’19 Fantasy Baseball Week 8

The eighth week of Yahoo’s Fantasy Baseball covered games between Monday, May 20 to Sunday, May 26, 2019. Ondskans Imperium tried their best to make a series out of it, but despite an absurd amount of strikeouts, the team was never able to rally from the reduced offensive output from the hitters and some pitchers who had high ERAs.

TRANSACTIONS

On May 19 we added Byron Buxton (OF – Minnesota) who went 0 for 10 in three days with us, so he got cut in favour of Marwin Gonzalez (Utility – Houston). We currently have two players who could play shortstop, but both are out with injuries. There isn’t a whole lot of talented shortstops in the free-agent market, so it was tough to fill the hole. Lucky for us, Gonzalez was available. We scouted him during the offseason and lost him in the draft.

Speaking of the Astros, we also grabbed Ryan Pressly (RP – Houston) because he has not given up an earned run this season. He joined our rotation to keep our team ERA low. Someday he will give up another run and maybe the run flood gates will open, but for now, he pitches every couple of days for a team that usually wins the majority of their games. We cut Jeff McNeil in the same transaction because he has a left hamstring injury and there’s no timetable for his return.

While reading deep into the fantasy dirt sheets, we learnt that Los Angeles Angels pitcher Andrew Heaney was coming back from an injury. During his one and only rehab game last week in Triple-A he struck out 10. In his first game back on Sunday, he struck out eight Texas Rangers. We acquired him at the expense of rookie Willie Calhoun, who injured his quad.

Weekly Move Total: 3/4

Season Move Total: 20/60

MATCHUP AND SCORES

SHABB’s Team may have been behind us in the standings, but they laid an offensive beat down on us. Even if we managed to steal two bases, this matchup was never really close. You could argue that our pitching staff was lights out, but two terrible performances raised our ERA close to 5.00 and it took forever to get it back down under 4.00. We scoreboard watched all weekend and saw the number come down, but not enough for a tie.

Things fell apart on Thursday and didn’t recover until Sunday when we took back the WHIP category to make it a 6-4 final. The score that really surprised all of us was that we collected 86 strikeouts in the seven days. That alone is probably a team record, we just never bothered to count our stats before.

STANDINGS AND TEAM STATS

It only took eight weeks, but we can officially say we are not a playoff team at the moment. As you can see, it is a tie for fourth overall, but Who’s Your Vladdy?! smoked us 9-1 in week six, so they win the current tiebreaker. If the playoffs started today, our season would be over.

Some would say there is a lot of games left but ask anyone who is a fan of the Baltimore Orioles or Miami Marlins. Most of those fans/players know their season is over after the second week of the season. Most of the time, when you dig yourself a hole in baseball, it is hard to get out of. We now sit with a 2-4-2 matchup record after eight weeks. Puig Farm, who is in the first place, is 5-1-2 and Who’s Your Vladd?! is also 2-4-2. We need to build some weekly wins to get back into the thick of things.

It is safe to say we are running out of time to stay in contention for the batting title. The batting category was a major focal point for our team, but now that we are very top-heavy in pitchers, so our team philosophy has changed. We are looking to salvage a tie every week from here on out. Scoring a 5-5 tie, by winning all the pitching categories, will sting a lot less than say a 4-6 or even 3-7 loss, which is a reoccurring theme for us On paper, we have some pretty good hitters, but every week they collectively hit at or below 0.200. We have turned all our attention to pitching and use these arms as the muscle of the team.

THE BENCH PLAYERS

This week our bench was really cut short. To bulk up on pitching, we got rid of a bunch of hitters. If someone stayed on the team, it was most likely because they were injured or on the DL. As you can see, nothing in the matchup would have changed because as the week went on, no one ever played from the bench.

However, for the first time this season, we left a starting pitcher on the bench on the day he was expected to start. Marcus Stroman (SP – Toronto) had a Tuesday start against the Boston Red Sox. In case he got lit up by their high potent offence, we sat him. All we lost out on was another win, four strikeouts, a 1.80 ERA, and a 1.20 WHIP. If you factor his numbers into the ERA and WHIP categories, nothing would have altered the final score in our favour.