Fantasy Musings on Dumb Mistakes We Won't Repeat for the Third Time

In the Spring of 2004, as we wound through the initial keeper rounds of the draft in our long-time fantasy league (still going!), we checked our cheat sheets and braced ourselves for our initial non-keeper picks.

There, at the top of our list, was Johan Santana. Having made the transition the year before from the bullpen to the rotation with aplomb, we had the 25 year-old hurler in our sights as our top pick after the keepers were tucked away.

(Yes, that's how you managed your keeper lists in Yahoo in 2004. We've come a long way baby.)

But in the moments before the draft, we were struck with a sudden panic over the next name on our list: Kaz Matsui. Would he make it back to us? We'd have 19 picks after Johan to get him, and we couldn't imagine him lasting that long. Who could resist this new demi-god of Japanese baseball excellence? The New Ichiro! The thought of seeing Matsui put up a decade of high-average, high-steal, high-run totals with a little bit of power mixed in at a premium position like shortstop (seriously!), and to have passed over all of that goodness? How could we have lived with ourself?

And besides: It's not like everyone knew about Johan Santana, right? We'd have a good shot at getting him in the next round...wouldn't we?

As our moment on the board came up, we confidently selected future All-Star, Hall of Famer, Gold Glove, Silver Slugger and Bronze Spikes winner Kaz Matsui.

And with the very next pick, our pal Darren selected Johan Santana. And he's kept him ever since.

We spent much of that season staring on in disbelief as Santana went on to win the Cy Young (and Darren went on to win the league), while Matsui would fumble his way through 114 games to the tune of a 0.4 WAR. (We didn't know what WAR was then, but there were plenty of conventional metrics that convinced us to toss Matsui to the scrap heap before the season was out.)

And as a result of such a folly, we saw our team fall back from a second place finish the previous year to a fourth place finish in 2004.

We should have learned our lesson. But somewhere along the line, the pain that we felt in that season would cease to seem tragic in our memory of it, and came of more as a farcical anecdote. And so, somewhere in the early-middle rounds of a 2008 draft, we found ourself jumping ahead on our list and grabbing the brand-new, can't-miss Japanese phenom, Kosuke Fukudome.

Once again, Fukudome didn't last much more than half a season on our roster before we tossed him asunder, probably in favour of one of the game's true greats...like Ryan Langerhans or Austin Kearns. Whoever it was, they helped lead us to an inauspicious ninth place finish (out of ten teams) that year.

All this is prologue to one immutable law of our fantasy baseball draft season: We will not draft Twins newcomer Tsuyoshi Nishioka. No matter how many great things we hear about him, of how he'll fit perfectly in the lineup between Denard Span and Joe Mauer, and will in all likelihood score 200 runs without really trying this year, he will not find respite on our roto rosters.

When it comes to fantasy baseball, our road to abrogation generally starts with the selection of a first year position player from Japan.

Nevermore.

Stuff we learned in our fantasy drafts

We're not quite the type to keep and care for numerous fantasy baseball teams anymore, what with the added expectations at work (those carts don't make their way to the corral on their own, you know) and home (the Missus didn't realize we were serious when we added the bit about our roto teams into our marriage vows) and with the blog (infotaining you kids can be a full time job.)

And so, working our way through two fantasy drafts this weekend seems to us to be a bit of a monumental achievement. If only the outcome matched what we perceive as the efforts, then we wouldn't feel quite so bummed out looking at our teams in the cold grey dawn of a Monday morning.

Looking back, it all seemed to fly by so fast, with our preferred players flying off the board quicker than we could queue them up. It was like we were unprepared for what was happening, and never seemed to have the grace to fully pull the moment off. We were left in a puddle of flop sweat and diminished expectations...Hey, this is really starting to sound like the entirety of our dating life!

With all this yammering as prologue, indulge us for a moment as we offer up a few lessons learned from this weekend, if only so that you might avoid some of the same missteps.

Preparation is not optional
Somewhere along the line, we had decided that our problem in the past was that we spent too much time reading the fantasy previews and making up lists and setting our pre-rankings. This year, we decided to go into our drafts completely raw, without any preparation.

It didn't go so well. When you have 60 seconds to make a pick, it's disconcertingly panic-inducing when you're suddenly wracking your brain to remember the points of distinction between Yovani Gallardo and Ubaldo Jimenez, or why you feel so wrong about picking Ryan Franklin (even though you end up picking him twice, and have the same rotten feeling about those low strikeout numbers each time).

If you don't know who's hurtin', you don't know nuthin'
When you're going into the draft blind, you quickly realize that what you don't know is going to overtake your thought processes. If a player was sitting out there a round or two later than we thought they should, we started looking to find out why. Is he hurt? Is he out? Does he have competition for the closer role? With a finite amount of time each round, we ended up frantically attempt to check on the health and wellness of any number of picks, and spent a good deal of time afterwards checking to see who might be of concern.

While we haven't found anyone egregiously hurt, we're reasonably sure that our fellow owners wouldn't have taken them off our hands if we had. (Not that we wouldn't try. Everything we learned about managing trades, we learned from Kenny Williams.)

Old mancrushes die hard
We tell ourselves every year that we're not going back to the well to draft big shining star prospects who are well past their best before dates. We tell ourselves that those dudes who had one or maybe two good seasons earlier in the decade aren't worthy of a pick. We tell ourselves not to fall into that trap again.

And then we go ahead and draft Alex Gordon. And Carlos Guillen. And Stephen Drew and Rickie Weeks. Zach Duke and Paul Maholm and Manny Parra.

Somehow, we managed to avoid drafting either of the Chris Youngs, although at one point, we had the D-Backs centerfielder in our sights, only to have him snatched away one pick before ours.

If there's one thing we learned, it's that experience hasn't taught us a thing.

What do you call a collection of questions microblogged?

TWEET BAG! Let's get it on.

@DHSpeedwagon (the inimitable Dany Heatley Speedwagon) asks:

Where do babies come from?

That depends. Ten years ago, we might have said that they come from broken rubbers and carelessness around the daily intake of progesterone pills. Now that we're older and fatter and greyer and of that age where many of our friends are indulging in having children on purpose, we can tell you that babies come from all angles. Many times, these babies are in strollers equipped with wheels that wouldn't look out of place on a monster truck, which their oblivious/entitled parents will run right over your feet, without apologies. Other times, babies will come from behind you with hands full of spittle and Arrowroot cookies that they can't wait to wipe on the back of a just-drycleaned pair of wool slacks.

It's just a good thing that babies are so cute and their heads smell like potential awesomeness. Otherwise, we'd have serious issues with them.

Moving on. @WillBeyer asks:

What catcher should I go after in my H2H draft?

Okay, we know that we invited fantasy baseball questions, but here's what you've gotta know about us: We haven't the foggiest clue about head-to-head leagues or auctions. So if you want advice in those areas, you'll have to suffice with one of the thousands of dudes who make a living doling out that sort of knowledge. We give this shit out for free.

And seeing as how we're in a giving mood, we'll offer you this: Victor Martinez is going to get a lot of at bats as a DH and 1B this season. And if we had the choice in a head-to-head league, we'd take the guy who is going to get six or seven starts per week versus the guy who might sit two or three times. And it's not just a volume play: V-Mart is probably going to give you pretty good production anyhow.

Also, keep in mind that catchers, as a general rule, will suck. You'll be all like: "Position scarcity! Must get Mauer/McCann/Martinez early!" But then they take a foul tip off the finger and suck for the rest of the season, and some dude has Miguel Montero hitting like the second coming of Johnny Bench. There's no effing justice to it. It's like that weird-looking nerdy dude from 500 Days of Summer ending up with Christina Hendricks. It'll just drive you crazy the more that you think of it.

Damn it all!

So basically, you can't win. We're drafting John Buck, just because we want to send that spirit of hope out into the Universe.

And the hits just keep on coming...@MassF last week asked:

Bottom of the 9th 2 outs bases loaded who do you want up T Gwynn K Puckett G Brett or W Boggs?

See, initially, we read this and figured that the scenario included us being tied to a post just behind the backstop, with a villainous eye-patched caricature getting ready to plug our brains full of lead from his vintage Ruger. We actually started to sweat it, and Fangraph this thing out, looking at advanced metrics and stuff. We were looking for splits on late inning tied or trailing, and situational hitting. We got frantic when we searched for Tony Gwynn, but kept getting pointed to Junior instead of Senior. "Damn it, man! Can't you see! Lives are at stake here! Get me the right numbers! I need to make the managerial decision that could COST ME MY LIFE!"

But then we re-read the question, and realized that you hadn't specified that this was a life or death consideration. What a letdown. In which case, we'll go with Gwynn. Because that tubby bastard could slap the ball into play, and his career .338 batting average was ten points better than Boggs'. And in this situation, you probably just need a bleeder through the infield to save you from the treachery of undefinably European villains. (Who says batting average is a useless stat?)

(SNIP! If you showed up here a little while ago, there was a whole long-winded thing about a certain Globe and Mail columnist's stupid column. So the first few comments probably look weird. We started to read the post over, and then we realized that it was angry in a really boring way, and a little bit sexist. And that's not in keeping with the True Spirit of Tweetbagging. Let's put this behind us, shall we?)

The man, the myth, the legend, @dpriest asks:

Will Alex Ant be the GM of a Jays playoff team?

While there's no way that we could ever divine such a thing, we have to believe. Or else we'd just put our blogging tools down and go pee our name in the snow instead.

Because if this blog is about anything, it's about hope. The hope that keeps us going, posting stuff in the dead of winter when we're scraping to try to even think of something to keep y'all entertained. The hope that, one night in October (or November), somewhere not too far down the road, the world will turn to our blog to read the reaction of a Jays diehard just moments after they've sealed the deal on their third title. (And they'd probably be greeted by something like: "Wooooo! Fuck yeah! Wooo! We did it!!!1")

We actually have these vivid visions of what that night would be like: There would be tears. And hugs. And champagne. And screaming into the phone. And staying up all night. And, eventually, blogging that moment out.

We're going to stick it out with this blog at least until then. (If we're allowed.)

More to come! Tune in tomorrow for a whole new batch of sage tweetery!

The return of the Roto-Hoedown

You've demanded it, and we're happy to oblige.

(Okay, so it took us about a month to get off our ass and take the two minutes to set up the league on ESPN. These things happen. I'm only one man, in spite of all this "we" business.)

The 2010 edition of the Roto-Hoedown has been set up, and we eagerly await those of you who wish to take part. This season, we'll only be setting up the one league, because getting our ass kicked twice over was more than a little demoralizing.

Here's the lowdown on the Hoedown: We can take up to 20 teams, although we'll probably cut it off before that number. (UPDATE: Actually, we lied. It's 15 teams. So don't dilly-dally.)

It is, as the name suggests, roto scoring, and it is a 6 X 6 set up with the following categories :

Hitting - Home Runs, Runs Scored, RsBI, SLG, OBP, and Net Stolen Bases. (Yeah, you heard right.)

Pitching - Wins (groan, we know), Saves (double groan, but still), ERA, WHIP, Ks, and On Base Against Home Runs Allowed.

So there you have it. That's the league. The draft takes place online this coming Saturday, March 20 at high noon Eastern Time. If you're interested, and you can absolutely be there at that time to draft, then drop us a line (taoofstieb at gmail dot com, yo, or direct message us on the Twitter). Chances are that if we know you and like you, you jump the queue and get in right away. If we don't know you, then make your case in a compelling fashion, and we'll pull back the velvet rope and let you through.

We'll only be contacting the people that get in, so apologies in advance if you don't hear back. You're all still cool in our book, babies.

The Five People You Meet in Fantasy Baseball Hell

We'd told ourselves that we weren't going to bother our readership with tales of our fantasy teams this season.

And yet, we feel as though we have to make some sort of excuse provide some sort of rationale for the piss-poor performances of our fantasy teams thus far. This is especially urgent given that we're bringing up the rear in the two leagues that we invited readers to join. Really, we're not that inept.

(Alternately, we could spend another day feeding into the mass depression over Roy Halladay. But this seems like the lesser of two evils.)

Here is our tale of woe, in which we assess blame to the five players who ruined our fantasy baseball season this year.

1. Carlos Quentin - 8 HRs, 20 RsBI, .774 OPS: Maybe we should have known better than to put our trust in a guy with a penchant for punching inanimate objects. Still, we figured that Quentin would return from his self-inflicted injuries and produce somewhere near his MVP candidate numbers from last year, and spent second round picks on him. That's what we get for being optimistic.

2. Grady Sizemore - 13 HRs, 49 RsBI, 9 SBs, .780 OPS: It's not that Sizemore's been awful this season when he's been healthy. But there's the rub. Even when he's been in the lineup, he's not swinging the bat like a first rounder should. We're thankful that we don't have him in keeper leagues, because the prospect of off-season shoulder surgery would have us selling him off for 50 cents on the dollar at this point.

3. Matt Wieters - 3 HRs, 10 RsBI, .680 OPS: We really should know better than to draft prospects, even if all the indications seem to be that they will be absolutely otherworldly and the greatest offensive catcher in the history of baseball or any other sport. And yet, we got sucked in by the hype yet again. Top prospects are our fantasy kryptonite, and Wieters follows in the rich tradition of Alex Gordon and Jeremy Hermida as the can't miss kids who missed for our fantasy teams.

4. Ervin Santana - 2-5, 34 Ks, 6.70 ERA, 1.70 WHIP: Two words that we'll no longer be able to ignore in baseball are "forearm tightness". As the reports came in over the offseason that something was amiss with Santana, we chose to ignore them and make him a sixth round pick and the first pitcher that we selected in a few of our drafts. In retrospect, it might be the dumbest pick we made in our drafts.

5. Ricky Nolasco - 6-7, 95 Ks, 5.77 ERA, 1.40 WHIP: Nolasco was a sexy pick coming into the season, and our selection of him in the eighth and ninth rounds of drafts garnered kudos from our fellow fantasy nerds. Of course, Nolasco went on to pitch atrociously for the first two months, and we ended up cutting him after May 22, when his ERA reached 9.07 and he was shipped to the minors. And it only follows that we weren't there to pick him back up when he returned to the big leagues and put up six straight starts with two or fewer earned runs and bucketloads of strikeouts. Our only satisfaction came from seeing him get shelled for seven earned runs against Arizona just before the All-Star Break.

Fantasy Nerdlinger - Our 2009 Draft Strategery

You wouldn't believe the number of people who ask us for fantasy baseball advice. Like, at least three in the past year. We're like a regular Matthew Berry, only with a lot more hair. And no association to Crocodile Dundee 3.

The funny part about this is that we really haven't been a very good roto player in a few years. Maybe it's the fact that this blog has taken up most of our free time, or maybe it's the fact that Travis Hafner has steadfastly refused to do anything of worth for us over that time. Whatever the case, we've taken an unmerciful shit kicking over the past couple of years, and we're halfway bracing ourselves for more of the same this year.

With two league drafts coming up this weekend and another a week later, we're buckling down and doing our homework now. Which is to say, we're reading USA Today Sports Weekly and making handwritten lists of guys we like. It's all very high tech.

We should probably be guarding this information a little more fastidiously, given that most of the people with whom we will be playing in roto leagues this season read this blog. But fuck it, we're all about the transparency. So here, we offer six of the finer points of our strategic planning for the coming year's fantasy baseball season.

1) Coming to the acceptance that we are a pompous fool: Too often, we go into drafts wanting to be the first guy to pick the hotshot emerging star of tomorrow, only to be stuck with them all season long. Jeremy Hermida, Alex Gordon, Homer Bailey...we've wasted a lot of time, energy and mid-to-high draft picks on guys who weren't ready to perform in the majors. This year, we trust no one under the age of 30.

2) A nice healthy breakfast: In past years, our draft days would kick off with a bit of the Eggs Mayflower (scrambled eggs on bagel with cream cheese, covered with hollandaise sauce, and a side order of sausage...heart attack!! Miam yiam!) However, we've been on a health kick since Christmas, if only so that we can strip away some of the irony from our fat jokes made at Rod Barajas' expense. So this year, we're thinking a bit of yogurt, some artisanal granola and maybe some fresh fruit to go with our skim milk latte. Either that, or we'll just make coffee and eat chunks of cheese broken right off the block.

3) Find something entertaining to occupy Mrs. Tao: Not that she'll butt in on our hours and hours of draft day madness, but it's always good to find something to keep the wife happy while we're deciding between Jeff Keppinger and Clint Barmes. So we've ordered up a Lexington Steele Signature Series replica...actually, never mind. We'll just keep her happy.

4) Don't get too wrapped up in other people's rankings: We have a tendency to depend on the wisdom of others, and every year we get burned by putting too much stock in the ranting of some random yahoo who managed to get a job as a fantasy analyst. Actually, Matthew Berry's mancrush on Jeff Francoeur got the better of us in more than one league last year. (Thanks, TMR!) This year, we're taking the Colbertian approach and shooting from our gut. We're not going to care if Fanball or Ron Shandler or BallBustingFantasyWhores.com all dump on Oliver Perez...if he's there in the 20th round and we wanna take him, we're gonna take him! So suck it!

5) Less talk, more action: Sometimes, our draft day chatting gets the best of us. We get so distracted by questioning the manhood of our fellow competitors that we totally lose track of the fact that our team is starting to suck, and we're not even in the 10th round. Then there's the whole question of hurt feelings. Even if we don't mean any harm to some of our fellow competitors with our witty repartee and snide remarks, there is only so much that you can communicate about the tone of your quip through emoticons. This year, we're gonna tone it down. We're just going to put Marvin Gaye's "If I Should Die Tonight" on repeat, and feel the love.

6) Put down the Hater-ade: We used to have a strict "No Yankees, No Red Sox" rule on our fantasy teams. Then we downgraded it to "No Yankees". This year, we're going to hold our nose and take whoever we need to take to get the job done. We're through with spending all season scraping away at the waiver wire to find someone to help us reach the dizzying heights of sixth place when we could have just taken Mariano Rivera to start with.

So...That's pretty much it. The entirety of our fantasy strategy. Clearly, a path to glory.

And for the good fellows in the Tao's Roto Leagues
Our drafts are on Sunday, and you'd better be there at the appointed times, because we're not going to listen to you whine about how you needed to wash your mother's pantyhose and therefore missed the draft. If you've got to scrub momma's unmentionables before she'll feed you Sunday dinner, then get to work on your pre-rankings now. You only get one shot at this.

It's the Tao of Stieb's Roto-Hoedown!

Hey kids! Do you enjoy the rotisserie as much as we do? Are you getting amped up for the coming season of fantasy baseball? Have you already purchased four roto expert guides that all contradict one another and feature mundane and self-evident strategies for your forthcoming draft?

We love us a little fantasy baseball, and we're completely geeked for this year, mostly because we took such a wretched shit-kicking in all of our leagues last year. (Something about undervaluing pitching...who knew?) We feel as though this year, if we just spend a few more weeks fretting and researching and poring over every pre-season guide, then maybe we'll be ready to go.

So geeked are we, in fact, that we've just set up the first annual Tao of Stieb Roto-Hoedown, a fantasy league for those who are regular readers, commenters, contributors around these parts. Basically, the cool kids.

We've set the league up at ESPN, which is a first for us, so we can't guarantee the performance. (It's not as though we would have anyway).

The Basics
The Roto-Hoedown is a 15 team league, 6x6 rotisserie league. Offensive categories are Runs, HRs, RsBI, SBs, OBP and SLG, while the pitching categories are Wins, Saves, ERA, WHIP, Ks, and complete games.

The rosters are 25-man, with a seven man bench, nine offensive slots and nine pitching slots, with two DL spots.

The plan is to live draft this baby sometime in March. We've left this to be determined, since we'll have to work around schedules and what not.

How to participate
Since we've already already taken one spot in the league, there are 14 up for grabs. Fire off an email to us (taoofstieb at gmail dot com), and if we already know you and like you, then you're in. You'll have to set up an ESPN account to join the league, but the process is pretty quick and painless.

If we don't know you from a hole in the ground, then make the case as to why you should participate, and swear on your momma's health that you're not going to bail as soon as your team goes into the crapper because you picked Pat Burrell in the first round.

This is pretty much first come, first served, so get in quick to avoid disappointment!

What you win
Err...nothing, really. Cameraderie? The sense of a job well done? We don't know...we've actually got a handful of spare baseball books that we might be able to throw in...T-shirts maybe? Really, we just want to play for the fun of it. (If you are looking to gamble, then go check with the dudes from Drive This at the Score.)

How much are we going to discuss this league on the blog?
Not much, really. There's not much that's more painful than reading about how someone's streaming strategies with middle relievers has led them to the exalted glories of fourth place.

Which isn't to say that there won't be plenty of shit-talking and general ironic douchbaggery over on the actual league home.

(Please note: Actual douchebags and their actual douchebaggery are not welcome. Thanks.)

So what are you waiting for?
Get off the couch, get to the computer and dial the number on the screen! Hot women are waiting to take your call!

Blue Jays Injuries: Fantasy Fallout

Here's an article from Fox Sports' Roger Rotter (I kid you not) talking about the fantasy impact of Toronto losing three players to the DL.