’19 Fantasy Baseball Week 7

The seventh week of Yahoo’s Fantasy Baseball covered games between Monday, May 13 to Sunday, May 19, 2019. Ondskans Imperium trailed their matchup with Who’s Your Vladdy?! for the majority for the week. A strong outing on Saturday and Sunday turned the tide for a come from behind tie.

Transactions

On Thursday afternoon while browsing the latest injury updates, we noticed that David Robertson (RP – Philadelphia) had another set back during his rehab program and may not return until late June or July at the earliest. After occupying the majority of the season on the DL, we decided it was time to cut ties. When we let Robinson go that opened a spot on the DL for Elvis Andrus (SS – Texas) to move to. He is currently nursing an injury and should be back in the next week or two.

These two moves opened a roster spot, so we set out sights on Jordan Lyles and added the Pittsburgh pitcher thanks to a favourable matchup that week against the San Diego Padres.

Next, it was time to cut Clint Frazier (OF – New York). Although it pains me to cut any Yankees player, he just hasn’t been the same since returning from an ankle injury last month. Our research never stops, which opened our eyes the rookie sensation Willie Calhoun (OF – Texas). The guy has collected at least one hit in all of five MLB games since being called up. His hot start may not last forever, but for now, he is welcome to pad our stats every day.

Buster Posey (C – San Francisco) returned from a concussion, so we thought it was time to move on from James McCann (C – Chicago). He doesn’t play every day and was only selected to fill a role that didn’t need filling anymore. In his place, we picked Bryon Buxton (OF – Minnesota) who is on fire right now. He is a hit and RBI machine, so while he is hot, he can help us win a few categories and build a little gap between our team and non-playoff teams.

Matchup and Scores

We can’t kid ourselves, it looked grim until the weekend, when some late-inning magic helped secure a 4-4-2 tie. Our hopes grew with every pitch because if memory serves, we held an 8-1 lead at some point on Saturday. It was very brief, but it looked promising.

Standings and Team Stats

With so many teams so close together in the middle, it has been hard to gauge the trade market. Four teams are looking to secure their spots, whether it be at the top or the bottom, the real fight will be between the final six teams who want a shot at the playoffs.

I thought of updating the stats by adding whether we went up a notch or dropped down in a category. Then I remembered how depressing our hitting stats are so once you hit bottom, there is really no place to go but up. Thanks to our pitching we are not the worse team in the league, but we are starting to lose our grip on the batting title, and you can see it almost every other day when the guy hit 0.100 or something even worse. We built a team of hitters who collect hits, but even these guys are starting to slow down. Here’s hoping our strategy leads to something promising later on.

Where the Matchup is Won and Loss: The Bench Players

There really wasn’t much to say about our bench management. Injuries occupied most of our free space on the bench this week. If a player wasn’t injured, then someone didn’t have a game because of scheduling or weather. Even if you factor in all the numbers from the bench, the final score wouldn’t have changed. Throw in the sparkling 0.172 batting average, and it would have lowered the weekly total to 0.211. Yikes.

Players: Best and Worse

	Best Hitter: Mike Moustakas (INF – Milwaukee) was our team MVP for scoring 14 points for the team this past week. He collected 7 R / 2 HR / 4 RBI / 1 SB, and batted 0.286.
	Worse Hitter: Clint Fraizer (OF – New York) is no longer on the team because he didn’t score a single point in the games he played while hitting a crazy 0.143.
Best Pitcher: Welcome to the team Jordan Lyles (SP – Pittsburgh)! This guy was lights out in his debut with our team by beating the San Diego Padres. In his win, he threw 12 strikeouts and pitched to a 1.29 ERA and a 0.86 WHIP.
Worse Pitcher: Max Scherzer (SP – Washington) is one of the best pitchers in the game, but even the great ones have off weeks. In his only start of the matchup, he suffered a pounding at the hands of the Chicago Cubs going only six innings. He still managed eight strikeouts by his ERA was 4.50 and his WHIP 1.67.