CPF NL Only 2011 league?

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Fire sale on at Lunchie HQ.

[smg58]

Why? You're one good week out of second place.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I was exaggerating the fire sale description but my offense is nearly incapable of having a good week.

At any rate, I agreed to trade Marcum to the Vandals for Mike Stanton. I'd be happy to entertain more O for P trade offers.

[willpie]

Even recognizing that this is a good kind of problem to have, I am completely baffled about what to do with my team. I've been in first place for so long that I'm terrified to make any moves, but also terrified that I'm going to end up losing because I rested on my laurels as of mid-June.
I don't usually find non-money leagues this stressful.

[metsmarathon]

holy shit, i'm tied for first!

[willpie]

Aaaaand the freefall has begun. It was a good run.

[smg58]

So MM, have you popped the champagne yet?

[metsmarathon]

not yet. i'm still wary of a momentus collapse - those things seem to running around these days.

i don't think there's all that much room for movement with one game left (would a 1-game playoff count for the league? hmm... ) but i'm still keeping the bottles corked for now.

i'm also still not really all that sure how i've managed to win, as my draft wasn't terribly good, and injuries and trades hurt me a bit throughout hte year. i guess i just picked up the right guys at the right time, and my potentially foolish investment in pitching in the draft paid off.

and i'm thoroughly clueless as to how my team became such an offensive powerhouse. batting average aside, for each of the other categories, i was worst or second worst in the league in april and/or may.

[metirish]

Your guys must have bunted a lot , all I have to say is that I didn't finish last.

[Ceetar]

metirish wrote: Your guys must have bunted a lot , all I have to say is that I didn't finish last.

I think we need to pare down the positions next year. Tired of hoping the random dregs left can be spot starters.

[ashie62]

Congrats to the Toddlers Knuckles and SMG!

I had great fun.

[metsmarathon]

Ceetar wrote: metirish wrote: Your guys must have bunted a lot , all I have to say is that I didn't finish last. I think we need to pare down the positions next year. Tired of hoping the random dregs left can be spot starters.

i dunno. this year, those dregs were largely a key to my success, plus some insane hotness when my team was actually healthy and together in the middle of the season.

last year, man, did i hate this league last year. i couldn't find a warm body worth a damn on the waiver wire.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I relied too heavily on Ike Davis and wasted a league-best pitching staff with the league's worst offense. Nothing I could do to stop it.

I propose next year we try a keeper league with an auction draft, and provide something for the second division to shoot for.

[metsmarathon]

hmm. in the six years we've been doing this league, this is the first season where the winner had neither the top batters (#2, with 52.5 points) nor the top pitchers (#5 with 45 points).

those honors fall to guldens spicy brown offense at 60.5 points and smg58's pitchers at 53 points. los luncheros racked up 51 points.

[Vic Sage]

In an NL-only league with this many teams and this many slots to fill, premium players have the biggest impact, IMO. So many of us are filling out our daily lineups with part-timers and lousy players that 1 great player can make a huge difference. For MM, i think Ryan Braun's MVP-type season and the mid-season pickup of Bonafacio cemented his O, while Cliff Lee's Cy young candidacy validated MM's strategy to punt on saves.

Knuxie took a cynical and smart all-Phillies approach that took him far... just not quite far enough. Hopefully, the actual Phillies will suffer a similar fate.

SMG did it with smoke and mirrors. I'm still not sure why i didn't catch him, except my mid-season trade of Stanton for Marcum did not work out as well as i'd hoped, with Wright and Weeks not giving me the power i needed to make up for the loss of Stanton, and Marcum coming back to earth a little in the second half, not able to balance out my otherwise awful starting pitching.

My team MVP is a toss up between Mike Morse, who had me nervous with his slow start and almost losing his slot in the Washington lineup before coming on to have the .300/30hr season i projected for him, and Bourn, with his .290/60sb/90r season. But the power ended up being way more important than the SBs, which were surprisingly easy to pick up off the waiver wire, so I'll go with Morse.

my Cy Young was also my best waiver wire value, Ryan Vogelsong who had a strong season across the board after i picked him up for free in late april. My worst pitcher was a toss up between Brett Myers and Derek Lowe. Oh, i had worse pitchers, too, but these guys got more innings to be terrible than the rest did.

my runner up for best waiver wire free pickup was Ryan Roberts, who gave me good HR/SB combo with multi-positional flexibility.
My worst waiver pickup value was probably the $442 i spent on rookie Jose Altuve, when i was already far ahead in SBs. what the hell was THAT about?

Best trade was Overbay+Jansen to MOOPS (neither of whom did much for him) for Leo Nunez, who gave me 36 saves, teaming with Brian Wilson to give me decent RP stats. But MOOPS got me back when i sent him a useful MI bat in Keppinger for Travis Wood, who did little for me before getting sent to the minors. In retrospect, giving up on Stanton to pick up Marcum smacked of desperation (as did the Keppinger/Wood deal, albeit less so), exacerbated by the lack of power i was getting from Wright and Weeks due to injuries. But i was kind of leery of Stanton's chronic injury problems, and thought he might fall off a cliff toward the end of the season. turned out he had a pretty strong finish and Marcum didn't. oh well. pitching envy will lead to such blunders.

My best draft pick? Probably Morse, in the 9th round, followed by Bourn in the 7th. Nick Hundley in the 23rd also gave me surprisingly good value.
My worst pick? All the others. My first 2 picks, Wright and Weeks, were decent but limited by injuries and not nearly as productive as you need your top 2 picks to be. Ian Desmond and G.Soto were decent for their positions, but i over-reached on them. I waited til the mid-rounds to get SPs (as i planned), but as it turns out, Brett Myers, Edison Volquez, Kyle McClellen and Derek Lowe do not a pitching staff make...even in this league. There were, however, good SPs available in those mid rounds and, if my top hitters had produced and i had picked better SPs (or had been luckier with them), i feel i would've been in it all season, instead of hovering in the 5th-6th place range most of the year until i was able to scramble to a 4th place finish.

oh, well.

wait'll next year...

Edited September 29, 2011 by Guest

[Vic Sage]

*avi*

[smg58]

Considering I was in 11th place at the All-Star Break, I can't really complain about where I finished.

What I learned:

In a league this deep, don't give up on a guy before his team does. I thought four months was enough time to give James Loney to show some life, but I was mistaken. And don't get me started on Javier Vazquez.

You can draft an elite catcher early, but you can't replace his bat if he gets hurt.

Call-ups are a safer source of cheap steals (thank you Eric Young and Dee Gordon) than power numbers (Anthony Rizzo, was it something I said?).