My Head is Spinning…Catching Up After Vacation

I’m baaaack. After embarking on a week and a half long road trip through Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota, I was mostly deprived of keeping up with baseball, and the chances I did have to follow the news, I chose not to take advantage of. Blasphemy! I know, I know. Although my one (yes, to everyone’s surprise, I am only in one league this year) fantasy team has little chance at a money finish, I still did not want to have any distractions during this adventure-filled vacation. Of course, I probably picked the worst possible time to take this trip, as the crazy trading deadline was smack in the middle of it. As you could imagine, upon returning home and trying to figure out how to catch up on everything I missed, my head was spinning.

Ubaldo Jimenez is an Indian??? Huh??? That was the first thing I found out and my exact reaction. I later began my attempt at determining the best method to learn of all the baseball happenings, while not spending hours upon hours on doing so. Here is how I did it…

Rotoworld Transactions Page – Initially, I thought I would just read the standard Rotoworld news blurbs, and just keep clicking on the previous news link until I reached the last piece of news I was familiar with. Unfortunately, that idea proved too ambitious, as it seemed like each individual day took like 10 pages to complete, and I had about 11 days to go! Too much clicking for me, so I decided that simply reading the transactions would provide me the meat I was looking for, without the bones. This of course deprived me of every-day performance results, but at least got right down to business on all the trade deadline happenings.

FanGraphs Trade Deadline Coverage Series – Naturally, the next site I checked was FanGraphs as I wanted to look up how Ubaldo has pitched so far for the Indians. To my delight, I found an entire series of posts analyzing the trade deadline deals. Jackpot! Now I could read intelligent analysis and discussion about the transactions I just learned of on Rotoworld. Slowly, but surely, I am feeling more confident that I could answer questions like “What team is Edwin Jackson on?”

Fantasy Roster Player Game Logs – Although I only own one team and it is quite a sad group of players at that, I still feel that curiosity to find out how my guys have done while I was away. So I surf on over to CBS, find that my team is sitting just as low in the standings as when I had left, and then check on each individual player. At this point, I can’t even remember which pitchers I started in which week. Since I already know my point total, this was more of an “oh, that’s interesting that Homer Bailey has a 9.00 ERA over his last 15.0 innings” than a “holy crap Homer, you suck!” kind of look through my player’s stats.

Box Score Perusal – Though I now mostly remember what teams the players on the move have landed on and how my fantasy players have done, I still am not caught up with the other players around the league. I am mostly interested in the breakouts, surprises and disappointments to see if anything has changed. And of course, I am interested in Jose Bautista. Did he set the OPS record yet? Is he at 40 home runs yet? Was his place in the Hall of Fame reserved yet? So like a typical day during the season, I checked my first box score in what seemed like forever, clicking on the names of the players I cared about to find out more than just their batting averages. This exercise was great for hitters, but of course I only looked up pitchers who started that day/night. So there is still work to be done, and I look forward to it.