Archive for fantasy baseball

My primary keeper league is a 15-team, mixed roto league where we start two guys at each position with six outfielders and nine pitchers.  We draft our starting roster and then have just two opportunities  — the final week of April and mid-May — to fill out a 10-player bench from the free agent player pool.  That’s it.  No other time.  There’s no streaming of pitchers throughout the year unless you roster a few on your bench and there’s no waiting to pounce on a rookie on the waiver wire once he gets called up.  You need to know in March who is going to get called up, regardless of whether it’s mid-season or September.  The first month and a half is all about knowledge and foresight. Read the rest of this entry »

For me, there’s nothing more fun about a fantasy baseball season than the constant trade chatter that goes back and forth between owners.  While the goal is, obviously, to walk away with a deal that you consider favorable for your team, I can feel just as good about a discussion that fails to culminate in a trade, but is still filled with good, old-fashioned baseball talk.  It’s like spending a whole day fishing, not having caught anything, and still feeling good about the time spent.  But nothing, I mean nothing, sucks the joy out of a spirited trade negotiation more than having to deal with a trade bully.

You know the guy I’m talking about.  It’s not just the fact that he believes that he has the best players or that his strategy is the best way to win the league.  It’s when you turn down an offer of his and, rather than try to re-negotiate the deal, he spends the rest of his time trying harder and harder to push you into it.

First, he’ll start by running down your guys.  It doesn’t matter if it’s an up and coming rookie or a multi-year veteran, he’ll find a dozen different ways to cut down your player and explain to you how trading him now is your best course of action.  Not for the value you think he’s worth but for some “realistic” value that he has somehow assigned.  The guys he is offering, on the other hand, are the absolute best and you are a fool for passing them up.  Usually that comes accompanied by some condescending comment about how you really should watch this guy play and if you knew anything about the game you would know the value he brings to the table.

You then try to counter his offer and rather than even listen to what you have to say he tells you that the players he’s offering are involved in other deals and you have to act now or he’s going to trade them away.  He’ll tell you that he doesn’t want to because he likes your deal better, but he’s not going to have a choice.  He has to act now.  That’s when you get the time limit — “I’ve got some stuff to do right now.  I’ll be back around three, so just let me know by then, otherwise I’m going to have to make the other deal.”  More often than not, there is some indignant tone aimed at making you feel bad for not jumping at his “once in a lifetime” offer.

Later that day, you’ll receive some sort of an email or text asking you if you’ve thought about the deal some more.  How it’s really the best move you can make for your team and that he hasn’t heard from the other guy yet, but he’s got to get a deal done today, so these players aren’t going to be available soon.  When you politely decline his offer again, you receive that immediate message telling you to have fun finishing in 8th place.

But just when you think you’re done and that this guy is out of your hair, he’ll make yet another run at you.  This is usually when he starts to endow his years of fantasy wisdom on you and explains the nuances of this particular league.  Doesn’t matter that you’ve been in the same league for multiple years, you apparently just don’t understand how to play or  see what this deal is going to do for you.

He’ll start telling you exactly what you need, how to run your team, and what you should be doing — all under the guise of friendship and good sportsmanship.  Suddenly he’s going to help you.  He knows more about your team and your strategy than you do and he’s going to help you finish in the money.  You guys will finish first and second.  But has he changed the deal at all?  No.  It’s still that same crappy offer designed at stacking his team and doing nothing for you.

When you decline again, you’re told you’re making a huge mistake.  Your team is going to flop.  You’re going to look back and wish you made this deal.  Are you sure you don’t want to do it?  This is the last chance because he’s going to have to do this other deal he’s been working on.  You decline one last time.

“Fine.  Good luck trying to get a deal done this year.  Thanks for your donation this year,” he says in his parting shot and you’re finally free from the worst trade talk possible.

Atleast until he comes back to you the following week with the same exact deal…..

When he slid into second and immediately grabbed his knee, my heart dropped.  The sickening taste of bile crept up my throat and into my mouth as I anxiously awaited for him to stand up, dust himself off and signal to the trainers that he was fine.  When that didn’t happen and he gingerly limped off the field, immediate thoughts of a torn ACL raced through my head.  In three different leagues I grabbed Evan Longoria at the tail end of the first round and until that moment, I wasn’t giving third base another thought.  Now, with news of a partially torn hamstring and a six to eight week recovery period, I’m left here staring at my computer screen, feeling like Kramer when the Kenny Rogers Roasters sign was finally turned off. Read the rest of this entry »

With a full month of baseball in the books, you’d have to think that your league’s waiver wire has been picked clean.  However, between the recent rash of injuries and rookie call-ups, there are certainly a few names that have slipped through the cracks.  Here are two guys you might want to consider depending on the holes in your roster. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re looking for help at the catcher position, now is the perfect time to start looking at buying low on certain guys.  Regular backstops such as Russell Martin, Geovany Soto and even Brian McCann are struggling out of the gate and it’s probably time to start putting in a few offers and see what it would take.  But what about Alex Avila?  After struggling as a rookie, Avila turned things around last year and put up a tremendous stat line that vaulted him into this year’s preseason top ten and turned him into a highly coveted commodity on draft day.  Now here in his third full season, he’s posting a woeful slash line of .220/.303/.424 and people are starting to wonder if last season was for real or just a fluke.  Is he a good buy-low candidate? Read the rest of this entry »

As we wrap up the month of April it’s time to go back to your waiver wire and sift through some of the names of players that have been dropped over the last few weeks.  Usually they are players who were taken in the later rounds of your draft and, with an early season slow start, have been discarded by their owners and forgotten on the free agent scrap heap.  However, a number of those players are now starting to turn things around and could be timely adds to your roster, whether it’s for a starting position or even just quality depth.  Here are a pair of just such examples and, even better, at thin positions.

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There’s nothing more depressing than watching an athlete refuse to admit that the career is over. I understand the feelings involved and the internal struggles one has with their own diminished abilities and, in essence, their own mortality, but there comes a point where you just have to say, “enough is enough,” and learn to walk away from the game gracefully. Between Andy Pettitte‘s comeback with the Yankees, Jamie Moyer’s 78 mph fastball and the Indians’ recent signing of Johnny Damon, we’re seeing it far too much in baseball and every day is starting to look like Old Timer’s Day.

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Between all of the injuries and slow starts, it’s expected that everyone in your league is scouring the waiver wire and looking for players to fill in the gaps.  The trick though, is to do it on the cheap this early in the season.  There are far too many people blowing their FAAB budget too soon or wasting a decent waiver priority on a quick-fix band-aid that won’t be playing in a month’s time, so while you need to stay active, you need to be smarter than the next guy in the way you do it. Read the rest of this entry »

With just about 10 games into the season and no one amassing more than 40 plate appearances, the Small Sample Size Police are in full force right now.  Hot starts, cold starts, nothing matters to these brazen fantasy owners who dismiss such meaningless statistics at this time of year.  But that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t have a little fun and appreciate the good fortune bestowed upon us by the fantasy gods as our catchers come flying out of the gate, white-hot, and throw us some always helpful power stats.  I mean, would you rather be sitting there lamenting Russell Martin’s ice cold start and wonder if his batting average will actually be worse than 2011’s .237 mark or give in to your child-like giddiness over the fact that Alex Avila has picked right up where he left off last season?  Yeah, that’s what I thought… Read the rest of this entry »

When you write a fantasy baseball column that recommends players, your number one priority is accuracy.  You can make all the suggestions you want, but if you’re making bad calls, no one is going to listen to your advice.  And even if you do happen to get one right eventually, there’s always someone out there to tell you that even a blind squirrel eventually finds a nut.  You need to know what you’re talking about.

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