Season Two: F.U.!

By Johnny Lowe
Posted Thursday, March 6, 2008

Draft Day is approaching. Like a drunken … ahem … love-starved Latvian sailor in Midtown Manhattan with eleven weeks’ earnings burning a hole in his pocket, in a very short time …. It’s on.

As the regular season Champion – and subsequent playoff loser - of the league’s inaugural 2007 campaign, I have done my part to continue the fine, albeit short-lived, tradition of Draft Day ass-kicking and name-taking necessary to ensure another successful summer of games not actually played by myself.

It’s more fun than it sounds.

Having long since abandoned any hopes of returning to a state of “coolness”, I’m reasonably secure in having participated in no fewer than 150 Mock Drafts this off season, and I can tell you from my own personal mind-numbing experiences that this year’s Top 100 is, from a fantasy perspective, a great group with as many as 20 of the first 50 players selected having fewer than four years major league experience. And there are more where they came from.

Your results may vary, but the first five rounds of the typical twelve-team draft looks only about half of what it looked like at this time last year. Consensus Top 20 player from last season, starter Chris Carpenter, is gone. Not “gone from the top rounds” gone, but “gone from draft day” gone. Consensus Number 1 from 2007, Albert Pujols is now averaging no higher than the fourth player selected, having been passed by everyone’s number one, Alex Rodriguez, Hanley Ramirez, Matt Holliday, and sometimes even David Wright, Miguel Cabrera, Jose Reyes, Johan Santana, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins …. you get the picture.

The greater the number of actual people which participate in the Mock Drafts, as opposed to artificial intelligence bots, the greater the likelihood that the statistical projections unique to each site are affected. A chart at the site I frequent, which I will shamelessly pimp below, allows you to contrast the statistical projections and the average draft positions of the Top 75 to determine which players’ stocks are rising and which are falling.

And that’s all you’ll get from me until after The Draft. I’m not going to submit my lovely wife to death by drafting, prompting a threat of marital disharmony and legal representation, and then just give it away. No, follow the little prompt at the end, down there at the bottom, and take the sixty seconds to register and start mock drafting yourself into a persistent headache. I did.

I will, however, allow myself to briefly recap last season’s Draft Day Massacre, as I’ve just now taken to calling it, for those whom were not fortunate enough to be present that evening. I was selecting in position 7 of 10, I remember it clearly, and blatantly took advantage of a potentially developmentally impaired Met-centric group by drafting Alex Rodriguez, Yankee third baseman and a pretty good hitter from what I hear, at number seven, followed by that Miguel Cabrera fellow with the fourteenth overall selection. Matt Holliday (27), Justin Morneau (34), and Robinson Cano (47) rounded out my top five.

A-Rod, Holliday, and Cabrera are each ranked in almost everyone’s top eight this season, and no team is able to draft any two of the three, let alone all of them. And it was supposed to be a keeper league but …. I know a rigged game when I see one, and what’s the fun in that? So we’ll do it again. For keeps.

The rest of my draft, in hindsight, wasn’t that great – fair at best - but after my first three picks, I had a huge head start. And even though I outdistanced the second-place team by thirty-six games in the standings, I still lost in the first round to the eventual champion and had to settle for the bronze. Nasty break, and this year will be harder, I know.

I am, after all, a marked man now.

The particulars of Season Two are as follows: Rosters are made up of one player each for the positions C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, LF, CF, RF, OF, and DH/Utility. Pitching positions are 3 SP, 3 RP, and 3 generic P spots with four Bench players and four DL spots. We don’t want anyone having to drop someone due to injury. Do it later if you need to.

The stat filter (“The stat filter is everything”) is modified slightly from the original 7x7 to a 7x8 style, favoring the pitching slightly. The change was made to slightly increase the value of starting pitching, a precious commodity, with more roster positions devoted to offense overall.

Hitting and pitching categories used correspond precisely to the following commonly accepted abbreviations: R, HR, RBI, K, Net SB !! (yes, Angelica, Jose Reyes did get thrown out and picked off 21 times last year), AVG, and OPS. The categories on the pitching side of the house, as the formats name implies, number eight. And the winners are … IP ( minimum of 27 weekly), W, SV, Holds, K, K:BB ratio, ERA, and the now infamous WHIP.

Innings pitched were added to correct the bias towards – can you believe it? – relievers in the previous format. The other option was to drop the Holds category, which I have always incorporated, and Ks from the hitters’ side and I’d hate like hell to do that because striking out is, you know, bad. The solution was to let the league reflect the game, and what wins today on a daily basis is the same as what has always won baseball games; pitching.

So we’ll try this, and come this Saturday night, March 8th, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time, Season Two of the Flushing University Fantasy Baseball League, hosted by the benevolent capitalists at YAHOO!, will kick off with what I trust will be the second in a long line of Draft Day fantasy baseball pseudo-successes, sure to thrill and entertain almost no one, certainly not my aforementioned wife, for moments after my computer monitor goes blank.

We have three spots available, which will inevitably fill in the hour preceding the draft, unless you get there first. And be sure to show up for the draft, so I can taunt you repeatedly.

No, it’ll be fun, really.