Thursday, April 2, 2009

Every Man's Fantasy

Every year I swear I'm not going to play fantasy baseball. And then one of my friends invites me to join their league and I do. I never win. I don't even come close. Usually I end up really beating everybody for the first two weeks, gradually make my way down to the bottom three in the league and remain there for the rest of the year. I always feel like I have a pretty good team (as I do this year) but am always beat by people with players I've never heard of. Oh, and the winners are usually people who've never played sports in their life. Go figure. So anyways, here's my team from this year. I didn't do a whole lot of research about up and coming players. I went with OPS (On base plus slugging percentage) rankings from the 2008 seasons for hitters, and past performance of pitchers. I do modify my pitcher rankings a bit based on whether the team they pitch for will actually score runs, thereby increasing the chance of getting a win. I also try to avoid pitchers that jump from the National League to the American League. Eventually these "techniques" begin to fail as the good players are all picked. Then you end up picking players because, 1) They're on your favorite team (Tim Wakefield, Hideki Okajima), 2) They had a bad season last year (due to injury perhaps- J.D. Drew, Ken Griffey Jr.) and you're hoping they bounce back this year, 3) You like their name or know someone with their name (Luke Scott), 4) They're not Yankees, 5) You have to pick someone because your time is running out so you pick the first name on the list of available players that you still recognize (Jack Cust, Jose Guillen) or 6) You don't pick in time so the auto-pick function just picks the player for you based on their overall ranking (George Sherrill...who?!?!?! Apparently he pitches for the Baltimore ).

So here we go...again. I'm preparing my three weeks worth of smack talk now.

Infielders:
Catcher- Kelly Shopach
1B- Albert Pujols
2B- Dan Uggla
3B- Chipper Jones
SS- Stephen Drew
2B/SS- Miguel Tejada
1B/3B- Chone Figgins

Out Fielders:
Milton Bradley
Carlos Gomez
Pat Burrell
Ken Griffey Jr.
Luke Scott
J.D. Drew
Jack Cust
Jose Guillen

Pitchers:
Roy Halladay
Jon Lester
Josh Beckett
Derek Lowe
Brandon Lyon
John Smoltz
Hideki Okajima
George Sherrill
Tim Wakefield

2 comments:

Jeremy said...

Your starting pitching is very strong. Lester could emerge as one of the top 3 pitchers in the MLB this year.

Isn't Miggy Tejada in jail?

Jeff and Joy Scott Family said...

Miggy was a late pick. He's on probation. It was interesting to watch the draft and see how people were picked later in the draft than they might have been pre-steroids stuff. I can't imagine that I'd have been able to pick Tejada with my third-to-last pick if all the steroids stuff hadn't been brought to light. It's difficult to feel good about a player's future performance based on past performance that might have been aided by PEDs. (I believe Nomar remained un-drafted! So did Bonds. HA!)