The third week of Yahoo’s Fantasy Baseball covered games between Monday, April 15 to Sunday, April 21, 2019. After an excellent performance in week two, Ondskans Imperium became the New York Yankees of the fantasy baseball world with numerous injuries, rainouts, and terrible pitching. Add all those factors up, and the team had a terrible week and except for one day, never really had a shot this week as Chod’s Team went from second to first thanks to their beatdown.
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Buster Posey is the only catcher on the roster. He hasn’t yet to hit his stride at the plate. Which concerns us about that position in the lineup. On Monday, April 15th we added Oakland Athletics catcher Josh Phegley. According to the depth chart, he is number one, but he does get days off, so we hope to platoon these two moving forward.
Ender Inciarte has a repetition of collecting hits and posting a high batting average. Right now if you look at his statistics, they are pretty bad, so we had to drop him in favour of Kansas City Royals outfielder Alex Gordon. So far, the move has paid big dividends.
Thanks to watching the Yankees and White Sox game on Wednesday, we learnt that Arodys Vizcaino had shoulder surgery and his season is done. He was a late draft pick with hopes of a stellar season and many saves. See you next year.
Yankees infielder DJ LeMhaieu had a great start to the season and was collecting multi-hit games every other day. Then a 0-15 stretch came, and we were losing the match on April 20 up, so we flipped him for teammate Clint Fraizer. Fraizer is finally getting the chance he deserves and is producing at an MVP pace.
We still have one open spot on the roster since Philadelphia Phillies relief pitcher David Robertson is on the Injury Reserved list. After adding players to try and compete in the hitting categories, we came to realize pitching is our main focus and will fill this spot at some point this week with a pitcher who can help boost those numbers.
Matchup and Scores
Ondskans Imperium took on Chod’s Team in week three and never really had a chance at pulling out a tie or even a victory. As you can see from the daily box scores, the matchup started out close and then went real lopsided quick. My pitchers started five games between Friday and Sunday, and only one of them got a win. Pretty much if you were a pitcher on my team, you got knocked around this week. As you can see from the collective 5.63 ERA, it was a bad week. Starting line up decisions could have made hitting category a little closer, but some guys were hot, and some guys were cold.
Standings and Team Stats
The teams are starting to separate as we head into week four. We know what it is like to be at the bottom and nine games out. The ninth-place team is starting to fall too, which leaves the eight other teams in the middle and only a few games from each other.
As far as team statistics go, we are falling left, right, and center. We are currently in first place in two of the ten categories. Our goal is top three in six categories, but that goal was tough to maintain over week three. If you break it down, we are top five in five categories and at or near the bottom in the other five. This isn’t a horrible thing, we just need to move up to stay competitive all season and clinch a playoff spot.
Where the Matchup is Won and Loss: The Bench Players
Despite a 7-3 loss, we could have snagged another category if we managed our bench better. We lost out on nine runs which could have given us a category win and lowered the beatdown to 6-4. We left 16 hits off the field which left us to wonder if those additional hits could have gained us a batting average higher than 0.276. That could have given us a straight-up 5-5 tie.
Players: Best and Worse
Best Hitter: Carlos Santana (1B/3B – Cleveland) had the best week of all the hitters by scoring 9 points for the team. He collected 5 R / 0 HR / 3 RBI / 1 SB and batted 0.368.
Worse Hitter: Castellanos scored zero points when he was actually in the lineup and batted 0.000. DJ LeMahieu didn’t fare any better scoring two and batting 0.077.
Best Pitcher: Justin Verlander (SP – Houston) was our best pitcher for the second straight week. He collected a win and struck out 8, his ERA was 1.29 ERA, and his WHIP was 0.86.
Worse Pitcher: Verlander’s teammate Gerrit Cole (SP – Houston) had a horrible game on Saturday. He pitched one game and struck out eight. His ERA was four digits long at 16.62, and his WHIP was 2.77. When I mentioned that our pitchers had a terrible week, he is the poster child of the struggles.
Stay tuned for next’s week recap of the Ondskan Imperium 2019 Fantasy Baseball season.
Keeping the Stats 