I've been asked by several people if I was playing fantasy baseball this season. Most people think I've kind of abandoned my teams because I haven't really been discussing it too much. Truth is I've been spending a lot of time playing fantasy baseball this year than I have in years previous. I've been spending more time making sure my players are in the correct lineup and very active in free agency and the trade market. In fact, this has probably been the most active I've been playing fantasy baseball than ever and I must say it's truly because of the team I co-manage with my boy Victor. Out of my four leagues, I have to monitor this league differently because of the way the league its set up. The scoring settings in this league is crazy, so I've had to adjust and make some serious changes to the team. This has made fantasy baseball a lot more interesting than in previous years also.
With my other three teams, I've kept up with them but only because of my team in the league South Side Champs. This league is a points league but the point system highly favors the pitching. Initially I didn't realize how the scoring system would impact the game and I didn't consider this when I was drafting my players either. Originally, my team was a offensive juggernaut with a supporting pitching squad, but I found this formula was not working. In this particular league, the points are set up in the pitcher's favor. You get a point for every inning pitched and two points for strike outs. On the flip side if a batter strikes out it's negative one point. At first I didn't think it had much impact, but I noticed we were always playing catch up trying to come from behind at the end of the week. No matter how may batters performed it seemed like it was extremely difficult for my offensive players to score over 5 points a game. The average points scored on offense was like 2 points a game, and I'm being nice with that statistic. Meanwhile, the starting pitching was averaging about 30-40 points a game.
After talking with Victor, we decided that we needed to make some serious changes. We were 2-4 and the competitive fantasy spirit inside of us could not accept such a disappointing display of fantasy gamesmanship. I started to look at other teams with winning records and one thing stood out to me. These teams had only one batter, but three or four pitchers on the bench. Our bench was opposite having three or four batters and maybe one or two pitchers on the bench. It was then that I realized where we were going wrong. Of course you would want more pitchers on the bench than batters because pitchers score more points and the more pitchers you have the more points you can potentially earn, especially since starting pitchers don't play everyday which makes it easier to rotate you bench. After sharing this with Victor, we decided that we would work free agency. This worked to a certain extent, and that's mainly a contrast of playing styles between Victor and myself. Victor gets his fantasy kicks from finding rookies who get his first start and dominates. He does this in fantasy football and tried it in our league, but this often came back to bite us in the ass as most of the times these rookies gave up like five homeruns and got us negative points for their first start.
We did get a couple of okay pitchers from free agency like Ubaldo Jimenez, Dan Haren, and just as recently as yesterday Mike Pelfrey, but I felt like we still needed someone who will get us those strikeouts on a consistent basis. I felt like our immaculate offensive players should be able to get us an ace of a pitcher via trade if it was packaged nicely, so I started looking for suitable trades. I listed some pitchers who I liked and because I'm weird, I decided to pursue them in alphabetical order. The first pitcher on the list was Madison Bumgarner who was owned by the leader of the league. Nornally, I don't make trade proposals to the league leader but going back on my theory that our offensive player should be able to land us an ace, I presented him with Kolten Wong and Alex Rodriguez for Bumgarner. It took the guy a few hours before he responded with a counter trade that I'm still kind of lost on where it came from, but it's better than the original offer I presented. He offered us Bumganer, Julio Tehran and Kole Calhoun for Jose Bautista and Johnny Cueto. It was like a scenario out of the Godfather, it was an offer we couldn't refuse. The cold part about the trade was it took three days for the trade to be completed and I got a start out of Cueto before he left and I got a start from Bumgarner and Tehran after the trade.
