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!

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. 

(more…)

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.

(more…)

3 more teams get discussed…….

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Two more teams put under the Gimpscope ™….

(more…)

At the end of last year I did a series of articles called 'Where We Blundered', going team by team with a commentary of what I thought were each team's possible mistakes. I can't say I did any painstaking analysis, just offered some opinions from the season and a quick review of the standings. I thought the articles prompted some interesting discussions. 

The intent is to generate interesting discussions and improve our games, not to make anyone look bad. I'd also like to note that to a man, each of these teams did countless things well and this year's league was without question the toughest I've ever played in. However, I'm going to focus on perceived errors for the most part, because I tend to think thats more interesting and hopefully edifying. 

Like last year, my focus for mistakes is going to be on evaluation of category management. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on player valuation (which is problematic to debate), and will instead procceed from the inital assumption that wasted capital (high category totals accruing a suboptimal amount of points) creates at least a suspicion of some mismanagement.  

(more…)