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.

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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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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This season, I’ve been running a series of articles here at the website for the CardRunners Experts League looking at closers and how we can best predict the number of games a closer will save in a given year.  Thus far, I’ve looked at a closer’s preseason hold on the job, his skills, and his closing experience, but aside from picking a closer with a firm hold on the job before the season starts, there is little difference between the top tier closers and the bottom tier ones in terms of pure saves.  Today, I wanted to combine all of our factors to see just how well we can predict saves and then look at which closers have over/underperformed expectations in 2011 and which CardRunners teams have gained/lost the most.
 

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I completed my first trade of the season a couple days ago with the team of Chris Hill and Nick Cassavetes. (more…)

Now that the trade deadline is safely behind us, I thought it would be interesting to go through a few of the teams and look for where the owners made strategic mistakes over the course of the season.

I'm not so interested in exploring the tactical mistake, like a bad trade, lineup decision, or waiver wire claim. I'm more interested in exploring strategic choices (or non-choices) of which categories to pursue and when to do it. I'm not doing this to make anyone look bad, and I'm convinced we've really managed to gather a group of top notch fantasy players in the Cardrunners League. However, even top players can make mistakes, and I think exploring and discussing those choices can be edifying. 

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Yesterday, Chris Liss penned a post at RotoWire's RotoSynthesis blog that mentioned my luck, randomness, and Dan Haren article.  This stemmed a little debate in the comments section, which I wanted to respond to here since I'm incapable of writing up a succinct response that's appropriate for a comments section.

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There's an interesting conversation going on in the comments section of my post from Wednesday (far more interesting than the post itself), and my would-be-responses were very long, so I turned them into articles over at THT:

Do we use luck and randomness as a crutch?

How much do counts affect BABIP?

I thought I'd point them out for those interested.

As we start the 2nd half of the season, it's always nice to revisit how the auction went down. Here are some selections per team for best buys, worst buys, and guys who just got run over by a truck.

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Big day for me.

I've got Carmona and Hochevar both going. Are they for real? 

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