Hi all,

I've got my quasi children's story The Existential Giraffe up at kickstarter.com. Please check it out, any support is appreciated!

A fantasy baseball season turns on two axes. The first is the preseason prep, during which we decide who to draft and then do our best to get those guys.

The second is inseason, when we make trades and release players while acquiring others.

Many years ago fantasy baseball's first great stat service operator, Jerry Heath, compiled something he called Hypothetical Standings. These are an attempt to discover what sort of draft each team had, which is an oblique way of looking at how they handled the regular season. The standings below are compiled using the first-week rosters of all the teams in the league and the full season stats applied. This is how we would have finished if we played with our first week roster all season long. (Real hypotheticals are made from the draft rosters, but Cardrunners drafted early enough that I thought it made better sense to include the waivers and trades that were made during the preseason, before the games began.)

I would have ended up in a three-way tie for seventh, rather than a two-way tie. Big deal!

If you would like to look at the spreadsheet, click here. Let me know if you see any significant errors.

Yes, I’m a little down about losing out in the final period of the season.  I was very proud of my season, having missed on several drafts picks and having received terrible early season luck with both closers and wins (forcing me to punt wins entirely) but making up for it with a lot of great FAAB adds and a flurry of trades in the weeks leading up to the trade deadline (all told, I made 10 trades in July and the first two weeks of August), changing gears, transforming my roster, and setting in motion a plan that I thought would make me a winner.  At the conclusion of the trade deadline, I thought I was the favorite to the win the league.

I knew it would be close between Clark and I, and I knew that luck could play an integral part in the final standings.  Because I believe it did, I’m going to take this opportunity to step up on the soap box and whine my heart out—hopefully with the understanding that I have all the respect in the world for Clark, who I believe played a tremendous season.  I just happen to think he was aided by a little luck.  Take this merely as the sour grapes ruminations of a guy thinking of what could have been.

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Congratulations to Clark for winning the first place prize and taking home a $12,500 profit!

A well deserved win, and a very enjoyable season. Thanks everyone!

So it's going to be a pretty anti-climatic concluding article as its hard to find much to criticize in the top two teams. 

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It's neck and neck as we go into the last 9 days of the season, with Clark and Derek in a virtual dead heat and well ahead of the pack.

I've updated standings for anyone interested.

Last week, I looked at a couple of my players that have outpeformed most people's expectations this season and why I drafted them.  Last time I looked at Mike Napoli and Mark Reynolds.  Today, I'm going to look at Alex Gordon and Curtis Granderson.

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3 more teams get discussed…….

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With my series on closers wrapping for the year last time out, today Eric has asked me to explain the logic behind drafting some of the players I selected back in March.  While I’ve had the good fortune of putting myself in the championship race (I’m currently in first by a point), my road to the title has been a bit of an unorthodox one.  Looking back at my post-draft day roster, Eric said that “it sure doesn’t look like a champion.”  That’s because I had some pretty spectacular misses, such as Dan Johnson ($10), Travis Snider ($15), Kevin Kouzmanoff ($9), Matt Thornton ($12), and Frank Francisco ($13).  Counterbalancing this, however, were some big hits in Curtis Granderson, Alex Gordon, Mark Reynolds, Mike Napoli, and Michael Pineda.

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Scott-

I've been kind of mystified by this team most of the year as well. Scott has generally hovered in the middle of the pack, usually between 5th and 8th. Everytime I look at his offense I think it must be smoke and mirrors.

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