That’s it for the regular baseball season and the end of the fantasy baseball season. Managed to hang on to 6th though it was closer that I expected it would be as I only had 3 players scoring for me for the last couple of days and the guy in 7th got to 77.5 points.
This is my final line for the season;
R; 13 HR; 13 RBI; 14 SB; 10 AVG; 3 W; 2.5 SV: 7 K; 8 ERA; 4 WHIP; 4.5 Total; 79
The league winner had no less than 13 points, of an available 14, in every category except SAVES where he had 5.5 points and won the league by 19.5 points with 126.5 points. I think this is a bit out of the ordinary and in a league where everyone is on it for the whole of the season then you should be in the conversation for the win at around 110 points. So that’s only about 30 points I need to find then!
As late as mid-July I was in 10th place and had been struggling to get much above there for quite a while so I’m reasonably happy with the steady progression I made over the last two and a half months, most of which came from the pitching. This is something of a validation of not drafting pitching early on, but not complete validation as I had more success spot starting pitchers once their form became evident and if I adopt the same strategy next year then I might have to wait until mid season to make it work and the league could be gone again by that time. Hindsight shows that I made a couple of major errors with the starting pitching, sticking with Harang too long and dumping Lester too early. But the best case scenario, ditching Harang for Nolasco in, say, early June and hanging onto Lester may have been enough to get me to 4th but no higher.
I certainly miss the day to day involvement, looking for form players or spot starters, always having to make roster changes for Monday & Thursday games, checking the scores from the previous night, first thing next morning and later in the day, checking how things had changed in the categories relative to the other teams. Not the same by any means, but I’ve started thinking about next years draft by downloading all the final player rankings and the team lineups for the teams that finished ahead of me, I’ll be looking very closely at the league winners team, and will start drawing up a spreadsheet with a provisional draft order for next year.
