We had our 10 team AL only auction on March 27th.  In many auctions I find lots of opportunities through either gross player misvaluation or poor money management. I also find people are generally too quick to write players off, and conversely too eager to pay up for the newest hyped possible stud to be. With this group however, I definitely see fewer plays I find fishy, and while I think there is still some propensity for the hyped guy here, the expert crowd seems far more reluctant to write players off as finished. 

I'm going to go team by team again, noting what I thought was good and what I thought was weak. This is not meant to make anyone look bad, but I think a critical analysis is valuable, and can only make us better fantasy managers. 

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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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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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What does a fantasy player do to save a dying franchise? I had the pleasure of being invited to play in the Card Runners AL auction league. Or maybe I should say, I was sucked in as maybe I’m dead money. It’s been about 6 years since I’ve played in a real trading league. Over the past six years, I’ve spent my time in the high stakes baseball market where trading isn’t allowed.

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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…)

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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There is no doubt that Cardrunner has assembled an impressive field for its inaugural season.  Just look at these guys.

Joe Sheehan is a legend.   His work with Baseball Prospectus opened up the world of baseball analysis and changed how people thought about the game.  He is partnering with Jeff Erickson, who founded Rotowire.com.  This is the site with the most comprehensive collection of fantasy information there is.  That is quite a 1-2 punch.

When I heard that Derek Carty was going to be in the league, I googled  around to find out what I could about him.  It turns out that Derek has a dazzling fantasy baseball record, and when I stumbled upon some of the articles he writes for The Hardball Times,   they were so smart they scared the living crap out of me.  

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I'm very excited about the Cardrunners Expert League.

The league is strict AL stats only (You can draft/claim anyone but only stats acquired in the AL count) with standard 5×5 Roto scoring. For a bit of background on how it came about, please read here. To see the full auction, click here. For a bit of info about me, check out the bio page.

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