Fantasy baseball championship this week, if you cared. Of course, in my money league, where the entry fees just went up, I was eliminated in the first round. I finished below 3rd place for the 1st time since 2018; timing is everything huh? Yeah, I turned in one of my worst weeks of the year in my playoff matchup; buh bye. In the newly created “family league”, my son and I have made it to the finals. This time of year, you need to really zone in on the waiver wire, hitting/pitching matchups, who is still playing for something, etc, etc, etc. Is there any way to be too zoned in? Short answer, yes.
In this league, we have 6 moves per week; you know I’m using all 6 of them, regardless. Can’t take them home with you. So, here I go. First thing, making sure we have the proper offensive depth; need to make sure I can swap guys in and out if someone isn’t playing that day; we were in good shape there, check. Second, how do the off days look? We were pretty short on Monday, so we picked up a guy to fill a spot; we were short again on Thursday, picked up another guy. Can’t blow your load on this, but you can add an extra few points here and there, which is all it may take. For any offensive move, I consulted with my partner, my son. He has taken pride in the fact that most of our big guns on offense on guys he wanted, either via draft or waiver wire pickup. Yeah, I know… I’m creating a monster over here. He signed off on those moves. When it comes to the pitching staff, that’s my forte.
Who is starting and when? Of course looking for 2 start pitchers that are high quality, like Zach Wheeler for example. Yeah, he was on the wire due to being hurt; he’s healthy now. He was another pickup. That leaves us with 3 moves. Because this is the last week of the season, no need to hold onto anybody pitching beyond Sunday, so as the week progressed, I cut some of our pitchers to fill up for this weekend. I maximized the amount of points we could get, or at least did the best I could, to win our matchup.
For this week, and this week only, I even looked at batter vs pitcher stats; yeah I did. Who does well against which pitcher, etc, determined who our 2 bench guys would be each day in our lineup. We wouldn’t necessarily sit one of our horses, but the 2nd tier guys could be moved around, pending their stats vs the opposing starter that evening. It’s worked pretty well; haven’t left many points on the bench. We are primed to win our matchup!
What’s the catch? Yeah, there’s a catch. Thing is, this fantasy championship week, the last week of the season, runs until Wednesday… W, T, F… Shouldn’t I have received a message about this from Yahoo since this is the first time ever it has happened this way? I was totally stunned when I found out… but I guess I have nobody to blame but myself. So yeah, those big guns that I dumped since they wouldn’t pitch again, like Woodruff and deGrom… well, yeah… my brother may be able to pick them up. We only have 1 starting pitcher after Sunday. What looked like a fantasy baseball title, has turned into a coin flip… need our batters to come up huge. I broke the news to my partner; he wasn’t too phased… he’s already zoned in on fantasy football… haha.
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