’19 Fantasy Baseball Week 14

The fourteenth week of Yahoo’s Fantasy Baseball covered games between Monday, July 1 to Sunday, July 7, 2019. Ondskans Imperium squeaked out another victory, this time a 5-4-1 win over the ninth-place Los Gigantes. This was our second matchup win (7-2-1 week five) over them, which improved our totals to 12-6-2 on the season.

Week 15 will be delayed for several days because Major League Baseball’s most prominent star players took a break from the daily grind of the 162-game marathon for a few days to participate in the All-Star Game in Cleveland (American League beat the National League 4-2 on Tuesday). Here are the latest World Series odds, with the Dodgers leading the pack, for those of you looking to secure your props before the start of the second half of the season July 11.

TRANSACTIONS

Danny Santana (INF/OF – Texas) was a good pick up for a handful of games but stayed on the team for about two weeks too long. He was the first casualty of the week on July 2nd.

Scooter Gennett (2B – Cincinnati) finally returned from a season-long injury. Since then, he reaggravated his injury and is now considered day-to-day. After drafting him and protecting him for the entire first half of the season, we cut ties with him after a 2 for 20 to start the season. He provided zero points in the six games he’s played so far. He was gone on July 3rd.

We updated the trading block again on July 4th. Gerrit Cole (SP – Houston), Edwin Diaz (RP – New York Mets), Max Scherzer (SP – Washington), Justin Verlander (SP – Houston), and Mike Moustakas (INF – Milwaukee) are available once again. So far, no one is interested.

On the same day, we dropped Chris Tayor (INF/OF – Los Angeles Dodgers) in favour of Toronto catcher Danny Jensen. Of course with our luck, after going 3 for 4 and collecting 7 points the day before we claimed him, he then went 3 for 11 in the three remaining games of the week. He’s next on our cut list.

In one of the more random team moves you will see, we added St. Louis catcher Yadier Molina. This move wasn’t for strategic purposes, more of a favourite fan choice. He was our second target at catcher behind Buster Posey (San Francisco) but lost him in the later rounds. He is currently listed day-to-day and hasn’t produced before, but can still serve as an everyday catcher when Posey isn’t in our lineup.

Weekly Move Total: 2/4

Season Move Total: 30/60

MATCHUP AND SCORES

The matchup started out tied 1-1 (a rare thing these days) and then turned into a blow out in our favour for a few days. As the weekend approach and teams geared up for the final stretch before the All-Star game break, our matchup got tighter and tighter, flip-flopping for the last four days. Lucky the final number flipped in our favour. This matchup could have been anyones at the end of it all.

STANDINGS AND TEAM STATS

There was another shuffle of places between the 2nd and 4th place teams. Nothing changed for the guys who sit in 5th and below. We remain at 6.5 games out of a playoff spot and defending league champion ItsNotRyanItsRyne remains 9 games back for a chance to defend his crown. There are only eight weeks left in the season, so realistically there is no room for errors and losses from this point on. We have been in this league for three seasons now and haven’t even qualified for the playoffs yet. We will do what we can to improve on our 65-66-9 record.

If you look close enough, you will notice we are no longer the top team in regards to ERA. Week 14 ended our four-week streak as the number one team in the league. Although if you look back at the numbers, we only led the league in ERA for those weeks. It seems we were playing above our standards and now fallen back towards the middle of the pack. It would be really tough to pull off, but you can see we are dead last in three of the five batting categories. If we decided to tank, we could try and aim for the clean sweep of 10th places in all those categories. When you break down the numbers, we drafted for batting average and really suck in that department. At least our pitching has stayed on par with our goals, but despite having good batters in the lineup, we just never get the hits. Our bench totals for the season have a higher batting average then the team we put on the field every day!

THE BENCH PLAYERS

For the umpteen week of the season, bench management cost us several categories wins. We lost the runs category 33-29 but left six runs on the bench, which would have given us a 35-33 win and bump the final score to 6-3-1. If you factor in the two home runs, that would have given us each eight for the week and another tie, so the score moves to 6-2-2, thus giving us more points in the standings.

We would have lost strikeouts no matter what and poor pitching all week led to a rare high ERA and WHIP. Just one less hit or walk, and we could have challenged the WHIP totals since we only lost by one point 1.28-1.29.