This afternoon the Towel and I completed a trade in the Denslow Cup that we had been discussing since last week.  It involved David Wright and Ryan Zimmerman as the centerpieces, and since I had Zimmerman, my side was going to be bigger.  We play in a league that uses both OBP and Slug% as well as the traditional rotisserie categories.  Obviously Wright’s projected numbers year in and year out are going to give him a little more spring value than a guy like Zimmerman in our league because the couple percentage points Wright walks more than Zimmerman essentially cancels out the 5 or 6 extra points of contact percentage that Zimmerman will throw up come October.  Wright will steal roughly 10-15 more bases most years than Zimmerman, though, which gives him the edge.  Both are injury prone to an extent as well.

What I’m getting at here is that a trade involving these two guys should simply not involve any other truly valuable players beyond these two guys because they are strikingly similar players in a league like The Cup.  To further solidify my point, Wright’s ADP in ESPN league’s right now is 36.0, and Zimmerman’s is 39.0.  It does not take much value to square up a trade between two players that are 3.0 draft positions apart.

What that means is that I got hosed, because I threw in Josh Beckett and John Axford to go along with Ryan Zimmerman to bring back an oft injured 29-year old whose best season was now five years ago.  What’s more, Wright is in the middle of one of the hottest periods of his career at the dish and has a fractured finger.  Finally, the Mets are awful.  There is no realistic reason to think that anyone in that lineup will bang in 100 runners or score 100 runs himself because it’s basically a lineup comprised of refuse, Wright, Ike Davis, and Daniel Murphy.  Beckett is currently being taken at the 103 spot on average and Axford is going ten spots earlier.  What that means is that according to ADP, I gave up three guys in the top 100 for the guy I just described.

How could I do that?  Well, in short, I didn’t like looking at my squad every day and not seeing Wright’s name.  I hated watching highlight shows of him performing so well and playing so courageously through injury while on another manager’s squad.  David is my favorite player.  As I write this, I occasionally drift off and take in the objects in my room.  Directly under my television is an autographed photo of David driving in Luis Castillo from second that Whitney got me for my 26^th birthday.

David Wright is my favorite baseball player ever (tied with Nomar…duh), and I don’t mind if I got hosed in April to get him on my squad, because he is the kind of player that will keep me motivated and interested for the next six months.  If I didn’t already have Jimmy Rollins, Andre Ethier, or Shane Victorino, I’d be making the same kind of boneheaded moves to get them too.

That brings me to my final thought of the day.  I love the squad that I drafted this season more than any season in the past.  I have an entire lineup of my kind of guys.  When I say that, I mean that my squad collectively knows how to hit.  They crush strikes and take balls.  They hit the ball in the air.  They are either terrific athletes or young enough that it doesn’t matter yet.  And now, I have David.  If I don’t win this season, I’m going to be pretty upset, but what I’m fairly sure of is that my team hits, and that’s a really, really big deal to me, because for the next six months, they are an extension of myself.  When I look at my lineup before I go to bed, my team’s performance over the previous 24 hours is going to have a large and meaningful impact on the next 24 hours.

That’s just life in The Denslow Cup, bro.

It is that time of the year for owners to come to grips with the reality of their team.  Your guys have either performed at or above the level you expected when drafting them, or have fallen short of reaching your expectations.  But even if you might have flopped on draft day, chances are you have at least a couple of guys on your roster that other owners would love to have.  If you only have a couple guys worthwhile on your roster, it’s probably time to make some moves and expand.  Turn your one stud into a couple of players that allow you to upgrade at multiple positions.  If you are an owner that currently has a hard time fitting everybody into the lineup on a daily basis, it is time to consolidate and bring in that one stud that will help ensure your team reamins in the top tier of your league.  If you refuse to make a move now, you might find yourself dwelling in the cellar for the rest of the season, and that makes for a miserable summer.

(more…)

When I last wrote about my first fantasy exploits, I was losing in the first week with only three days left. My staff was performing poorly, and I was freaking out in front of my computer screen while Madison Bumgarner, Matt Thornton, and Ted Lilly tried to sabotage my team. After an awkward first week, my staff looked up the definition of “pitcher” in the Oxford-English dictionary and realized what they were doing didn’t fall under those guidelines—and they did something about it (or I made a move). We’ve been through four weeks of heated battles, and I thought I’d give the reader a breakdown of each week, including my weekly moves (henceforth referred to as “Strategery”), best hitter (“Neck Snapper”) and best pitcher (“Cash Checker”). It goes a little something like this:

(more…)

When I say this is my first week of fantasy, I don’t mean the first of the season—I mean I’ve never participated in fantasy sports before this year. Previously, I assumed that I would make too big of a time commitment just to be stomped around by guys (and possibly girls) that have done this before and have, you know, strategies and such. When fellow Sombrero contributor Rick Berdelle invited me to his league, “The Sober Valley Lodge,” I thought this was a great opportunity to finally make the plunge into fantasy. The Lodge’s settings look like this:

(more…)

Last Tuesday evening was the annual Denslow Cup draft.  Luckily I was back home in Farmington so that Griff and I could get together and drink some beers and eat some BBQ courtesy of my mom and buddy/Sombrero enthusiast, Benji.  The Cup’s draft day is one of my favorite days of the year, and this was absolutely no exception.  I was totally amped all day and could barely hold my hand still to click the mouse to select my first pick.  As usual, we played in a 7 X 7 league with R, RBI, BA, Slug %, OBP, SB, and HR as our offensive categories and W, SV, WHIP, ERA, K’s, K/BB, and IP as our pitching categories.  We have tried to incorporate stats we view as essential to Big League success such as K/BB and OBP in an effort to discourage profiting from players who don’t contribute proportionately to their actual teams.  Anyway, I wanted to present my team, the Milk Steak Knives (named after both the Cup’s founder, Robert Vincent Unsell, and Charlie Kelly’s favorite dish), to our readers and offer some justification for my picks.

(more…)