metsmarathon

this season is difficult - it's not even a race! muddy chickens hit big-time on all his draft picks, it seems. at least in the past, there's been two teams battling it out. or at least not so much of a gap. this year, wow... i had been hoping to transition into being a buyer if my pitching ever straightened out, but kershaw going down and staying down has ended that fantasy. boo.

metsmarathon wrote: with 3 starters on the DL, and 2 utterly ineffective, i'm running a 3-man rotation right now... thank god for clayton kershaw! so... uh... about that kershaw fellow...

with 3 starters on the DL, and 2 utterly ineffective, i'm running a 3-man rotation right now... thank god for clayton kershaw!

o far this early season, my team is struggling a bit. there's just no power, and my pitching has been uncharacteristically spotty as well. i took to the strategy of sitting my expensive slumpers, only to see miggy smack two homers two nights ago, and mccutch knock in three of his own last night. of course. but it's early, so far, and my guys should start to get back to the backs of their baseball cards. or else there's a fire-sale coming!

yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. oh yes.

so... uh... did our commish forget to re-up his team?

the remnants of a soundly defeated german empire took a mere two decades to rebound into one hell of a formidable military machine following the great war. the first order is on the outskirts of the known galaxy, with access to a vast frontier far distant from the new republic - and all of its attendant resources - and is made up from the most ardent among the empire's survivors. it could've been explained away a bit better. but did we really want them to get into more history lessons, treaty negotiations, and discussions of the intricacies of galactic economics?

some of the copying of plot points is due to the nature of the galaxy they're in. the empire likes to make big round powerful weapons, with trenches. it's what they do. it's their thing. they also like impossibly large space ships shaped like triangles. do they need to start branching out stylistically? do they maybe need to find a different defense contractor? yes, clearly. this time, instead of building a moon, they built their weapon into a planet, through it's core, however improbable that it. I guess they could've lopped off a couple sides of it to make it a giant tetrahedron. or cube it. maybe have the gun hang off the side like a big angry Q...? I'm okay with it. the trench? I guess. sure. need to pop some hard right angles into these things instead of all the straight runs. but it took more of a ROTJ-style attack to defeat it than a single lucky shot from luke. and if there wasn't a weak spot, it would become a very sad movie where the bad guys win easily, or the good guys have to win by slowly punching away at the diamond wall. attrition is really hard to do cinematically. so. desert planet. ok fine. they should mix up a little more effectively where they source their protagonists from. beyond that, "hey look, our hero is a happy, well-to do kid with a robust, full family and lots of friends." doesn't seem to have the same draw as some down on their luck dreamer whose been dealt a raw hand. though I suppose the down on their luck thing doesn't come off as effectively if the kid is on a verdant lush forest world. the thing that I took away from the movie was that, yes, these points were taken from the original, but how they got there was different, and unique, and served, to me, to show how cyclical the star wars universe is. I also feel as if the remixing of these elements was viewed as necessary (and I agree that it was) to establish that, 'hey, this really is an actual star wars movie' and not just some other piece of fan fic using some of the same characters. it was safe, sure, but for me, it worked, and worked fantastically well. will it hold up as well on a second viewing? I think so. also, I look at it like I look at the terminator and T2. a lot of the same things happen, and there are frequent callbacks throughout. and in the terminator series, it makes sense as to the inevitability of the future, whereas in star wars it's about the cyclity of it all.

ok, I finally saw it, and I fuckin' loved it. it has flaws, sure, and borrows a bit much from the original, but I'm thus far okay with it. I simply cannot wait until I can watch it again. unfortunately, it was altogether too much for minimm. part of the problem may have been that we were seated in the friggin' second row, under a massive screen, but he was curled up into a ball almost from the get-go. he left with mrs.mm before the assault on starkiller base. he agrees that perhaps the cinematic experience saturated him, and is not averse to trying to see it again, on a smaller screen at home, in the future. poor kid. I liked what was done with the original cast - it all felt authentic. as far as rehashing star wars plot points, rotj already had another death star, and the phantom menace had Anakin fly into a large space station and destroy it (accidentally) by blowing up it's weakest design flaw. I thought they offered up a fairly new take on it all, and in remixing in a lot of what felt familiar from the original trilogy, they established that with the force, in this universe, it's all cyclical. and I think that such a pattern has already been established as canon. besides, there's really only two ways to take out massively powerful superweapns - critical flaw, or attrition, and attrition is a lot less exciting to watch in a movie.

For one, it rewards anyone dedicated, we, stoopid, enough to stay up till the end of the draft for the slim pickins that remain. And two, there are a bunch of teams in desperate need of roster overhauls that could benefit from such dreg-rankings. And three, who's to say we'd be all the way down to those players of such inconsequence that most of the league has no interest in trying to obtain them by the time the time limit kicked in? And finally, if the players are of such trivial nature than it shouldn't matter if the harder working owners get them, should it? The only real argument for it is that someone willing to foolishly put more time into their team might be at as light competitive advantage. But isn't that kindof the point...?

I disapprove of the hard end cap

We really need to have this done before the keeper deadline. Do we need to find a different replacement owner?

so... ownership straightened out yet...?

minimm still hasn't seen revenge of the sith (and I can't remember if he's seen attack of the clones). unfortunately, I don't think he's really ready to see the force awakens, even though it opens just two short days after his 6th birthday. I didn't do machete order, and ended up with a kid who liked jar jar binks. dangit. he's really not ready for revenge of the sith though... I might have to queue up the original trilogy again instead. get the µmm's into it early.

oops. it was jj hardy, not rickie weeks. a dollar on mejia is probably better placed than a dollar on hardy. though the hardy dollar was mostly done to avoid actually penalizing the receiving team, I'm guessing.

once you award a dollar, as long as the deadline hasn't passed, you just change the $1 to a $0 on the respective team page, and reassign your dollar as you please.

just thought I'd start up a new thread for the next season, as we're basically all done with the last one, having concluded salary arbitrations. as has been mentioned on the otto board, my one friend the philly phan, hungrypup, is dropping out. it seems he can't pay enough attention to the league during the week to remain competitive (though it was mostly his drafting and keeping that sunk him), and is dropping out. I have another friend (a mets fan in easton assassins) whose uncle (not sure if he's a mets fan) is interested in joining. any objections? any other takers? any other dirty no-good dropouts? I'm looking forward to all the interesting keeper decisions that come down the road. I'm also still trying to figure out why anyone would've put arbitration dollars on ricky weeks. honestly.... I.. just don't get it.

psst, arbitrate, you guys!

holy crapola, it's a barn-burner! heading into the final, rain-soaked weekend, scant fractions of points separate the albatrosses from the chickens! a meager handful of runs scoreed, times on base, strikeouts or runs allowed will be the difference between victory and hollow defeat for one of us! every single at bat, every last pitch counts!

so, due to a general lack of interest overall, i'm pulling hte plug on my nascent idea to run an ottoneu football league. sorry...

ok, so ottoneu football is officially live. you guys still up for it? my friend muddy chickens is in, too, so we only need, like, 10 more teams! the basics of it are here: http://ottoneu.fangraphs.com/football/help/ ottoneu Fantasy Football is a multi-season auction-based dynasty fantasy football game with college players available as prospects. it's a weekly head-to-head league with 3 divisions of 4 teams each. $400 cap space, 20 roster slots. the positional breakdown is on the website under >rules< let me know if you're in!

If your teams are so terrible, you should maybe be a little more active on auctions, or looking for cheap players to hang onto. None of y'all were in on schwarber! Now, fine, he went for a ton of cash, but that none of you even bid a few dollars...? Or moreland... He went for a buck! You weren't going to outbid smg, but you could've driven up his cost. Don't wait until the offseason to start your rebuild! There's still promising players out there, and if you get them cheaply enough, you can hang onto them for next year. They may not be foundational players, but they could help solidify your roster.

if harper ended up where trout is now, he's still an easy keep. you also have syndergaard, and harvey as well, there to siphon off some of the arbitration interest.

nah, the last two years it came down to the wire, with me sweating it out on literally the last day of the season. this year might end up the same. although, damn, i've built up a bit of a gap here... and... well... i'll...uh... i'll take harper if you don't want him.

have i mentioned that this is my favorite fantasy league to play in? because it is.