’19 Fantasy Baseball Week 15

The fifteenth week of Yahoo’s Fantasy Baseball covered games after that All-Star Break (July 8th-10th). Players returned to action on July 11, and our two-week-long matchup ended on July 21. Ondskans Imperium was never in contention against one of the best teams in the league, Puig Farm, and their defeat dropped them like a flying brick in the standings. After spending most of the season in one of the top six places, we now sit in eighth place, only seven games out of ninth.

TRANSACTIONS

The first player on the chopping block was Pittsburgh Pirates starting pitcher Jordan Lyles. During his outing against the Chicago Cubs on July 13, he only managed to get two outs in the first inning before getting the hook. We don’t even know how many runs he gave up, but his ERA was 94.50, and his WHIP was 12.00. That was indeed the beginning of the end for our team that week.

After getting extremely hot for a short period, we signed Tampa Bay catcher Travis d’Arnaud on July 16. This was the day AFTER he hit three home runs at Yankee Stadium. He rewarded us by going 0/11 over the next three games and finished the weekly matchup 1/14 with a handful of RBIs. So much for that.

On the same day, we cut ties with Baltimore Orioles first baseman Trey Mancini. Once thought to be a draft-day steal in the late rounds, Mancini was on a six-game hitless streak and scored one point in the same time frame.

Although the matchup was all but over by July 18, we added Garrett Cooper of the Miami Marlins. Since we had three catchers in the lineup, we dropped Danny Jansen of the Toronto Blue Jays.

Since the season was tanking before our eyes, we offered Mike Moustakas (INF – Milwaukee) and David Peralta (OF – Arizona) to the last place team The Fast & The Grego for Glayber Torres (INF – Yankees) and Giancarlo Stanton (OF – Yankees). The trade was rejected in minutes. We continued through our wishlist and managed to swing a deal with SHABB’s team that was approved on July 20. We offered Carlos Santana (INF – Cleveland), Nick Markakis (OF – Atlanta), and Gerrit Cole (SP – Houston) and got Aaron Judge (OF – Yankees) and Luke Voit (1B – Yankees) in return.

As the trade deadline approaches, we will pursue a few other players on our watch list.

Weekly Move Total: 2/4

Season Move Total: 32/60

MATCHUP AND SCORES

If our league gave our participation medals, we would have definitely earned ours last week. Since we got the snot beat out of us, let’s take a look at the numbers and try to find the positives. We lost eight categories with a handful of them being really lopsided. Since we are considered one of the worse hitting teams in our league, it is simply amazing that we weren’t beaten by double digits in every hitting category. On the flip side, we once had one of the elite pitching staffs, who decided to stay on the All-Star Break and not come back to work. Out of nowhere, we managed seven wins, but those victories came with a lower strikeout total and a higher than average ERA.

We really can’t complain when you look at the overall direction of the match up. Ondskans Imperium has yet to get shut out this season, and that streak remained alive for another week. The team managed to be competitive in the matchup for one out of the 11 days. The entire second week was a crapshoot because the hole was deep and only getting deeper. Much to our surprise, the weekend bought good news and our one single category win. It seemed like we were the Washington Generals for a week, as Puig Farm used us as a tune-up for a shot at the fantasy league championship.

STANDINGS AND TEAM STATS

The defending league champion ItsNotRyanItsRyne swapped spots with us in Week 15. Despite having the same winning percentage (0.473), we have the worse record. Our goal heading into the final few weeks of the season is to avoid the last place as we throw in the towel on reaching the playoffs. It sounds terrible to “give up” with seven weeks remaining, but as YES Network analysis Ken Singleton says, when you are seven or more games back, that is at least a week’s worth of ball to make up ground. The Imperium is 11 games back of the fourth place, which means that is at least one week’s worth of wins combined with another half week thrown in to get at least to double digits. We won our very first match up 10-0, but those are almost as hard to come by as no-hitters are.

Since we traded away Gerrit Cole and have our other elite pitchers on the block, our pitching numbers will begin to take a dive. At this point no matter who we add for offence, those numbers can’t get any worse, and they don’t seem to get any better either. Even though we are not the worse team in the league in regards to the standings, we seem to be the league’s worse constructed team. Buying a handful of fantasy draft magazines and participating in seven mock drafts did absolutely nothing to help break the playoff drought.

THE BENCH PLAYERS

The matchup was lopsided from the opening pitch to the final out so the 10 points we left on the bench would have done absolutely nothing to cushion the blow. When you break it all down, we can’t even blame bench mismanagement as an excuse on the sloppy play of Week 15.