Welcome

I'm pleased to announce that the Baton Rouge Dirty Diapers have won the QCFL for the second straight year and the third time in the last four seasons. Prior to this run the league had had six different winners in six years so there's usually someone new stepping it up each season.

In 2005 and 2007 I had really great drafts and I knew that I should be able to compete for the top spot in the league. In those seasons I opened large leads over the rest of the league pretty early and held on to a comfortable margin most of the year (though there was team with a late-season push in 2007 that nearly caught me).

This year was different. I had a good draft but there were definitely some question marks, and early in the season I was stuck far below the leaders in the standings. Like many seasons lately, a couple of teams, led by BJ's Charleston Chew, had a large lead over the rest of us and they didn't seem likely to come back to the pack. In June I was thinking that, like 2006, I would end up trading off productive players for extra picks next year; I would have to wait for 2009 to make another serious run at the title.

But before I started looking for trading partners I looked at the standings and realized my hitters were doing nearly as well as the first place team. It was pitching where I was suffering. I also noticed that the standings were packed tightly in the pitching categories, so if I could make some improvements I could make up some serious ground. Around the same time I read an article by a well known fantasy baseball expert who was having a bad season in a public league. He wrote about the need to stop the bleeding from his pitching staff. I took the words to heart. Just before the All-Star break I estimated that in the best case scenario I could get as high as 117 points, and in a worst case scenario for Charleston the team could drop to as low as 117 points. I love competing against BJ and the possibility of finishing the season tied and settling things in a post-season playoff was hard to pass up.

I kicked off the stop-the-bleeding campaign by dropping Ian Snell, a starting pitcher from Pittsburgh who had been a big contributor to my victory in 2007, but who couldn't seem to get it together this year. I also dropped Kevin Correia and Carlos Villanueva, two pitchers that I had picked up late in the draft as possible keepers for next year. I figured I could either spend the rest of the season playing for next year and hoping they'd pan out or get on to trying to improve this season—it helped that I more productive keeper options from the end of the draft that I was more likely to keep. I tried packaging two of my other end-of-draft keeper candidates for a decent starting pitcher, but I ended up passing on the only offer I received (I looked back at the end of the season and the players I was offered wouldn't have helped me any, so no big loss there).

Instead I focused on picking up free agents. I got some lucky breaks when Jesse Litsch and Yusmiero Petit were unowned after being demoted to the minors. They both pitched well down the stretch and helped me make up some ground. I also finally got some saves out of Dan Wheeler and had the good fortune to pick up Joey Devine, Chad Qualls, and Jensen Lewis right before they started getting saves. Finally, I stopped playing my pitchers in unfavorable matchups.

Between these improvements and some smaller gains in the hitting categories I managed to climb into a tie for first place with three weeks left in the season. I hadn't made it to 117 but the Chew had dropped a little more than I had thought possible. The last three weeks of the season I managed to solidify my gains, making it up to 123 and taking firm hold of the top spot.

BJ's team had done one favor by trading away three starting pitchers that had great seasons in 2008: Cliff Lee, Joe Saunders, and Edinson Volquez. But when the season was over I looked at their stats following the trade, and while they would have helped, they wouldn't have kept him in first place.

All in all it was a great season, and my most prized win so far. The first time I played fantasy baseball it was a match up against BJ, and after several years of getting my butt handed to me it has been great to do well the past few seasons. Hopefully we'll have many more seasons of fighting it out between first and second.

—Jack

Labels: fantasy baseball