The encarnacion, springer, marte, betts and Cueto trades were all wins, the abreu and upton trades complete duds

Shrug. Haven't made any effort to publicize this beyond this thread

did you end up writing/keeping a blog?

i feel like it would be fun to send around to bill simmons, espn, yahoo etc

I actually have had thoughts of trying to do it up as a story and shopping it to Yahoo. Not sure if they'd see it as a positive or negative, since it advertises shark-infested waters.

115-59-28

**** the Astros to hell. Had 147 shares of bregman 8 days ago and started dropping him for streamer pitchers because I thought the 6 add limit would reset after Sunday even thought it's a 2 week week. I was wrong

Have him in 50 spots with his availability plummeting

So I'm in as good a position as I can hope for under the circumstances. 41% in with 33% between 7-9 which for the purpose of this thread I'll just keep referring to as the bubble. Didn't expect to get 60% in in preseason and since that's in play that's what I'll shoot for

I THINK I might try this next year at 250 minimum since the time commitment wasn't nearly as brutal as I anticipated it might be, but looking back on it I think the biggest mistakes I made that I would do differently would be:

1. Only $50 buyins. $20 buyins are difficult to exploit unknown players running well and $100 leagues players are sharp enough to beat me pretty easily if they're paying attention since I'm not really.
2. Don't wait so long to balance the bubble teams. I should have started working and focusing on the bubbles at the midpoint of the season instead of the ASB
3. Don't wait so long to trade incumbents and gamble on unknown players
3a. Don't be so quick to drop. I stand by my strategy but it's clear that it can't be used for a full season over 200 teams because once you get behind the 8 ball 7-3 wins aren't enough anymore. The biggest advantage to being the only guy with a deep bench is the ability to stash players people couldn't otherwise justify rostering because they're wasting a spot. The problem is I decided if a player couldn't have trade value for me and I wasn't starting them I'd just drop them for a different gamble. In all 202 leagues I drafted Saunders. In over 170 I drafted schoop. Turner, victor Martinez, Melvin Upton, villar, Nunez, just a lot of people I ultimately ended up dropping because they served no purpose for me if I couldn't trade them or start them. I should have been quicker to trade away the arenados, canos and such in spots where I had more than enough to justify doing so instead of making it my goal to trade for them

Anywho, 7 weeks to go

Interesting stuff. Thanks for posting.

That's up to you, I was just curious. I guess if you spoke to a blog or show of some kind they might have you on to talk about the experience.

Any updates?

hey ramen, hows life

dropping story 150+ times probably felt awful

65 losses last week, haven't updated anything yet, been putting heaps of time into getting trade offers out before the deadline, will update monday

hud

yarp. although it was actually less than 100. don't recall teh exact number

Update:

67 losses last week. 3rd winning week in the last 4. This week likely hinges on tomorrow where every single league I have between 4 and 7 starters

I've noticed I have the most moves made in every single one of my leagues which on one hand I find unusual but on the other was kind of the point. People are generally too hesitant to pull the trigger on a player that there should be bank runs on that by the time it actually happens it's either a full month after it should have or it's too late cuz I have it all

I would say that my biggest edge in these leagues was largely negated in a lot of places by my desire to hoard as many top 2 round players as humanly possible. Napoli and Duffy for instance. In both cases I still have slightly over 100 but in both cases I started out with 200. At the time I picked both up their upside was apparent but in both cases I would end up throwing them in as trade bait or dropping them if that didn't work out. My logic was that I wanted to autopilot in as many places as possible and assembling as many top 20 players as possible and using them as high value trade chips when the time came to focus on the playoffs was the best way to approach this. It was still a functional approach but it also resulted in a ton of value left on the table along the way

Also I'm thinking next year roto is the best approach. My biggest problem this season was I didn't pay nearly enough attention to where I was at in pitching in nearly enough matchups this season and left a lot of wins on the table. The problem is going through each matchup and adjusting as needed uses up far too much time over 200 leagues, and it's way more practical to do roto where you can look at each matchup in a vacuum over a season rather than check who you're playing, what they have left, the gaps in ratios and volume between you two

121-68-13 on the week. 4th winning week out of 5. Good time to be heating up

89-89-24

Considering how absolutely horse**** my pitching was (average era was around 7) this could have been a lot worse

Will update standings and how many teams are in contention by how many games tomorrow

I am only playing in a 3 leagues, 2 H2H and one roto and doing well in all but I like roto best. Because it is easier to handle the pitching. Although I made almost no pitching changes other than snagging closers when I could and maybe got real lucky in the draft. I made no changes to my starting pitching all season (Sale, Syndergaard, Qunitano, Hendricks, Lackey, Garcia) other than at one point dropping Garicia and placing Lackey on DL. Closers of Jansen, Familia, Ramos, Allen and some others I snagged along the way. I have pretty much crushed the pitching competition. In roto you only get a certain amount of innings pitched for the season (I'm over by about 10 innings so far). So it never makes sense to send up some scrubbish type of guy who will eat innings when you can get more quality types of innings by just sticking with some ace types.

I like the strategy of grabbing rock solidish pitching and then just leaving it alone unless it sucks. I admit I got lucky with my initial choices but stand by the strategy of quality only given you only get a set amount of innings for the season. Next year I would want even more in the area of quality closers

You definitely ran really good with your mid round draft picks.

In my roto I drafted Kershaw, Salazar, Richards, Liriano, Chen, and McHugh.

By June 3, Kershaw and Salazar were my only remaining drafted pitchers.

By August 2, both of them were on the DL.

But I'm actually still leading pitching generally with my trades/pickups of Strasburg/Maeda/Duffy/Musgrove/Hammel/Bundy. But it has cost a hell of a lot of offense to build that rotation.

look at the top 50 hitters by rank and only 17 have a preseason rank outside 100

look at the top 50 starters by rank and 34 have a preseason rank outside 100

by in large when it comes to hitters you're going to get what you pay for which is why you should hoard as many of them as possible and not only are pitchers far too variable but a lot of studs will fall completely under the cracks (which was the basis of my draft strategy to begin with). where i ****ed up was not holding onto the pitchers that i snagged early and instead trying my damndest to use them as trade assets and ignoring people like fulmer and wright and porcello simply because they had no trade value to me early on

Not that I disagree (although league settings are HUGE wrt how you should focus your early picks), just wanna make sure that when you say pitchers with a preseason rank outside of the top 100 do you mean the top 100 starting pitchers?

Because there are a lot more hitters in the top 100 overall than there are pitchers. On the player rater, there are 34 SP in the top 100 overall right now, 10 relievers, and 56 hitters.

There are a lot more hitters though. Pitching is for sure more variable though which is why in roto where you only get a set amount of innings quality picthing is FAR more important. Guys that can/will blow up your whip and era need to be avoided at all costs. It's not like H2H were a bad outing can be shrugged off because as they accumulate they will bury you in roto.

I think this is the main strategy difference in H2H vs roto. You have to pay up on draft day to get the really solid guys. Problem is you still may miss. But if you can land a couple of #1's who are effective you are in good shape. Streaming to get maximum starts doesn't make sense since you will run out of innings and get too many bad ones.

nah i mean top 100 overall cuz it reinforces the idea that if you're using a top 100 pick on a pitcher the results (nearly annually) say you're wasting a pick given what constitutes the top 50 starting pitchers at this point in the year

it's true though, for the most part it is dependent on league settings

also number of my teams that aren't in the playoffs, games back of 6th:

mathematically eliminated/abandoned: 4
20.5-30: 4
15.5-20: 13
10.5-15: 29
5.5-10: 32
0-5: 35

I'll give the top 50 players right now that are SPs, and their ADP:

5. MadBum 25
6. Kershaw 4
7. Scherzer 14
16. Sale 20
18. Arrieta 22
20. Porcello 230
22. Kluber 39
26. Verlander 133
29. Hendricks 198
30. Cueto 77
33. Fernandez 54
34. Duffy (undrafted)
37. Lester 75
38. Happ (undrafted)
43. Strasburg 58
45. Syndergaard 61

The player rater ain't perfect, but looking at the above I just feel like if you don't draft any pitchers early, you'll likely miss out on the elite pitchers. Unless your MO is to trade for them with hitters, which could definitely be viable depending on the league.

Although I will definitely agree that proportionally there are fewer hitters on the list who didn't come out of the first 10 rounds--Villar, Nunez, Desmond, Myers being the most notable, with most of the others being fringe 10th rounders. Plus RIP Story.

106-79-17

106-76-16 not counting the abandoned teams

number of my teams that aren't in the playoffs, games back of 6th:

mathematically eliminated/abandoned: 19 (9.4%)
0-5: 32 (15.8%)
5.5-10: 26 (12.9%)
10.5-15: 26 (12.9%)
15.5-20: 12 (5.9%)

116-62-24