The battle for Jose Fernandez - our 2014 fantasy thread!

one way or another Mr Rizzo will be neutralized for the remainder of the season!

YES

I can tell my grandchildren I was in first place for at least one day in 2014.

fuuuuuu.....

beware of the Curse of Doing Well. i, too, held first place for a day or two this year. then i traded away the future of my team for a set of used razor blades and a jar of rubberbands that are too small and dropped into 6th place overnight

I think Yahoo corrected yesterday's standings following the results of the suspended games. So I wasn't in first place after all? But now I am (again, or not)? Yay?

ya that was confusing.

i guess - you're kind like the George W Bush of our league – your first victory was under dubious circumstances at best, but this time around appears to be legit. for the most part.

;)

Are you trying to say that there will be a huge real estate/baseball statistics crash at the end of my term? That I will be bounced from the top of the standings in disgrace in the final week? It's on, dude!

almost the end of the season and I finally got Will. M's team name [/slow clap]. New Order threw me off the scent.

wha? what do you mean new order threw you off the scent?

uh. i thought it referenced Bizarre Love Triangle: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7uEBuqkkQRk

It does reference bizarre love triangle, that is why I am confused haha

What other (more clever) meaning does it have?

I was wondering the same thing! What else could it be?

Thermo, your team score has been following a periodic pattern since mid-season, with about a 3-4 week period of oscillation. This means you will be back down to 140 points by the end of the season and I should have no problem overtaking you.

Yes, this is my best "strategy" for winning at this point.

my strategy is that the top 3 all spontaneously fall apart and i ride the hairy back of lance lynn into the winners circle

mine revolved around voodoo dolls.

Your hairy backs and voodoo are no match for my fortune telling.

i've been collecting my tears since the ASB which i intend to throw into the yahoo servers and when they lose all of the info will say "guys i am pretty sure i was gonna win anyway"

i overthought it. thought it had something to do with T()mb()t.

lool

aw man now i really wanna know cuz i have NO idea waht u mean by that!

Your hairy backs and voodoo are no match for my fortune telling.

i'd say your plan is more like relying on the tides!

Like the Blue Jays, it looks like I'm limping to the finish line.

a grand total of 70 different players on my roster earned points for me this season according to my team log. not sure if there were any guys i picked up and didn't play.

team log is interesting, here are my least valuable player awardees; @ least i knew to cut them quickly to strive as a 4/5th place team

Chase Headley 6 games played - 2/24 0R 0HR 0RBI .120OBP .083SLG
Daniel Nava 4 games played - 1/18 0R 0HR 0RBI .056OBP .056SLG
David Murphy 4 games played - 1/17 0R 0HR 1RBH .111OBP .059SLG -1NSB
Kolten Wong 5 games played - 0/13 1R 0HR 0RBI .188OBP .000SLG 1NSB

i'm just playing against the clock at this point – need to avoid a collapse for just 6 more days!

so i sat down a started figuring out how all those crazy trades i did panned out. but then i stopped because i got sad.
basically the two main keepers that i dealt, who were struggling at the time – caught fire. I got Cano for Marte and they have both hit roughly the same – so I would have been better off just hanging onto Marte. And for Shelby Miller I got Cliff Lee who had one horrible start for me before going on the DL. So that’s one pointless trade and one disaster. Trade three where I sent Seager and Calhoun – who have both performed about as well before and after the trade – for Ryan Zimmerman, who hit well for a week before going on the DL for two months; and Josh Hamilton who has been a total non-entity – is another disaster.

The only trade that worked out was when I had to find a replacement for Zimmerman, ironically, and dealt a collection of spare parts for Beltre.

Basically, had I just stood pat, I would be easily be running away with the league and still have a solid collection of keepers to pick from. Bleh.

ironically, i went to set my lineup just now and i see this in the side-bar:

Fantasy Medals:
Wheeling and Dealing
Successfully complete a trade
Won by: Barry
Date earned: July 2, 2014

fuck you.

my trades for marte and kluber really helped elevate me from 12th to 10th place

well - you've got Marte for something like 6 years now? where as I do not.

xpost

i think you still got the better end of that deal! i traded you a keeperable Kluber for about 4 or 5 starts from Garrett Richards, whose knee promptly exploded.

oh i know i got the better end of the deal, though i sure didn't think it was a coup at the time. i just wanted to keep somebody. anybody!

i didn't know klubs was gonna turn into scherzer, i thought he was kinda brandon beachy 2.0

too bad about richards, i figured it was a better deal for you considering how well he was pitching. must have carried my SP injury curse along with him. :/

oh no big deal! ironically i made that deal in an effort to shore up my hitting with pujols (who did just fine), but after that trade the rest of my hitters collapsed while my starting pitching finally got better, even with richards getting injured.

anyway at this point i'm just hoping to make 3rd place.

btw does anyone else feel like the innings pitched cap is too high? i've had a bunch of starting pitchers all year (to the point that the # of batters i've been able to keep on my roster has been thin) and i'm STILL going to end up way below the IP cap

i asked about that maybe two ago and everyone seemed ok with where it was back then (i think it *was* 1425). 1400 – where it is now – is the standard ceiling for most leagues and we have set-up guys going too.

lol wanna talk about trades lets talk about trades then

- I send Choo for Chris Davis (arguably I win but Davis was basically team poison so everoyne lost).
- I send Sonny Gray for Iwakuma and Doolittle -- kinda hoped better than a ~4 ERA from iwakuma (he's posted a 3.91 since I got him, and Doolittle only notched 10 saves -- not great). Down one keeper
- I send HJ Ryu for Hanley Ramirez, who posted 150 ABs in ~3 months. down one keeper
- I send Chris Davis, Javier Baez (KEEPABLE), Kimbrel (!!!) for Scherzer/Uehara. Scherzer decent but unremarkable. Good K's, bad rates. Uehara a total mess, 8 saves, ~5 ERA. Down THREE keepers.

Sum: down five keepers in the name of winning this year, currently battlnig to stay in 3rd. ;_; I stand behind my deicsions, they were good gambles, and I'm not COMPLETELY fucked on keepers next year, but... damn man. :(

ok. you made out worse than me. i'm glad i hung onto my top keepers tho: King Felix & Jose Fernandez. Jason Heyward to a lesser degree.

I love the trades this year. Super aggressive moves. The only way I built a winner last year was from two years of plowing elite stars into elite keepers.

Yeah, it was a good year for interesting trades in our league.

I traded for keepers at around the same time my offense finally caught fire, so I got better in the short and long term. I really fluked out with the timing of those trades. I'm not sure I have enough under-25 keeper eligible players though, but at least I have a real decision to make for next year, as opposed to this season when I had almost no keeper eligible guys left.

also you're closing in on me again. your sleeper agents have really fucked my shit up.

It'll take an epic collapse at this point. However, you are trending downwards -- don't doubt the tides!

I also couldn't help but notice that you rearranged some deck chairs on your roster in response to my rearranging of deck chairs on my roster. You're panicking!

i looked at my keepereligibles.xls and i think everyone has at least 5 eligible keepers, at least 2 from each category (assuming nobody dropped any since tuesday)

oh and thermo i will send that sheet when i get home, apparently i cant attach files in gmail at work so i workmailed it to myself and then i will go home and get it and send it blah blah blah

i was thinking - maybe a google doc that everyone can see would be the best way to go. great idea either way tho – thanks.

And streaming pitchers is not panicking!
Picking up Hosmer is panicking.

don't want to scare you guys but i moved up to ninth place the other night. #comeback

hah just emailed it and then read this, i will put it on google docs.

link

That's awesome, thanks!

Well - last day of the season. Good luck to everyone with their last-ditch, random free agent acquisitions!