weeks—at least six weeks, some say—with a calf strain. We didn’t draft him; if you did, you have our sympathy. What makes your misfortune interesting for present purposes is that it has called our attention, for the first time ever, to Jefry Marte, whom the Tigers have just promoted from Toledo and who’s expected to form the short side of a first base platoon with Alex Avila while Cabrera is out. The questions we’re asking ourselves about Marte are: (1) is he worth getting if you’re desperate for a warm body at Corner Infield, as you may well be if you own Cabrera? (2) is he worth keeping in mind as a daily league/streaming option? (3) is he worth going out of your way to get? The answers, we think, are yes, yes, and (to our immense surprise) maybe. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Sunday, an uncrewed Space X Falcon 9 rocket was launched in Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. As you may know, it didn’t quite get there. We’re complete ignorami on the subject of aerospace flight—this is rocket science—but here’s what we saw. About a minute after liftoff, a cozy-looking white glow appeared at the top of the rocket, whereupon the flame at the bottom began to eat the rocket, and if you think that’s just a weak metaphor, check out the video. The rocket tilted from the vertical to the horizontal, and then back to the vertical, but not in a good way. When there was no more rocket for the flame to consume, everything exploded, and within a few seconds there were nothing but small fragments glittering in the sky.

A lot of time, talent, energy, and money were invested in this project, which, we feel safe in assuming, was a dead-weight loss. Moreover—and we’re not making this up—if the ISS astronauts don’t get a grocery delivery pretty soon, they’re going to have to come home for dinner. But still, you’d have to be a NASA employee, Elon Musk, or comatose not to find the video of this launch pretty spectacular. The visual part is plenty amazing, but what turns the video into a work of art is the voice-over. The voice in question is that of George Diller, who’s had this gig for NASA for more than thirty years. You’ll probably recognize it: that calm, somewhat intense, slightly hushed Chuck- Yeager-cum-golf announcer voice that is meant to be, and is, the opposite of Herb Morrison’s, who handled the play-by-play on the Hindenburg.

Diller was, shall we say, nonplussed by the turn of events, but he kept his cool. “We appear,” he observed, as rocket fragments twinkled like snowflakes in the moonlight, “to have had a launch vehicle failure.” And yes, Diller told us, after a further long and pregnant pause, just in case we had been thinking that the vaporization of $133 million worth of rocket and supplies was what everyone had had in mind all along, “the range confirmed that we have had a non-nominal flight,” “nominal” evidently being aerospacese for “not according to plan.”

Our Fantasy Baseball flight, too, can justly be described as “non-nominal.” This is a high-concept blog—Two Dabblers Take on the NFBC Main Event With Their Own Money—and though the blog has transformed us from dabblers to obsessives and gone places we hadn’t envisioned, we remain mindful of our vow to keep you abreast of developments with our team. Now it’s time for a midterm report, and, as we watch the gleaming shards of our pitching staff fall to earth and think about the sleek and powerful rocket of a team we’d hoped for, “non-nominal” seems about right, though if you prefer “launch vehicle failure,” we won’t quibble.

To descend (LOL) to specifics: We are 7th of 15 teams in our Main Event league and 189th of 450 overall in the Main Event. In the league, we’re at the top of a tier of teams, but far behind the top six (12 points to 6th, 35 points to an in-the-money finish of 3rd), and we don’t see ourselves closing the gap. Our hitting has been fine: if our pitching had been as good as our hitting, we’d be 11th overall. On the other hand, our pitching has been dismal: if our hitting were as bad, we’d be 416th. In short, it looks like we’re stuck with a mid-pack squad.

We discussed our draft results in our April 8th and April 15th posts, so we won’t do more than summarize them now by way of background. We drafted in 4th position, and our draft strategy was unorthodox but straightforward: Get a slugger in the first round, take Billy Hamilton in the second round and remove steals from the must-have list, get two elite closers early (3rd/4th/5th/6th round, depending on what the other owners are doing closerwise) and a closer-in-waiting later on, don’t draft any starting pitchers until the 8th or 9th round, but draft four or five in a row once we begin. Towards the end of the draft, grab some outfielders who can be spotted or “platooned” in the semiweekly-transaction world of the NFBC to take advantage of matchups. All in all, trying clumsily now to translate draft position into auction dollars, we estimate that we spent two-thirds of our “budget” on hitters and one-third on pitchers, with one-third of that third (or maybe a bit more) devoted to closers and CIWs.

To bring you up to date on our post-draft flailings with free agents: Among the original draftees, Travis Snider, Jose Ramirez, Jake Smolinski, Gregor Blanco, Pat Neshek, and Trevor Cahill are gone. We turned Snider into Todd Cunningham, whom we then turned into Randal Grichuk. We turned Jake Smolinski into Carlos Peguero, whom we then turned into Ben Paulsen. We turned Jose Ramirez into Brad Miller, whom we turned into Derek Dietrich. We turned Pat Neshek into A.J. Ramos, and Steve Cishek into Tony Cingrani, whom we turned into Junichi Tazawa. Free agent Andy Van Slyke is just gone. Among the now-departed starters who have graced the Team Birchwood roster are Shawn Marcum, Brett Oberholtzer, Travis Wood, and Jose Urena; with us now are Matt Wisler and Brandon Beachy.

So the roster as it now looks consists of:

C: Russell Martin
C: Yasmani Grandal
1B: Jose Abreu
2B: Derek Dietrich
3B: Nolan Arenado
SS: Alcides Escobar
CI: Carlos Santana
MI: DJ LeMahieu
OF: Seth Smith
OF: Brandon Moss
OF: Randal Grichuk
OF: Billy Hamilton
OF: Ben Paulsen, or Melky Cabrera when we can stand him.
UT: Alex Rodriguez

P: Dallas Keuchel
P: Alex Wood
P: Gio Gonzalez
P: Ian Kennedy
P: Mike Leake
P: Drew Hutchison
P: Chase Anderson
P: Aroldis Chapman
P: A.J. Ramos

BN: Ender Inciarte
BN: Martin Prado
BN: Ken Giles
BN: Junichi Tazawa
BN: Brandon Beachy
BN: Matt Wisler

So, like the puzzled Space X engineers, we’re asking ourselves: What did we do wrong? Is there any answer other than “you drafted the wrong guys”? If that’s the answer, how did the owners who drafted the right guys (Shelby Miller, A.J. Burnett, Yovani Gallardo, Jake Odorizzi, and Carlos Martinez all went in the 15th round or later in this league) find them? If we used the wrong strategy, what part of it was wrong? Going after closers too soon? Overvaluing steals? Allotting too little of our budget to our starting pitchers? Was it our in-season management? Should we have been more aggressive and free-spending in going after high-priced free agents like Eduardo Rodriguez or Lance McCullers? Or perhaps quicker off the mark with cheap, haveable guys like John Axford or Brad Ziegler? Or is that just a variation on the “wrong guys” conclusion? And how (RIP Philip Austin) do we make our voices do this?

If we have any answers to these questions, we’ll share them next time. Meanwhile, we yearn to hear yours. Also next time, unless more pressing matter supervenes, a clear-eyed evaluation of how we’ve done with players we’ve recommended or disrecommended over the months so far. Preview: The results have been mixed, which is more than you can say about the bargain-basement daily-play suggestions we occasionally make on Twitter, @birchwoodbroth2, which have been pretty uniformly bad. Still, just like Elon Musk, we plan to keep trying.