May 14
My innocent adventures into Fantasy Baseball have begun to turn sour. The smiling candy salesman on the corner has revealed himself to be a murderous drug dealer whose delicious wares are now poisons ravaging my body. It’s too late to do anything but shake my head in helpless regret though. I’ve become addicted.
Lukas sold me on this league as a means of casual diversion, a fun little game to play. It’s good for the business too, he said. You might learn something.
Oh, learn something I have, my trickster friend. I have learned that Fantasy Baseball is perhaps the greatest source of both pure joy and pain in all the Devil’s resume of creation. Given that I otherwise find baseball to be generally pointless, it is amazing how this fantasy league can find me literally dancing around my computer and then screaming in murderous rage, all within the span of a single inning of a single game.
Both good and bad, I blame Lukas for everything. He knows my obsessive nature, particularly when it comes to things that are simultaneously trivial and competitive. At least with football I can resign myself to throwing away only one day of the week – and perhaps a few hours on Thursday and Monday nights. But with baseball the torture is daily.
I mean… I can’t NOT watch the games, right? At the beginning of this season I purchased a subscription to MLB.tv so that I would be able to watch every game, or at least every half inning that my pitchers pitch and every at bat that my hitter’s hit (everything else is still generally pointless).
Six weeks ago I probably couldn’t have told you whether a given team was in the AL or NL, let alone the names of any non-superstar player. Today, as I write this post, I can recite from memory the starting pitching rotation of the Kansas City Royals. Still worse than that, it’s 6:00 AM and I know that the first pitch of the day’s first game is in four hours and five minutes.
I think I have a problem.
Grossest of all, this new found obsession would actually be tolerable if it were the source of more joy than frustration. Predictably that’s not the case. My draft went well and my season started off strong, but in very short order the train went off the rails. Lukas likes to remind me that “it’s a very long season,” but at this point that feels like more of a punishment than a consolation. “Sure, I know it hurts right now… but stop complaining because it’s going to hurt for a very, very long time.”
As of this morning the Dirty Darcsens are tied for 7th place (out of ten) and in a seeming free fall. My 5×5 scoring positions are as follows.
Batting
———-
Batting Avg – 5th place
Home Runs – 10th
Runs Scored – 10th
RBIs – 10th
Stolen Bases – 1st
Pitching
————
ERA – 9th
Strikeouts – T-3rd
Wins – T-5th
Saves – T-2nd
WHIP – T-6th
In terms of season expectations it would be hard to convince me that I don’t have one of the best pitching staffs in the league. I currently have five of the top forty players of this season to date, and four of them are pitchers. Still, for every otherwise good outing there seems to always be one inning where my pitcher manages to give up five or more runs. Things are great… right up until they are terrible.
Or, equally as frustrating, my pitcher can have a great game but still lose because their otherwise potent offense doesn’t manage to provide any run support. I am getting really sick of CBS post-game analysis that routinely tells me, “don’t worry, this game was an aberration. ________ will be back to his normally dominant form real soon.” How many consecutive aberrations can be considered a new normal? Looking at my lineup I would expect to be in the top three of every pitching category – and for three weeks I was – but recent weeks have seen nothing but disaster after disaster.
As inconsistent and maddening as my pitching situation, my hitting has somehow been worse. It will no doubt go down as one of life’s great mysteries that baseball is a more injury-riddled sport than football. The players do far less physically, but seem to get hurt much more frequently and are sidelined for much longer than their gridiron brethren. I don’t want to speak out of turn, but it also seems that the Dirty Darcsens have received an inordinate amount of that damage.
In fairness this is the inherent risk to my approach for this season. As I explained a few weeks back my strategy for the draft was to invest a lot of money in a few marquis players and then ride out my season upon their beefy shoulders. The obvious weakness to that approach is now manifesting itself: injuries (or performance slumps) for any of these critical players will naturally drag my team down more so than it would for a more balanced, deep team. That was the gamble I decided to take – perhaps needed to take – and at the moment it seems to be a gamble that I am losing handily.
Aramis Ramirez (CHC), an elite player at his position, tweaked his hamstring and missed two weeks before returning to the lineup. He played all of two or three games before separating his shoulder on a diving catch last week and sending him to the DL for the next two months. Awesome.
Brian McCann (ATL), the best player at the thinnest position (catcher), missed several weeks with “spots of dryness” in his left eye. He has just returned to the lineup and seems to be getting back in form, but I am still concerned that he will have a relapse of this mysterious injury before too long.
Derek Lee (CHC), a previously and potentially once-again elite player at his position, unexpectedly sat out several games in a row before it was revealed that he had “bulging discs” in his neck. He had an MRI that apparently came up negative, but at this point it seems completely random whether he will actually play in any given game.
Ryan Ludwick (STL), one of the hottest players of the season so far, strained his hamstring on Tuesday and will be out for at least two weeks.
It’s not all injuries though.
Alexei Ramirez (CHW), an elite player at his position, has yet to break out of his season-long slump and is actually being regularly benched by his manager. He had a good game yesterday, though, so hopefully he’s turning the corner. I have no choice but to start him every week and, like Derek Lee, hope and pray that he finds his way into the day’s lineup.
These guys are literally the backbone of my team, and all of them have had rough starts to the season. Every single week I have been forced to scavenge across the waiver-wire to fill in the roster spots of my injured elites with anonymous scrubs that I can only pray will have one good week. Lukas commented yesterday about how I am a waiver-wire whore, constantly picking up the latest “next great player.” I can’t really deny that, though. While I have a few good players that are actually performing well, it is a massive disappointment to find myself routinely begging for “slightly better than mediocre” performances of thoroughly mediocre players. For a game that is supposedly so rich in manager influence, fantasy baseball serves only to make me feel helpless.
* If you want to cheer me on today, root for the Yankee’s to beat Toronto with a score of 3-0. We want CC Sabathia to have ten strikeouts and the win, and have Mariano Rivera pick up the save.