Disjointed Kitsch

While I won’t claim to be an expert in Fantasy Baseball, my Keene Blackflies team managed to come in first with 73 points. There’s still the little matter of wrapping up the season for Colorado and Philadelphia, but the second and third place teams don’t have any players on those teams while I have 3 (2 batters and a relief pitcher). I don’t think I’ll drop three points today/this evening so I’ll go ahead and claim “I Win”!

During a prior post I mentioned some “tips” that I picked up by watching other teams/owners and just playing the game. I don’t think I’d change anything on that list, but I will add a note about “Game Starts”. Each time a starting pitcher “starts”, it counts as 1 “Game Start”. The league I played in caps the number of “starts” for starting pitchers to 120. So after my starting pitchers started a collective 120 games, they didn’t collect stats any more. I’m not sure if that means they can collect stats if the play in relief rolls, but it does mean a fundamental shift in strategy if you have a cap: either you have to pace your play to stay under the cap or burn to it and then bring in strong relievers (setups, closers, etc..) to keep your pitching stats moving upward. For me I opted for a combination of setup men and closers. That generally kept the WHIP and ERA stats down while adding to strike outs. I think the ideal is to burn to the cap early getting starting pitchers with strong K to BB ratios and then use the last 2 months of the season to lower the ERA and WHIP with relievers while ditching starters. Just make sure you don’t ditch a really good starter since they can wind up on another team and hurt you. Better to “sit ‘em” than trade/release them.

One other item I might mention is that I had a hard time finding a catcher. Catchers take “days off” or have certain pitchers that they don’t catch for (Tim Wakefield for instance) or both which limits their productivity in batting. I eventually ended up with a catcher that had only a few routine days off and caught for the entire pitching staff. Unfortunately it took me half the season to find him.

At any rate I had fun and learned a whole lot about baseball in the process. I’ll probably play again next year. It certainly kept me occupied from April through September. Now.. back to football!