Among the peccadilloes and eccentricities that we’re willing to confess to in this forum, perhaps the most embarrassing is our continuing thirst for 80’s synthpop, which we were too old for even the first time around. The sillier and stupider the better, as far as we’re concerned: Human League, Soft Cell, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Human League, A Flock of Seagulls, Men Without Hats, and of course post-Vince Clarke Depeche Mode, goth-synth titans so dumb they make Ozzy Osbourne look like Harold Bloom. (Come to think of it: Have you seen Oz lately? Even with the makeover, he does look kind of like Harold Bloom, who’s looked pretty much the same for the last 40 years.)

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Spoiler Alert: We’re going to tell you two sentences from now where we come down on the subject of Brad Miller, enigmatic Mariner. Jump to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know until the end of the article. Spoiler: We have no idea. The point of this piece is to call your attention to what we discovered when we started investigating this subject: we found that new, exemplary, state-of-the art, microscopic, persuasive explorations of Miller and his stats, in sickness and in health, by undisputed Fantasy All-Stars, wind up in opposite corners, and can’t be reconciled. Read the rest of this entry »

Eos is extending her rosy middle finger in our direction, beckoning us to another day of Fantasy futility. Our weekly Fangraphs deadline is here, and once again, we have spent a restless night pondering, weak and weary, the question preoccupying all of Fantasyland: what’s going on with Melky Cabrera?

Since you’ve found your way here, you probably already know all there is to know about Melky, but let’s do a quick review, just for giggles. He turns 31 in August. He had some success early in his career with the Yankees, had an excellent 2011 with the Royals and an even better 2012 with the Giants, producing the highest batting average in MLB. He’d have won the official batting title, but MLB had other ideas after Melky was caught enjoying a mild stimulant composed of arrowroot, cyclopropane, and organic library paste.

He served a suspension, spent much of 2013 on the DL, then came back strong with Toronto last season (.301/.351/.458). He signed a big three-year contract with the White Sox during the off-season, and there was a broad consensus among forecasters about what would happen during 2015: Mild regression to the mean, with a slash line of roughly .290/.340/.440, a dozen or so home runs, about 75 runs scored, and maybe 65 RBIs.

In other words, a player of some Fantasy value, and he went for $10 in the Tout Wars mixed auction (same price as Joc Pederson!) and in the 12th round of the Tout Wars mixed draft. We ourselves got him in the 11th round of our NFBC draft, which was about his average draft position in the NFBC. Read the rest of this entry »

Like most Americans of our generation, we remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we got the news about Kennedy. It seems like just yesterday. In fact, though, it was last week, and we were sitting at our computers, as usual, staring at baseball numbers, as usual. We froze with horror and disbelief as we saw that Ian Kennedy had pitched 3 2/3 innings, allowing 9 baserunners and 7 earned runs. Actually, now that we brood about it, that may instead have been May 17, when we were sitting at our computers, as usual, staring at baseball numbers, as usual. We froze with horror and disbelief as we saw that Kennedy had pitched 5 innings and given up 6 earned runs. Or, we wonder, as the mystic chords of memory begin to chime like Peter Buck’s guitar, was it instead May 12, when we distinctly recall freezing with horror and disbelief as we saw that Kennedy had pitched 4 2/3 innings, let 11 guys reach base, and surrendered 5 earned runs? No, wait—it might, after all, have been April 25, when Kennedy pitched 4 1/3 innings, with 9 baserunners and 8 earned runs the outcome, and we froze with horror and disbelief. Read the rest of this entry »

The older we get, the more awed we are by catchers and the more literally unthinkable we find what they do. Our imaginary lives are as richly textured as the next stat geek’s, and now and then, in the kingdoms of our own minds, you might find us pretending that we’re thirty or forty years younger, and far better baseball players than we ever were. But though we might imagine ourselves hitting Stargellesque home runs, throwing Koufaxian pitches, or making Robinsonable plays in the field, we just can’t conceive of getting into and out of a crouch as often as catchers must and do. Our geriatric knees just won’t let us get our geriatric minds around the possibility.

But being able to crouch that much and that often is of course merely one part of a catcher’s job. As you know, he’s also got to call pitches, block the bad ones, frame the good ones, throw out base stealers, pounce on bunts, and, so it’s said, serve as the on-field team’s prefrontal cortex. So it’s unreasonable to expect catchers to hit very much, and in fact, many of them don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

It can’t be easy to be the manager of a major league baseball team. True, the pay and the perks aren’t bad, and a lot of guys don’t mind the travel. But for one thing, there’s the uniform. It really serves no practical purpose, and even if you’re relatively young and relatively trim, like Kevin Cash or Joe Girardi, you’d still look better in a nice crisp Zegna. If you’re not and you’re not, you might as well be wearing a clown suit.

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So here’s this starting pitcher who arrived in the Major Leagues in 2013 at age 23, made 10 starts, 7 of them Quality Starts, and posted the best ERA of any rookie starter in the American League. Yet he got not a single Rookie of the Year vote, and was paid no pre-season attention by the Fantasy experts in 2014—he wasn’t even taken in the 15-team, 29-round Tout Wars mixed draft. And the experts were right: he started the 2014 season 0-6 before being sent to the minors. Of course, he got no support from his hitters (12 runs in 7 starts).

But he did in fact pitch pretty badly: he’s fortunate his record wasn’t minus 1-6. But then the guy gets it together in Triple-A, comes back up for good in July, and makes 15 starts, 10 of them QS. Nonetheless, he was again almost universally ignored in drafts this year. Maybe that’s because he had a terrible spring training, though that may have been due to the injury that has kept him on the disabled list for the first month-plus of the season. But he’s finally healthy, and has made two minor-league rehab starts. Unfortunately, the first one was dismal. Fortunately, the second one was superb. Read the rest of this entry »

More matter with less art, we hear some spoilsports telling us. We came for data; give us data. Fair enough, and here you go. The thing is, though, you never know. Sometimes you complain about the menu and you wind up with manna. Other times, you complain, and you get so much of what you’re after that, as God so trenchantly put it, “it come out of your nostrils and it be loathsome unto you.” Keep us posted as to which it is; we know you won’t be bashful about it. Read the rest of this entry »

There is no stronger or more unpleasant current in the emotional maelstrom that is Fantasy Baseball than Dumper’s Desolation. This is the feeling you get when you are forced to give up on a player and jettison him, whereupon one of your opponents rescues him, and he (the player, but also the opponent) prospers. As an example, if one is needed: It’s Memorial Day, 2014. You paid good money for Jedd Gyorko at the start of the season ($14, if you happened to buy him in the Tout Wars mixed auction). He’s rewarded you by hitting about .170, and it’s not a subtly-potent .170. You’ve long since banished him to your reserve roster, and replaced him with a second baseman who’s not hurting you as badly but also not helping you—Gordon Beckham, let’s say. As far as you know, there’s nothing wrong with Gyorko physically; he’s just performing poorly. Now someone else on your roster is coming off the DL, and you need to free a spot. So you bitterly but confidently mutter “good riddance” and put Gyorko on waivers. Someone else grabs him and stashes him. A week or two later, Gyorko goes on the DL. He’s got severe plantar fasciitis, which is news to you and everyone else besides Gyorko and his podiatrist. A month or so after that, Gyorko, much refreshed, returns, and you watch helplessly as he posts a .260/.347/.398 slash line for the last two months.

An experience to be shunned at all costs, right? Yet in most leagues, dumping is a way of life; in fact, the better and more sophisticated the owner, the likelier (s)he is to have a roster that forces a difficult choice. And in Fantasyland as in the rest of the universe, Newton’s Third Law applies, and you’re going to have to control the equal and opposite reaction when it’s time to upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »

With draft season over and duly reported upon, we have been brooding about what new worlds to conquer. Our long-promised sabermetric investigations are forthcoming, but they take time, and we’ll no doubt be staggering down many blind alleys and culs-de-sac before we get someplace worth bringing you to. We’ll keep providing progress reports—well, status reports, anyway—on Team Birchwood in the NFBC Main Event, but those won’t take long, even if our bargain-basement starting pitchers stop igniting upon exposure to oxygen and we move up in the standings.

Meanwhile, having been irritated during draft season by so-called experts touting so-called sleepers who were already well-known in places like Kazakhstan, we find ourselves even more irked by these same experts, now that the season’s started, touting waiver wire pickups that are probably making casual fans on Pluto sneer. Let’s quickly do a Google search and see what we come up with. “Week 3 Waiver Wire.…” Hmmm… pre-injury Jake Lamb. Odubel Herrera. Drew Pomeranz. Wade Davis, for God’s sake. We’ll accept arguendo that there are dilletantish Plutonian 10-team mixed leagues in which some of these guys might be available. But if you’re far gone enough to be reading not just Rotographs but this particular blog, you or somebody else in your league already owns them. So what exactly do you do when, say—this is of course completely fanciful–Brett Lawrie disables your left fielder with a slightly-misdirected hard slide and it’s time to go replacement shopping? Read the rest of this entry »