Today was the day I've been waiting for. I got home from work and found a box on my front porch from Yahoo. Hooray! Finally, my bobblehead trophy for winning my Yahoo Fantasy Baseball Plus League arrived. It's a nice, heavy ceramic bobblehead - but why does it take Yahoo so long to ship them out to league winners? My league ended four and a half months ago (before the MLB playoffs), and just two days before pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training. I'm bringing this right to work to sit next to my Emmys and other awards.

Labels: fantasy_baseball

Sorry I haven't been blogging lately. Here's what's been going on over the past week that wasn't really worthy of dedicated posts.

• I didn't play disc golf for a full month because of the incredible heat we've had in Charlotte all of August. On Thursday I played in my first tournament in 6 weeks, and I took 4th place, my highest finish yet. I won't bore you every time I win plastic (the prizes are new discs), but I will post if I ever come in first.
• Last week we finally got part of our house repairs taken care of. The first floor ceiling was finally patched and I'm not satisfied with the popcorn finishing they did. We're still trying to get the master bathroom floor fixed but nobody is willing to take the job because the "first response" people who came in to dry everything up did more damage to the sub floor than necessary. It's all a freakin' mess that I wish would just go away already.
• I'm now back to working 6 1/2 days per week until December. Joy. Even better is the fact that my non-NFL job (which I don't identify) stopped paying overtime, which really sucks after working what sometimes ends up being a 14 hour shift.
• Ending on a positive note, I am the guru of fantasy sports. I am in the championships in both of my fantasy baseball leagues, which is a huge achievement in one league since I started without a winning week for the first 5 weeks of the season but came back to end up with the 2nd best regular season record. And now it's football season too. In the three leagues I'm in, I'm a combined 6 wins and zero losses (2-0 in each league) and I'm in first place in 2 of my leagues. Booya!
  

Labels: disc_golf, fantasy_baseball, fantasy_football, home, work

In March I offered draft analysis for two fantasy baseball leagues I'm in. We're now at the MLB All-Star break so I went back and took another look at my previous analysis. I had some very off-target player predictions but the most surprising thing is how backwards my initial confidence in each roster was. In my money-league I was concerned about missing out on certain players and thought I'd have a tough year, but I'm sitting in 2nd place with a .640 winning percentage. I've lost only one weekly matchup all year!

On the flip side I predicted that my non-money league team was going to totally kick ass, but I started the season without a single weekly matchup win for the first 9 weeks (0 wins, 5 losses, and 4 ties). Wow, talk about misjudging your talent. Fortunately for me I've started to turn it around, winning all of my matchups for the past 5 weeks. I still have a losing record but I've climbed within 4 games of a playoff spot with two full months to go.

As long as I was wrong about my pre-season predictions, better to have the over-achieving team be the one in my money-league.

Labels: fantasy_baseball

If you don't care about fantasy baseball, stop reading right now.

I had two live fantasy drafts this week and my results were night and day. The first draft was a free, 12-team league of semi-regulars I join every year. The second was also a 12-team league I join every year, but this bunch is more serious. We play for cash and use keepers (players you can keep from the previous year).

My first draft went exactly as I planned, in fact it went better than I could have hoped. Everything fell perfectly into place and my team should absolutely dominate the league. In the first three rounds I took Chase Utley, Manny Ramirez, and Derrek Lee. In the 4th round I took Garrett Atkins which is a great pick at #40. In addition to good mid-round values, I got nearly every late-round sleeper I was looking for. In the 12th I was lucky enough to find Jim Thome still available (Thome was not part of my plan but I couldn't pass that value up). I took Mark Teahan in the 14th, Brad Hawpe in the 15th, and rookie phenom Alex Gordon in the 19th round (pick #232). My team is going to kick ass.

Then Last night was the draft for my money/keeper league. Perhaps the competition is just more knowledgeable but this draft didn't go as I expected at all. Because it's a keeper league, I began the draft with three top-10 players: Jose Reyes, Ryan Howard, and Chase Utley. In fact, my team was so great last year that I actually had to dropped Alex Rodriguez! (That was a very hard decision that I'm still second guessing.)

I got Hawpe in the 15th the day before but he went in the 10th round to somebody from Colorado who understood how good of a season he should have this year. I did get Teahen in the 12th round but that was sooner than I wanted to take him. Since I lost A-Rod, and missed out on Ramirez, Atkins, and Zimmerman, I needed to to pull the trigger early to ensure I didn't get shut out at 3B. Alex Gordon went in the 13th. I wanted Gordon but there was no way I would've picked him that early.

Long story short, I began the draft with the best team due to my three great keepers, but lost ground thereafter. I actually had an okay draft but other teams came out looking as powerful as my team did in my other league, which is not good for me. It's going to be a long season.

Labels: fantasy_baseball

As if I didn't have enough going on this month, I joined a rotisserie baseball league. It should be fun. I began playing rotisserie baseball in the 1980's but it's making a big comeback. We haven't even drafted yet, so I'm currently tied for first place in my league :)

Labels: fantasy_baseball