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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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…)

As we begin the last two weeks of the Cardrunner's first season, things have not gone down quite as I expected. 

Both Chris and my team have struggled mightily to post any offense, and suddenly both our pitching staffs began to crack as well. The winner appears likely to be he who hemorrages the least points back into the pack.

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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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I felt very left out when Eric failed to include me in his post on the remaining contenders yesterday.  Granted, I'm in 8th place right now, but I'm not going to make excuses. (more…)

With a little over two months to go, the fight for first appears to be between the Gimps and Chris Liss. Going into today's standings Chris has a 5 point lead on the Gimps, and has a solid pitching position. His offense has begun to struggle a bit of late, and I'm sure he is eager to see Justin Morneau return to the field. 

The Gimps gambled on Tillman and Rzepcynski last period, only to see both go up in flames. Ben Sheets also went down after Jake Peavy, leaving the Gimp staff in disarray. The Liss owned Derek Jeter inside the park homer through David Dejesus's face also brought lots of frowns to Gimpville. 

Peter Kreutzer has had a solid grasp on third for much of the season, but will be hard pressed to gain 15 points in the remaining time given his last place batting average and punting of steals. 

Andrew Wiggins, currently in 4th, is the dark horse of the field, looking to make a big surge in stolen bases with recent additions. He was the owner of Dan Haren, recently traded to the AL. If he gets lucky on Oswalt too, his team could be a sudden contender. 

Only 4.5 points separate the top 4 teams as of today's standings.

I also think its pretty impressive that of the three team's who have had the most brutal luck Derek, Bill, and Joe/Jeff two of them seem very much still in contention.

We use bi-weekly periods in the CR league, so period 1 ends today with just a half day of MLB action. Given how most of the posts going up of late have been intense and theoretical, I thought I'd take the opportunity to post some lighter thoughts about the beginnings of the season.

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