Baseball Update: October 1

Well, the regular season ended last night, and an ignominious ending it was for the Mets, wasn't it? Here's how each of my teams fared this year:

RFSJuniors ended 4th out of 12. For a long time I was 2nd in the league and looked to stay that way, but beginning in late July two other teams made concerted moves to overtake me and succeeded. In addition, my hitting, which in the first half of the season was going very well, slid somewhat in the second half of the season, and it was just enough to drag me down, even though I ended up second in the very valuable Stolen Bases category. My original goal was to finish in the top half, but I really would have liked a trophy, whic hyou only get if you are in the top three. I think it was trading away Prince Fielder just at the trading deadline in August that sealed it for me.

RFSJ II ended 5th out of 12, and I was relatively pleased with that. I was in the middle or slightly above in all categories, and although I wish hitting was better, given some of the power hitters I had, it wasn't too shabby overall. I think acquiring Barry Bonds didn't help me too much overall, however, and I notice that I think he's been dropped by San Francisco for next year.

RFSJ III finished tied for 7th out of 12. At one point toward the end of September, I was in 11th place, and two of the three teams who had made no trades, implying an abandoned team, wre ahead of me in the standings. (Apparently, this often happens in the free leagues.) So finishing as high as I did was gratifying. Although I won the Wins category, I lost both ERA and WHIP and had pretty poor hitting as well. So all in all it wasn't too bad.

I definitely will only play one team next year. I got too distracted by playing three teams, and ended up neglecting all of them. It's possible I could have staved off my drop in Juniors had I paid more attention, but I didn't. I also want to explore using another platform, like ESPN, for example, for my fantasy ball. I need to think about pitching more as well, in terms of how I use starters. Essentially, for the last three weeks, I didn't start any starters because of the innings-pitched limits. In a full season, you can only pitch a total of 1250 IPs over all your pitchers, and I reached 1200 IPs by early September. So I had to bench most of my starters, leaving just releivers to pitch, who only use 1 or 2 IPs per outing. Good news is that saves on ERA, bad news is it doesn't help in Wins except rarely.

So, all in all, somewhat disappointing, but I did make all my initial goals. Better luck next year!

RFSJ