To expand the overall fun of RotoSavants, I took head of creating our fan league this year. My love of deep leagues brought us into an 18-team roto league with many of our beloved fans.
To recap our first month of play: Team Jebens is leading our RotoSavants group to 2nd place, Lee Perrault is in 4th place, my team (Team Restivo) is in 15th place, Troy Patterson's team is in 16th place and bringing up the rear is Aaron Murray's team in 18th place entering tonight's games.
In the overall standings, team "CA Penal League All-Stars" (great name by the way) is leading the way with 135.5 points with Team Jebens on his back trailing by about 4 points. The separation between 2nd and 3rd place is 11 points.
So now I'll get into the more entertaining part of this piece: how I obviously failed in drafting in this league. I picked near the bottom overall so I had the wheel when I wanted to make decisions on guys. In a deep league, being aggressive is normally the rule of thumb: I'd rather get players that I want and reach a little than get players I don't want later.
Strategy Fail: Draft Three Closers
Coming from playing one 19 team league last year and auctioning in a 20 team league the day before, I somehow thought a great strategy curveball would be to go after three closers. So I went and grabbed two "good" closers in Andrew Bailey and Joakim Soria and then decided that I'd go grab my new "boy" Mike Gonzalez. Yes, he had an awful spring but I decided to use a 10th round pick on him. Still, we didn't know that it was structural problems until he blew up in April and the O's gave him a DL stint with (originally) no timetable for return. Whenever you hear no timetable for return, that's almost the worst thing to hear. However, now we hear that he will be back soon in a few more weeks.
Another reason my strategy might have backfired, I found that one team was willing to punt saves and fields a group of 9 starters. The strategy has worked for him so far, he is double digit in three of the five pitching categories. In a league like this I never really want to try and employ that type of strategy because it really makes me have to go trade for saves later in the year to make my move.
I like to try to speculate for saves on the waiver wire and trade from strength later in the year when it comes to trading saves for power/steals, but this was a #fail for me in this league. I'm still tied for 13th as of tonight in saves, thank you Evan Meek and your 1 save!
Oops: Catcher
My two catchers in this league I drafted were Kelly Shoppach and Miguel Montero. Montero, my 5th round pick, is one of 7 of the top 90 players who is currently on the DL (I'm counting Manny Ramirez in this list). I thought Shoppach would also be a good investment, it appeared the Rays soured on Dioner Navarro and if Shoppach returned to form that would be a great cheap investment, instead he hurts himself on a home plate play. That forced me to go spend a bunch of FAAB on Navarro's next apparent replacement: John Jaso.
Edwin Jackson in the 11th Round
Enough said. Jackson has been a batting practice machine this year. Jackson's hits per nine has exploded and it appears his 5.07 ERA in the 2nd half of last year might be more of who he is than his 2.52 ERA and All Star appearance last year. For some reason in a few leagues, either my ace or soft ace/second starter, has carried me while the other has been a dud.
So I'm using this forum to also tell the league that I am officially on the trade block looking for home runs (among other things) and will trade away steals...
