MoFo Fantasy Baseball '16 - The Regular Season

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A system of cells interlinked
Wait, have the final stats updated yet on the main page?
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“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



Whew. Finally.



My offense somehow hit below .200 for something like 5-6 straight days leading up to yesterday, so the whole thing was a lot more dramatic than expected. That, along with the inevitable "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" strategies that inevitably permeate the last couple of days, meant I had to make a couple of tough choices about who to start.

It was obvious Mike (well, I would guess it was more likely Lem) was making a run at Ks, for example. So I looked at IP and K rates for the random dudes he was tossing out there and came up with a guess for how many he might rack up, so I could decide how many starters of my own I needed to risk rolling out.

You ever hear the phrase "back of the napkin"? Well, this time it was a paper towel, but close enough. I decided he'd get around 34 Ks:




I figured I should get enough to offset this with three starters, but it might be close. But he had to use every slot for this starters, and I had four relievers going, so the odds were good I'd get a relief appearance or two to cover any under or over performers. And that's exactly what happened: when all our starters had finished, the Angels had the lead in Ks by one, and then Hudson and Romo came in and flipped it back. Won the category by two. Would've been fine if I'd started Kennedy anyway (and it'd have gotten me another half point), but I was primarily trying to limit downside, since the odds of being caught in ERA or WHIP by someone streaming six guys was pretty small.

Needless to say, after 2014's ending I didn't do any celebrating last night. I saved all my exhalation for this morning.



Some general additional thoughts:

Thanks to everyone for a great season. Special thanks to the teams that stayed active all year, and an extra special thanks to Mike, Tim, and Mark for the crazy sprint to the finish. I'm not sure we've ever had four teams still in contention for the Championship in September. And while it was all competitive, the race for the 2-4 spots was particularly nuts. Seems like the order changed something like 9 out of every 10 days over the last month.

A big congrats to Mark for an excellent season, in particular. He took first from me in June and held it for over a month. I took a tiny lead back right before the All-Star break, and then he exploded. Mark was in first from July 15th until August 29th, and his lead was as high as 20 points in mid-August. Tim and I both figured it was pretty much over at that point. But just 11 days later we were basically deadlocked, and we stayed within hailing distance of each other the last five weeks or so.

He was the much steadier of the two teams, though, thanks to that huge offensive first half:



As always, I'm mildly relieved it's over. Every year I forget what a marathon roto baseball is, especially when you're in contention until the very end. Hope you guys all come back next year and compete with the same intensity.



Wait, have the final stats updated yet on the main page?
i could be totally wrong here, but i THINK the final stats arent updated.....according to the stat-tracker last night, the scores are way off. i could be wrong, obviously, but almost positive they havent updated yet.



A system of cells interlinked
Lem still has stat tracker open on his machine and says we are in third place there. I can't access ST myself, so I am unsure what the deal is.



Last standings update: Mon Oct 03 03:02am EDT(according to Yahoo).....i THINK the final score is when they post the trophies....this **** happened last year in my other league. They updated it mid-day the following day. But again, I am completely unsure. Either way, great season guys!!



StatTracker doesn't calculate things to the same level of precision as the daily standings. So, for example, StatTracker had three teams at .271 for batting average, so it lists them as tied. But after thousands of at-bats, they're obviously not all at exactly .271, it's just rounding off. Some are .2706, some are .2714, etc. You can click on the averages on the full standings page to see:

http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo....&sort=3&sdir=1



i understand that, BUT it still has the same points from the day before....i BELIEVE it's not updated yet.....like i said, either way, great season guys



as of last night, not all 3 of us had .271....someone dropped to .270, thus my reasoning of it's not updated completely.....but what do i know, lol



Congratulations again Chris!

Im ready for next years draft right now. I know Troy Tulowitzki & Jose Bautista wont go as high as they used to, and neither will Chris Archer.



Just poring over my final stats:

I finished in 3rd with 108 points (56 hitting, 52 pitching); I finished in the top 4 in 5 of 6 hitting categories (7th in HR); came in 9th in two pitching categories (SV and QS). The counter on the side said I made 20 moves, but I think that's separate from my 10 trades. Regardless, I didn't make a lot of moves, but–in trading a lot–I generally tried to make higher impact moves.

HLA had six top-50 hitters on the final roster: Mookie (3rd overall player), Goldie (5), Xander (33), Hanley (36, great bounce-back year for him), Beltre (40, one of my favorite players), and . . . Carlos Santana (57, drafted him in the 19th round!); I had Dustin Pedroia, Christian Yelich, and Miggy (technically) on my team also (they finished 43rd, 50th, and 11th, respectively).

I had five top-50 pitchers at the end: Kershaw (7th overall, though I only had him for a few starts at the end), Scherzer (14), Andrew Miller (15), Cody Allen (86), and Tony Watson (100); I also had Jose Fernandez (44th, ), Dellin Betances (63), and Roberto Osuna (71) for a lot of the year.

I did pretty well in the hitting rates (2nd in AVG, 4th in OBP) in spite of giving 534 at-bats to Jason Heyward and Prince Fielder (went 115/534=.215 AVG when I started them, combined for 16 HR + SB). I've gone back and forth about whether or not I held onto them too long. I mean, I *did* because they never turned it around, but J-Up also had a terrible start to the season and ended up looking pretty okay for me (.252/.322, 29 HR, 7 SB when I started him). I weirdly came in 2nd in RBI's, but 7th in HR. I was never able to turn HR around after a slow start. I had 7 players hit over 20 HR (Odor, Xander, Mookie, Beltre, Santana, Hanley, J-Up), but I also got an underwhelming number from Prince, Heyward, and Goldie (hit 10 in the 2nd half, though he also stole 22 bases on my team!).

Pitching-wise, things didn't start very well for me. Scherzer and Fernandez got off to lousy starts. I grabbed Vince Velasquez off of waivers after his 16 K CG against SD at the beginning of the year and traded him for Chris Archer and Drew Smyly. Archer was okay, but not as good as I'd hoped; Smyly was dreadful (posted an 8.03 ERA, 1.72 WHIP) and gave up a ton of homers. This was right around when I made my most ill-fated trade Stephen Vogt + Danny Salazar for Prince Fielder and Garrett Richards. Vogt ended up having an acceptable year, Salazar was very good, Prince was hurt/bad until he retired, and Garrett Richards suffered a season-ending injury in his 2nd start for my team. (Upon trading Vogt, I employed Gomes, Grandal, Castro, and Montero behind the dish and they collectively hit .120 with 5 HR; Russell Martin was a god-send for me in the latter half).

I did poorly in SV and QS. Part of my hole in SVs was because the Cubs never generated any of them for Hector Rondon. Osuna was my only player to break 20; I regretfully traded him around the deadline thinking I had done enough to pull myself out of the hole in getting Watson and Ottavino and that I actually had a *surplus*. I feel stupid typing that now. I can chalk up SVs to bad luck and bad decisions, but I'm not overly upset about QSs. The types of starters that I value just don't do well in that stat. Most of my rotation was populated by younger starters (on innings/pitch limits) who get a lot of K's (drives up pitch counts) and who do better in FIP than ERA (with the expectation that their real results will approach their hypothetical ones). So it was VERY costly every time that Scherzer and Fernandez missed a QS for me. Likewise, that philosophy led to me giving a lot of chances to Smyly, Archer, VV, Odorizzi, Robbie Ray, etc. I'm just never going to have a rotation made up of low-K innings-eaters like John Lackey and Marco Estrada (and there aren't enough Scherzers and Bumgarners to go around).

I did take a hit in ERA and WHIP at the end by trying to catch up in QS's, which–in hindsight–I was better off avoiding. Iwakuma, Ray, Waino, and Wacha all hurt more than they helped. My best path to winning would have probably been to just accept the hit in QSs, go harder for SVs, and just try to coast on my leads in HD, ERA, WHIP, and Ks.

That said, I had a pretty good season. I had a really excellent draft (J-Hey at 56, Rodon at 137 were really my only bad top-15 picks), I made more good trades than bad, and had a shot to win it at the end (though it was an outside shot). I woke up in 2nd yesterday, so I'm disappointed falling to 3rd knowing that, but I also could have easily fallen to 4th.

So it goes, I guess.



Also, congrats to Chris and Mark!



^^ If I tried to map out everything I did this season in a post, I think the page would crash.

Ive been able to control my tinkering in football, dont count that stupid defense waffling, and its done well for me there. I know I blew it last year bad in baseball, worked hard to get from a dominant 1st to drop all the way to 5th place. This year I worked hard to get from a dismal last place to 5th. I gotta kill the tinkering, and learn outlying stats like WAR and such. If not, Ill be working hard to be a little above average again.

It is fun though.



Thanks, Tim. Congrats to you on a really great year, too. Average production out of guys like Heyward/Fielder and this might have turned out different, for sure.

And ah yes: stat breakdowns! Everyone should do one; very interesting to see all this stuff with a bird's eye view.

This was probably the most balanced team I've ever had: 56 hitting, 58.5 pitching. I wasn't really dominant anywhere, but I had no weaknesses: I came one home run away from finishing top 5 in every category, I was top 3 in half of them, and top 2 in a third of them. That's particularly gratifying, because I spent a lot of time and thought before the trading deadline specifically trying to deal surplus to shore up weaknesses. This led to slight drops in a couple categories and big jumps in others, for a net gain of 15 points from the All-Star break to the end of the season. Two of my target categories, AVG and HLDs, accounted for 10.5 of those.

My draft was mediocre. Altuve in the 1st was fantastic, but Bautista in the 2nd wasn't, and Price (in the 3rd) just kept underperforming. If he was even slightly closer to his normal self, it would've been worth 3-4 more points.

Mark obviously had the best draft.

I'll have to think a bit about the trades (I made 15 in all). They were a pretty mixed bag, and hard to judge except in aggregate, because so many were done with further moves in mind.



^^ If I tried to map out everything I did this season in a post, I think the page would crash.

Ive been able to control my tinkering in football, dont count that stupid defense waffling, and its done well for me there. I know I blew it last year bad in baseball, worked hard to get from a dominant 1st to drop all the way to 5th place. This year I worked hard to get from a dismal last place to 5th. I gotta kill the tinkering, and learn outlying stats like WAR and such. If not, Ill be working hard to be a little above average again.

It is fun though.
If you look at the four of us at the top, you see varying degrees of tinkering. There's a range of 20–254 moves, so I don't think there's a clear right strategy to employ within reason.

If I can offer my critique, it's that I think you do really well with your top players and not so well with the other two thirds of your roster. We have 23 players on our roster. Most teams have about 5 players that are really terrific and should only be moved for similarly large returns. Likewise, everyone has a handful of players at the bottom (worst couple of hitters, worst starter, worst reliever) that are pretty interchangeable with the best available guys in the FA pool. Chris made 254 moves, but I'm willing to bet that 85+% of them involved the bottom 5 spots on his roster.

It's that middle band of 10-12 players that I think you're too impatient with or tend to undervalue if they start to slump. For instance, you cut Rougned Odor after a month maybe (and he wasn't off to a bad start, maybe just a string of bad games) and he ended up having a great season (33 HR, 14 SB, .271 AVG). My best advice would be to make it so more of your roster is off-limits most of the time and to only fiddle with the bottom 3rd of your roster.

That said, you still finished in 5th and did a really good job of turning your season around at the halfway point. I always have fun keeping tabs on your team haha



I'll echo what Tim said: I actually think you do a very good job out of getting good value for your best players. It's cutting too easily on the mid-tier guys that can make or break a lot of seasons. Lots of roster spots to fill compared to fantasy football, so "stars and scrubs" doesn't usually work.



Thank you for your advice guys, and youre right. I have to have more patience with my middle-tierers.

I think Boston would do well for themselves letting Price come back to Tampa, and paying that ridiculous difference on his contract for us too.