This is awesome SRM. Hope you rub all the monies on your titties

50-131-21

Brutal brutal brutal week. Had Manaea nearly universally, and a number of other speculative streamers across the board (severino, eovaldi, eickhoff) who completely brutalized me beyond repair in era and whip. The only solace I can come up with is that 62 of the 131 losses were by 2 (6-4, 5-3) or 1 (5-4, 4-3). So not losing that much ground in a lot of my losses which is important

update?

Forgot to count it up sunday but it was bad. Really bad. I think I lost close to 130 and didn't want to see what the standings total was after that and chose to make some changes I'll post when the week's over

119-58-25

So I went back to just relievers after getting crushed for a 2nd straight week going starters inclusive. The problem i faced in the last 3 weeks is while I did a good job across the board picking up or trading for 4-5 statistically elite starters, it wasn't close to enough in leagues with no pitching caps so it didn't really serve a purpose, especially when I have guys like gray or berrios or duffey everywhere and they're all getting smashed. So im using the starters I have as trade bait but refusing to play them

Plus this helps me hoard more stashes

Plus this helps me not have to spend an hour a day setting up pitchers

Subscribing. GL SRM.

Fun Fact. My wife's initials used to be SRM before we got married.

Rooting for you. I'm intrigued with the closer strategy, especially if you have time to go matchup vs matchup and when the other guy has few closers using a guy like Will Haris or Seung Hwan Oh who have great ratios and K/9 but won't get saves since Wins are already punted.

Also when you accidentally get a bunch of wins out of closers one week people playing you will be maaaaaaaaaad.

have a couple of minutes and am finally in front of a computer again so as far as teh last couple weeks went:

honestly, i should have known better. the problem was i got in on the ground floor of a lot of good pitchers for cheap or nothing (nola, pomeranz, hill, ross, cueto) and initially planned on just holding them to use as trade chips as their value legitimized but instead i figured i'd just shoot for the moon and try to go for as many teams with 10-0 potential as i could

first problem with doing this besides the time investment is that in order to have a winning pitching staff you need every or damn near every available bench spot to be a pitcher, so stashing no longer works and my ability to consolidate hitters and improve my offense further is effectively finished. also i'm doing so many leagues that streaming would make me suicidal by day 3

second problem is in order to fill my pitching rotations in the mighty 200 beyond the players i already have i'm going to have to fill it with a number of gambles on unproven peripheral darlings and worse yet i'm going to have to use those same pitchers in basically all my leagues. it's a bad enough idea to have the same hitter starting in 200 leagues but at least in that scenario the worst the hitter can do is be a net 0 in the counting stats while giving you a negative hit in average. the worst a starting pitcher can do is singlehandedly kill you in 2 categories while being a net 0 in the counting stats. it's all well and good (but still a terrible idea) when the pitcher is doing well, but in the last 2 weeks i was completely and utterly face****ed almost universally by berrios, manaea, gray, duffey, and a couple other ****heads i'm forgetting

the moral of the story is stick to the plan

people already get super mad on a daily basis and even madder any time i make a trade for a top 10 orank'd player. i find it's best to egg them on

121-68-13

bad news: had 95 shares of pence. traded a couple before the severity of the tear was disclosed from people who were trying to buy lowish on him so at least i got that, and by in large my offenses are plenty good enough to survive without him, but still, that's a lot of shares so that's annoying.

good news: when i gave up on starting pitching and started dropping all the fringe starters i had accumulated the first guy i made sure to pick up was will harris. so if harris is named the full time closer that means in almost 170 leagues i have a closer with a sub .5 ERA, and in the leagues where he's an excess closer that makes him an incredibly useful trade chip

Still plugging away? How goes the battle?

Stopped checking the weekly totals 3 weeks ago. Too much work to be done and losing weeks kill my drive to actually put in the work so I decided I wasn't going to check anymore

Reaching a point where im clearly oversaturated in offense and with hill coming back im getting all my ducks in a row trading for pitching just in case I need to start shooting for the moon to get teams on the cusp into the playoffs

As a matter of curiousity I checked all the teams that drafted kershaw because my first plan was to trade for hm everywhere I can while he's on the DL and the average standing of the teams who drafted him is 10.1/12. Not surprising I dont think. Drafting kershaw means you passed on some of (or in some cases all of) trout/goldy/bro/arenado/donaldson. It's a lot harder to build an elite offense forfeiting that player than it is to build bad pitching despite having Kershaw. As good as he is his value is very easily watered down if every spare roster spot you have is a pitcher

The importance of format is HUGE wrt valuing top pitchers vs hitters. In my 5x5 Roto league we have 17 offensive roster spots, 10 P slots, 4 bench, and a 200GS limit. That means there's a relatively large amount of offense vs pitching, which means mediocre pitchers have little value and elite pitchers have very high value. I drafted Kershaw with the #1 pick and am winning by >10 points.

To me, figuring out the differences between generic ADP/rankings and actual values in your league is critically important. If your league varies from standard roster and scoring it will change he relative value of all players, often in pretty subtle ways.

Don't know the exact record but I had 53 losses last week

Getting to the point where I need to start preparing for the need to shoot for the moon each week to maximize playoff teams. Accordingly updated the spreadsheet to include the teams in 7th-10th for my own tracking and will spend the ASB balancing them out by selling off offense and closers

Im not giving up on the teams in 11th/12th but trading from them has proven largely impossible since teams seem to judge my teams as desperate and counter my offers for fernandez with their fernandez for my trout for instance

Pretty critical I do this now because of the 3 dead days and the 2 week week cuz almost 40% of my teams are in the 7-10 region and I can't wait any longer to salvage them. Likely going to make all the offers I need to with them then work up to 6 then 5 then 4 etc

Also I accidentally dropped hill meaning to drop ziegler then proceeded to burn 4 adds to try to hide the fact that I dropped hill hoping he clears waivers cuz nobody notices. Only a $20 but still. So titling

lol

what's your biggest lead in any league? and will you go hard for trying to get a 1st round bye (finish #1/#2) and work your 3rd/4th place teams up, or are you just worried about more of the playoff bubble teams?

11 is my largest lead.

My goal was to focus on getting as many teams in the playoffs as possible and not worry about seeding so im definitely emphasizing the bubble teams right now since I can still realistically get over 100 teams in the playoffs

That said after this week im likely going to write off my 12th place teams that are > x games out since people are going to try to feed off desperation rather than give value for value. That extra time I'll probably spend fine tuning the potential bye teams

My plan is to bet big on gordon napoli reyes Grichuk and pence and use guys like cano or springer or story/lindor/Boegarts to get aces. It's a risky play but thankfully I have more than enough offense to live with it

The guys I likely will not move under any circumstance are trout/goldy/bro/Altuve/marte/donaldson/arenado/machado/correa

Marte really stands out from that last group to me. power gone and BABIP around 400...think his trade value may exceed his likely production ROS

Marte can pull a > .350 BABIP but that's not really my reason. He's already at 30 steals and speed is really valuable

Edit: if I have to trade marte I will, but my preference is to trade any number of others first in leagues where I have him

Haven't checked in a bit. How's everything with the leagues doing SRM - you alive and sane I hope!!?

Barely on both counts. Made close to 200 trades in the last 5 days

What is your updated goal? To break even?

nah, still playing for keeps

my goal at the start of the season was to get > 100 into the playoffs at which point let come what may. that's still a realistic goal

Sounds like its working so far. How did all those Trevor Story trades work out?

Any chance your experience gets shown on a fantasy show/blog if you document your progress, or are you not int'd in that?

Sick challenge and thread, gl!