Fantasy Baseball:

I want to start off by first congratulating my good friend +Stephanie Smallsen who won my NCAA bracket group. She had the audacity to pick Duke over Kentucky and it paid off. Who would've thought Kentucky wouldn't even make it to the championship round? Steph's friend Dayna did, and she came in second. I'm not buying into the whole Canadian girls dominated my group, but at the same time, congratulations. I'm going to come through on my part of the bet and hook up Lil' Smallsen... I might cop this weekend, if not, definitely by next weekend.

It comes in pink too...

Now, on to the PhantasySteez. Fantasy Baseball is in full effect and this year already has it's little intricacies that is making me feel some kind of way good and bad. First of all, is it me, or did fantasy basketball end the same day fantasy baseball started? I know I was in the last day of the fantasy basketball championship game on Sunday, I also was starting Jon Lester and Anthony Rizzo on the first night of fantasy baseball. How ironic, yet how convenient. Last year I remember the two seasons overlapping each other and and I really didn't pay too much attention to my fantasy baseball teams until after fantasy basketball was completely done. This year, the transition was almost seamless and I'm fully locked into fantasy baseball at the beginning. I had thought that the fantasy basketball playoffs started early, but this way I can turn all my attention to fantasy baseball, which is a good thing since I have a problem changing my lineup on a daily basis.

I joined four different leagues in which I participated in three of the drafts. The one draft I didn't participate in was due to the fact that the ESPN Fantasy Baseball App does not allow you to draft using the app. I'm a mobile device guy, so drafting through the app would've been super ideal for me, but because of this I decided to only have the one team that I had to auto pick on the ESPN format. The other three teams are on Yahoo where I was able to draft all my teams using the app. Towards the end of one draft, I had posted a message in the chat room with the web address for this blog and instantly someone replies, "omg, why do we care." Now, was I wrong for the shameless plug for my website? Better yet was I wrong for the response I gave? Either way, I can't wait until I play this guy so I can show him what's really good with that phantasy steez.

This season only one of my leagues is a stat category league. The other four, including the one ESPN league, are points leagues. This format intrigued me because it's the standard format used in fantasy football and I thought it would be a good way to get my boy Victor more involved in fantasy baseball. What is screwing up my whole little experiment and grinding my gears about this format, and really about the stat category format too, is offensive production. Even though I did look at the scoring system for these leagues, I didn't take into consideration how it was set up. Most of my leagues are set up similar with some differences, but it what's killing my offensive production are strikeouts. Naturally if you don't get hits you don't get any points, but in these leagues you get -1 point for a strike out. If a player goes 0/4 and has 2 strikeouts, that's -2 points. So far this early in the season, a good number of my guys are going 0/4 or 1/4 but are getting more strikeouts than hits.

On the flip side, the pitching situation is just as crazy because you get -1 point for every earned run. Luckily this hasn't really hit me because these leagues seem to favor pitching. For example, in one of my leagues you get 3 points for every inning pitched and 8 points for a save, but you don't get any points for at bats. In another league you get 10 points for wins and no hitters, but the only offensive category you get 10 points for is grand slams. Any team would have a better chance of scoring a win than scoring a grand slam. How does this balance out?

Nonetheless, I like the teams that I drafted. Most of my teams are balanced, but the team I'm sharing with Victor is deep offensively and has a sleeper pitching staff. It's going to interesting to see how this season plays out.