Baseball
Fantasy Baseball Recap: Week One (Mar. 30 – Apr. 9)
I am in a fantasy baseball league with my cousins and many of his friends. To these people I am not known as Stanko. I am known as Cousin John. […]
I am in a fantasy baseball league with my cousins and many of his friends. To these people I am not known as Stanko. I am known as Cousin John. Or CJ. Depending on the day.
I am of the believe that Fantasy Baseball is the toughest fantasy sport to play. It is 162 games long with daily updates. I think it is the hardest sport to turn it around if you start off bad. It takes massive patience, diligence and frankly absurd confidence to make it in Fantasy Baseball.
I remember I won this league once maybe five or six years ago. It has been a very long time. Frankly, maybe even longer. I remember where I was. I was standing behind the shorter couch at my old home in Southbury and I saw the final game end. My matchup (with I don’t remember who) came down to that very last game. I could go back and look it up, but the standings don’t go back that far.
On my family’s lives, I swear I am not just making this championship up. It is real.
But getting back to the standings. The past three seasons have been dismal performances on my part. Probably due to lack of focus, I have been a bottom dweller. And it is has not even been close. So this here blog is a way to keep myself accountable. I am going to focus. I already am a bit more back into baseball with the fast pace of play, and this hopefully will be a second step to falling back in love the with sport I played most.
So here we are. Week one recap of my matchup against Onions And Ketchup. Not sure about that team name, but let’s roll with it.
I should also mention that I started writing this recap of my week one matchup on April 13th, which is technically more than midway through my week two contest. This is the setting the stage and catchup. We have to figure out how this is going to look and feel every week. Lots more moving parts with Fantasy Baseball compared to Fantasy Football, so patience while we fine tune this synopsis process.
WEEK ONE: March 30 – April 9
So this is how week one unfolded. I won 8-3-0 over Mr. Andrew Huntley, but three of the categories could have gone any way and I was just on the fortunate end of it. Hits, Runs and Home Runs all could have flipped on the last day which would have turned the tides in my opponents favor.
It came down to the last game of the day on Sunday. The San Diego Padres vs. the Atlanta Braves. I had Ozzie Albies going as well as Juan Soto. Those two combined for three hits, which put me over the top in the category. I was fortunate that Andrew did not have anyone going in that game.
My team only scored two runs on Sunday (thank you Soto and Taylor Ward), and that proved the difference as I had to fend off five runs scored from Andrew’s team on the final day.
Neither Andrew and I had anyone hit a home run from those in our playing roster on Sunday. My 12 home runs as a team were spread out; I had nine players on my roster hit home runs. Juan Soto hit two, along with Jordan Walker and Cedric Mullins…yea wasn’t expecting that from Mullins.
Andrew got his first category win with RBIs thanks in large part to Peter Alonso smashing in 11 runs. That’ll do it. J.D. Martinez had nine for his new club in their first week of games as well. My top two performers in the category where Mullins and Walker who each had eight.
Stolen bases is a category that I love to try and dominate but it is really a swing or a miss proposal. This week against Andrew it worked out for me. Tim Anderson had five steals for me and Mullins ended up the week with four. Overall I had 15 swiped bags to Andrew’s nine.
OPB (which I admit thought was OPS during the draft for a bit) was won by myself and my hitting crew. Jordan Walker had an impressive .405 clip, but it was his teammate that led the charge for my club; Paul Goldschmidt had an .463 on base percentage over this first matchup. He had 11 hits in 33 plate appearances and also threw in seven walks.
Andrew gets back on the board with strikeouts, best me by seven. He had five players record 12 or more Ks; Jose Berrios, Reid Detmers and Hunter Brown all had 12, and Astros hurler Framber Valdez had 13. The man carrying the big stick was Dylan Cease of the White Sox who over two starts and 11.1 innings had 18 strikeouts. That is pretty damn impressive. I had three pitchers get 12 or more Ks, but then there was a precipitous drop-off.
In the wins category, I frankly dominated it. Eight to three. A rather big blood bath. This category is really luck. An ace can toss you eight shutout innings with double-digit Ks and you think you are killing it in fantasy but then you look at the win category to only see he got stuck with a no decision.
Saves is a category I always struggle with. That continues here. Zero saves for your boy out of the rotating relievers of Paul Sewald, Kendall Graveman and Ryan Pressly. This is going to be a rotating door position for the entire fantasy baseball year for me. The idea of a lock down closer is disappearing in baseball and unless you are locked in every day you are just going to need to find diamonds in the rough.
ERA was a blood bath in my favor. My staff put together a very respectable 3.086 ERA for the first week and that includes using all 13 of my allotted starts. My squad was able to accomplish this with Corbin Burnes displaying a 9.64 ERA allowing 10 earned runs in 9.1 innings. YIKES. This is a potential Cy Young contender and a very high draft pick of mine so I hope it doesn’t continue. My next highest ERAs were all pitchers who tossed six innings or less, so their bad numbers didn’t affect my other categories too much. Andrew really got fucked by Jose Berrios who outdid Burns with a 11.17 ERA allowing 12 earned runs in 9.2 innings.
Last category is WHIP and I took the edge their 1.261 to 1.313. I am going to be honest with you, I don’t know if this is a huge margin or not. So we are just going to see how this category plays out for the entire year.
The MVP for my team this week has to go to Cedric Mullins. I know that he did most of it against my Red Sox, but I didn’t expect the power with two homers, and four stolen bases is beautiful. He didn’t hit that much (only 7/37 and a .268 OBP), but when he did they counted with eight RBI.
The LVP for me? I mean Triston Casas…yikes. Not smart on my part to play him that much. Only 2 for 22 during his first opening week as a big leaguer. He did have a home run, but ouch.
The MVP for Huntley is between two people: Pete Alonso or Dylan Cease. I think It is wiser to go with the pitcher because he helped Andrew take home the strikeout category, and if he didn’t do that, then the week would have looked a lot worse. Sure Alonso had 11 RBI and Huntley won that category as well, but Cease was fucking nails.
The LVP for Huntley is Austin Hays. This one may be out of hindsight, but the times that Huntley put him in the roster he went 0/9 and knocked in two runs. As of the day I am typing right now, Hays is batting .340 with a .380 OBP and a .638 SLG. He has five doubles and three home runs. None of that came in this matchup.
WEEK ONE SCOREBOARD
WEEK ONE CATEGORY STANDINGS
Here is a deep dive. I know that this is overkill, but I think this can be fun to track throughout the season. I know this is insane. This is for the whole league to dissect. Also can see who got unlucky and who didn’t.
WEEK TWO MATCHUPS
Now I am writing this on April 14th, so these matchups are currently going. Hopefully I am doing one of these recaps every Monday while I am on the train so I can get them when they are all squared away.
So this photo below is as of 11:15 AM on Friday, April 14th.
OVERALL STANDINGS
Now this gallery below will scroll through the leader of every category after weeks. So for this one here, same caveat as the week two matchups. This is as of the April 14th at 11:20 AM.
Now I could go deeper about acquisitions throughout the week, but too be frank, that would just take up too much time. If I wasn’t working full time, hell I would love doing this shit all day.
If you have gotten to the bottom of this and have any thoughts, concerns of questions, please feel free to let myself or the commissioners know. Best of luck throughout the season to everyone.
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