My Home Town

April 20, 2012 //

I was born in Birmingham, Michigan. Technically it was Hazel Park since that was the closest hospital. But Birmingham was where I lived and grew up. That was my home for eighteen years until Uncle Sam came a’calling. It is one of the many suburbs of Detroit. Surrounding all big cities are numerous smaller ones like mine and the only to tell one from another is a road sign announcing the fact. They are really like one giant city.

So I grew up a Tiger fan. We all were. My mom, my grandfather, my friends. I listened to all the games and when they were on TV it was a special treat. For years I lived and died with the results of those games and actually cried at some of the losses. I remember a lesson my dad once told me upon seeing me upset one night. He said, “Do you think Al Kaline is crying right now because he struck out? No. He’s already put the game behind him and going home to his wife. He’ll come back tomorrow and try again.” Great lesson then…and now.

After my tour of duty in the Air Force, I went back “home” but only for a while. Soon it was off to college in Indiana and then my current home in Lexington, Kentucky. Aside from the occasional visit, I’ve not spent any time back home. I’m 61 now but still think of Detroit as my team. Being so close to Cincinnati,  my friends here root for the Reds. I watch a game every now and then but there’s no connection like I had with the Tigers. I wonder if it’s like that with everybody who moves away from home? Do they still root for the team they grew up with or do they put that behind them and move on?

What does this have to do with fantasy baseball? Well, if you find out that a manager has a soft spot for a certain team you can…how can I put this…use that knowledge to your advantage. It doesn’t mean you take advantage of them but knowing that they like certain teams helps. I like having Tigers on my team and some of my competitors feel the same about Kansas City players, Cleveland, Baltimore and the Yankees. I even compete against another Detroit fan so between us we have to share the roster. J

Look for trades you can make with those managers. That’s the whole point. When you have one of “their” players, look over their roster and see if there’s someone you’d rather have on your team. It’s like you have a bargaining chip. They may be willing to part with someone of a little higher caliber in order to get their home town favorite. But they aren’t stupid. They aren’t going to trade you Verlander for Hochever even though they like Royals players. Nevertheless, you might get more than you expected AND you know you have a manager with a sympathetic ear if you find yourself in a position where you need to make a trade to cover an injury or something.

Last, you might want to check over your current fantasy team right now. Does your roster indicate that you have a favorite team? Have you tipped your hand and don’t even know it? Have people been making trades with you all these years getting the advantage over you because they know your “tell”? Everybody knows I like Tigers players so it’s no secret. Actually this year I wish they would try to take advantage of me. It would be 1968 all over again – the year of the Tiger.

Categories Uncategorized

How to draft Pujols

April 6, 2012 //

Since Pujols seems to be the big prize in American League drafts it seems apropos to offer a quick guide on how to draft him. The strategies that follow are made within the Baseball Manager game, affectionately known as BBM. These strategies are not the only way to get him but they work. I drafted him this year in one of my keeper leagues and am in position to get him in a non-keeper league.

The first step is to set the SP and OF caps to the bare minimum (3,500 at SP and 3,000 for the outfield.) This assures you of not spending more than that. However that is not enough. You have to actually spend less than that in order to position yourself first for the 1st base draft. How can that be done? Read on.

If the league is a Keeper league you want to keep 5 cheap SP and 5 cheap OF. By cheap I mean the 100-200 type players. These don’t necessarily have to be dogs. You won’t have much of a team if you have no pitching and a worthless outfield to go along with Pujols. The good news is that in a keeper league there are usually several players worth keeping who don’t cost much. Look at this list of names – Viciedo, De Aza, Boujos, Reimold, Crisp, Gardner, Dirks, Cain, Boesch and Austin Jackson. These are some of the outfielders in my keeper leagues with salaries of 100-200k. A manager can put together a pretty promising outfield with that kind of talent. Keep 5 of those and you’ll get a 100k player with your 6th pick. Do this for both the starting pitching draft and the outfield draft and you’ll have the #1 selection for 1st base (assuming that no one else is using the same strategy).

A note: You may be able to reduce that keeper number to 4 players at those two positions and thereby keep two other promising cheap players on your roster, but the risk is that you might draft someone with a higher salary with the 5th pick. The safer play is to keep 5 at each position.

For non-keeper leagues, the strategy is more difficult and less “guaranteed”. Once again, set the salary caps to the minimum. The challenge now is to draft cheap quality. Duh. Everybody wants that. The trick is to figure out how to do it. The Verlanders and Weavers will cost more than 3,500 so players of those type of players are out of the question. You can, however, draft some quality players by zeroing in on the 3rd tier players. These are guys who will cost around 400-800. Guys such as Floyd, Peavy, Mendoza of KC, and even Freddy Garcia will likely have salaries under 800. And there are plenty more. Drafting 3 or 4 of those types coupled with the 100k players at #5 and #6 and you come in under the salary cap AND you have a squad you can work with.

Once you determine a dozen or so players to target, do you rank them at the top of your draft list? No. A player you rank #1 will add 500 to his salary. Even if everyone else had him ranked 20th he would still cost 1,400. The strategy is to rank this group just below the high-priced players. An even better strategy is to rank one or two just below the top group of players, then rank the others just below a second tier of quality players. Yeah right…grin…therein lies the rub. How do you know where that magic cutoff position is located? The answer is you don’t.

This is why non-keeper leagues are more difficult to maneuver into that numero uno position. But cheer up…you can still make some reasonably good guesses about who is going to cost the most. Put the Verlanders and Weavers at the top. Just below them add the next most obvious group of stars. Then, somewhere around number 10-15 you put in a couple of your targeted 3rd tier players. Move down the list a little and add the rest of the target group. The better you are at this the better your chances of getting the prize. And if you aren’t number one after the SP draft you still have the OF draft to squeeze past that team ahead of you.

It’s fun to go after Pujols. The downside, however, is bypassing all the talent to get the cheaper players. That really shows up in the keeper leagues. It’s tough not to keep the stars but they usually cost the most. There’s no way you’re going to be able to keep those high priced players and still get Pujols.

With all the leagues in Baseball Manager there must be some other strategies that work. Let’s face it, someone in every league will get the 1st pick and not all leagues are going to have managers who think like me. It would be very interesting to hear how your league worked or how you nabbed the big guy. Leave a comment. Let’s see how you did it.

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Categories Games

Draft Mistake #1

April 2, 2012 //

Waffling. The Urban dictionary defines it as “unable to make up one’s mind…” Man, oh, man does that strike a chord. Let me tell you about what just happened in one of my drafts. Hopefully you can learn from my mistake.

I play in several leagues. Most of them are keeper leagues that force you to make decisions before the draft. You select 7-10 players you want to keep. You enter the draft with a keen sense of your strengths and weaknesses and target the needs. Great fun. I love the keeper concept as it seems a little closer to real life managing, and even more like general managing.

Anyway, keeping all my teams straight is sometimes a challenge, especially during this busy drafting stage. After spending weeks studying which players to keep, decisions are made. You hit upon a strategy. You sleep on it. Heck, you end up sleeping on it for weeks and months. You’ve had all winter to mull things over. The decisions have grown on you as you considered how things will play out. And finally you become…comfortable with your decisions. You’re at peace. You have a strategy.

Then one morning you get an email. “Let’s trade.” Oh boy. Here it goes. All of a sudden you see new possibilities and before you know it the “grass is always greener” game gets played. Each new trade offer opens new fresh ways of looking at things and for some reason new seems better. Pretty soon your team is a shadow of what it was. The team you thought about all winter is no more. Planning is out the window.

Then suddenly part way through your draft it hits you – the dreaded waffles. “What the heck have I done? I’m no better off than I was. In fact, things are worse. Why didn’t I stick with my original plan? Why didn’t I think things through? I shouldn’t have made that trade. I should have spent more time thinking about the trades rather than just accepting them.” Can you spell waffle?

It’s a killer. It spoils the fun of the draft when you constantly second guess yourself. And it’s a horrible way to start the season. You looked forward to something for so long and now you’re disappointed. It’s a shame to let indecision cloud every move. Don’t do it. Don’t succumb to playing the “what-if” game. Either your off-season strategy was sound or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, then fine. Go ahead and make trades. But if you had a good team and your plan was sound, stick with it.

It’s one thing to draft someone not as good as you had hoped. It’s quite another to draft that guy and blame the last minute trade you made. Those things gnaw at you and ruin your fun. My advice is develop a strategy based on what you have to work with. Just about any strategy can work. You can keep expensive guys, cheap guys, load up on one or two positions or spread the keepers all around the field…it doesn’t matter. Each strategy can produce a strong team. Trade only when the new piece fits seamlessly into your plan. Don’t throw everything away just because of that new shiny trade offer.

Waffles are meant to be enjoyed smothered with lots of syrup. Why else are those holes there? Don’t let this fun time of the season and all your hard work get shot full of holes because you aren’t satisfied with your decisions. You made a plan, now follow it through.

Here that, Owl? Yes. I need to look past the mistakes and enjoy the rest of the draft.

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Categories Games

Countdown to the Draft

March 23, 2012 //

It’s almost here. The Draft. This is what we’ve been waiting for and the fun is about to start. To help us avoid the post-draft blues, here’s a last minute checklist. This is a reminder for me as much as you.

  1. Injured players. Guys who are not going to play until mid-season or later should not be drafted. Exceptions are keeper leagues or games that have a designated roster space for players on the DL. There’s nothing worse than wasting a draft pick on a player you have to immediately release because he’s taking up a roster spot for nothing. The difficulty is knowing who is injured and who isn’t. It takes some work on your part to check pretty much every player’s status. Fortunately, in some of the games (like Baseball Manager) most of the injured players were kept off the draft lists.
  2. Position changes. Many fantasy games have eligibility requirements for a fielding position and some don’t. In those that do, you need to know those rules. Baseball Manager is very strict on its requirements – you can only play a guy at a position the same number of times he plays there in real life. So, if you draft someone at 2nd base and he ends up playing shortstop you’re in trouble. So check it out. Just because someone is located on the 2nd base draft list doesn’t necessarily mean he will play there.
  3. Starter or reserve. Another common mistake is drafting someone who ends up playing once a week…and you expected him to be in your starting lineup every day. Ouch. It happens. This is especially true if you look at spring training data. You’ll see a player having a good spring and he’s getting a start every day and think he must be the man. You draft him only to discover that he’s a bench player or been sent to the minors. Beware. Check some of the numerous depth charts so conveniently listed online for us. A new one I discovered this January is http://www.mlbdepthcharts.com/. Maybe it has been there for years but it was new to me. And it is updated constantly.
  4. Pitching role. Similar to the previous point, it is important to know which role the pitchers will play? Every year there seems to be a handful of relief pitchers making the transition to starter and this year is no exception. Determining which relievers are going to start this year isn’t always easy…especially in late March. There are still question marks for several American League players (Ogando, Ross, Crow, Bard). Chris Sale of Chicago seems a lock as a starter but those others are all still iffy. They may eventually be a starter but you need to know if it’s going to happen this season. My fantasy game needs at least five starting pitchers who get one or two starts a week so I sure don’t want to draft a reliever or two with my six picks.
  5. Relief role. This concern is valuable in Baseball Manager (BBM) fantasy game…not so much in any other games I know. In BBM the relief duties are split between long relief and short relief. It’s useful to have some of both. Good long relievers are the more difficult to find since the better pitchers are usually starters or closers. The thing is that if you can snare a couple of the good long relievers it will be beneficial to you in BBM. So, you may not want to purposely rank all the top closers at the top of your list. Move a few of those long guys up there and you’ll be glad you did.
  6. DH. Now only an American League concern but from what I read it will someday be everyone’s concern. It looks like the commissioner is determined to get the DH in the National League within a few years. Anyway, the concern is what to do about drafting players who only DH. David Ortiz and Travis Hafner are excellent hitters but should you draft them you may find yourself short on a regular 1st baseman. The same is true of the DH guys in the outfield. I remember one year drafting three of them with my six picks. Ouch. I had to scramble around trying to trade two and that is not easy. No team in BBM wants two DH’s so if you draft more than one you may end up releasing him with no return. In other words, drafting him was a complete waste and you lost out on someone else. Word to the wise is make sure that if you draft Montero of Seattle you have a backup plan in case he spends most of his time sitting on the bench instead of crouching behind the plate.

Good luck in your draft. May you get who you want and not regret who you get.

Categories Uncategorized

General Manager

March 11, 2012 //

This time of year we naturally focus on the draft. Who do we think is going to have a good year, how do I rank my players, how much am I willing to pay for this guy…those are the kind of questions every good fantasy baseball player asks this time of year.

We must do this because a good draft is the foundation of a good season. Managers who don’t work diligently now in ranking players will end up with mediocre teams from which they may never recover. So, we read everything we can, watch TV reports, find out who is injured and set up our spreadsheets to make draft day a little easier.

One bit of advice…the best team in April and May isn’t nearly as important as having the best team in August and September. It is a mistake too many of us make. We think we are set after the draft. The season starts off, we do well, and we sit back contentedly knowing that our pre-season efforts have paid off. That just won’t work. Unfortunately players get injured, traded to the other league, and don’t perform as expected. If we spend all our money in the draft and have little left over for claiming free agents we are in trouble.

Baseball Manager is one of the fantasy games where money management is as important as identifying key player personnel. It is a fantasy game where one’s general manager skills are tested. You must reserve a good chunk of cash for post-draft free agent claims, and those claims will continue throughout the season…especially in August and September. Teams that sit pat are doomed.

This should come as welcome news to those of us knew at the game or are unsure of our drafting skills. Don’t fret too much if you don’t get who you wanted. Teams that constantly morph into different teams with new lineups, new pitching rotations, and new rosters throughout the year are the ones that will be sitting pretty when it’s all over.  Yes, a good draft is important. It’s a good start, but only a start. What happens after the draft is just as, if not more, critical to a successful campaign.

Categories Games

Spring Training

March 4, 2012 //

How much emphasis do you put on player performances during spring training? At the start of spring training I tell myself to ignore the results…ignore the guys hitting home runs all over the place, ignore the pitchers throwing shutouts for their two innings work, ignore the….you get it. Then every year I peek at the data, just a little, and then the closer to opening day I look a little harder and see if I can discern who is ripe for a great year and who has isn’t. Good grief, is that dumb or what?

Why bring this up? Because this is the time of year when we start craving data, is why. We’ve been starved for player input all winter. Finally, the Rotoworlds of the Internet are filling our heads with daily reports of who’s knocking the stuffing out of the ball and who is throwing lights out. This is what we’ve been waiting for. We are finally getting our fix. “He hit two home runs today, that guy had three doubles, so and so is now batting .450, poor Joe is now 0-8 so you better give up on him, and old Bob gave up five runs today so he’s toast.”

Darn it. None of this matters. It’s practice. The fences in some of these stadiums are a notch above little league. The ball carries in Arizona like it’s been shot out of a cannon. And half these performances are against guys who aren’t anywhere near the quality they’ll face during the season. We have to temper all of these results with some common sense.

Yet we look. And we move players around on our lists in part based on what we read and see happening in these spring training games. Inevitably what happens around May is that the “real” player shows up and performs the way he usually performs. And then we kick ourselves because the guys we moved up are doing bad and the guys we moved down are doing well. Grrr….

Stick to the plan. Base your rankings on proven yearly data especially for veterans. The longer they’ve been a veteran the more unlikely it is that spring training matters to them. They are just getting in shape. We would spend our time wiser if we studied previous years’ performances rather than reading that the Tigers hit 9 home runs today.

“Gee, I wonder if I can still make a trade for Ryan Raburn?”

Categories Games

Baseball’s New Playoffs

February 29, 2012 //

1968. The last year of baseball without “playoffs”. All we had back then was the winner of the American League regular season versus the winner of the National League regular season. The two best teams pitted against each other. Period.

That marked the start of the end of an era. One year later Curt Flood refused a trade that started the movement toward free agency. Baseball changed after 1968.

Now we have three divisions and 4 playoff teams. Soon we’ll have a 5th playoff team (maybe this year). Good for baseball? Let’s take a look at it. The immediate pros of more teams in post-season is more fans get to root longer for their teams and get to prolong the hope of taking home the big prize – World Series champs. So that’s a good thing. Another good thing is being able to watch an additional post-season game with everything riding on the outcome. The new playoff system pits the two wild-card teams against each other in a best of ONE “series”. The winner moves on to play the best team in the league. The loser of this one game goes home.

That aspect is another reason to like the system. The team with the best regular season record plays the Wild-card winner. Logically that should be a good incentive to have the best record – you get to play “a lesser” team in the first round of the playoffs rather than another division winner. This also makes it a little harder for the non-division winners to move through the playoff system.

This one Wild-card game will be watched by a lot of people. Games with that kind of meaning (winner takes all) are always interesting and fun to watch. Everything’s riding on this one game. And that leads to the fourth and dare I say most important reason? Money. An extra game like this means more money for the interested parties.

All good right? Well, here’s what I don’t like. You play 162 games. You’ve done well. You make the post-season. If you are one of the division winners you play in the Division Series (a best of 5 affair). The Wild-card teams play a best of 1 affair. Yuck. I’m sorry but you have a weak argument if you are going to convince me that the better team moves on after a 1 game playoff. It’s hard enough to convince me that the better team moves on after a best of 5.

That’s what I don’t like about these things. In baseball more than any other sport a single game can be skewed so out of whack compared to the way it normally plays. One stud pitcher does not a team make.

I want the better team to win. The better team should be the one that moves forward. If you’re going to have a playoff system instead of the best versus the best (which I know we’ll never have again) then let’s at least give the contenders a fighting chance! Letting them duke it out for one game doesn’t do that.

The underdog winning makes for a nice movie or TV show, but the team that played better for the whole season is the better team – not the one who happens to have the one best pitcher or the one who gets lucky or the one who wins because of a stupid fluke. Those are all things that can happen in one game. And that’s why we don’t settle the World Series in one game. The long haul winner deserves the title…not the one-hit-wonder.

A one-game decision? Yes, I’ll watch it. But don’t tell me the better team moved on.

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