Armchair Thoughts

The updated standings can be found here.
 (I have retired the Weekly Projections portion since they aren't that fascinating.)

Caff is still hanging onto the top spot, and has been there for as far back as I can remember. Though, Mooch is hot on his heels. But I'm playing a different game. I'm playing in a world of hypotheticals projected outcomes. I'm playing for the title after Week 23, not Week 8. I choose to live in this virtual reality where Mooch and Caff are projected to be the 2nd and 3rd worst teams going forward and have to fight for a playoff spot.

And yet, in both the reality and fantasy worlds, I am losing. For the first time all season, we have a new projected winner: I got Matsui!
I don't know how Riley is doing it, but by golly we've got to take him down. His batting stats have skyrocketed over the course of 7 days, and to boot, he's still got Votto on the DL

Looking closer at the rest of season projections, another team that rivals Riley for one of the best teams of the rest of the season is Goose's Flock. Let's have a looksie at them.

Batting

What have they done?
They have a winning percentage of .615, which is only 2nd to Mooch (.625). That's quite remarkable. They have had very few holes in their offense with only SBs (3-4-1) dipping below .500.

What will they do?
Make no mistake, their results aren't far from reality. They're projected to win at a clip of .529 the rest of the season, largely relying on HR and RBI to do the heavy lifting

	HR
Giancarlo Stanton	39
Brandon Moss	30
Paul Goldschmidt	29
Freddie Freeman	27
Brian Dozier	22
Pablo Sandoval	21
Michael Cuddyer	20
Salvador Pérez	13
J.J. Hardy	13

That's an awful lot of homers from just those starters. Giancarlo has YET to hit 39 according to Steamer's projections. Moss for 30? DOZIER for 22? I guess I can't argue since I've invested so much in the narrative of "numbers know more than you". So, there's that.

Pitching

What have they done?

Sucked. Sucked badly. Almost as much as Dave's pitching staff. Only Losses (4-3-1) and Saves (5-3) have been above .500.

What will they do?
They will monumentally bounce back.  Wins will climb back toward .500. Their rate stats will also have a heavy climb back toward contender status.

What we have here is a power-laced team that has had some back luck in their pitching stats thus far that will potentially ride the coat tails of their offense to a playoff spot.

The updated standings can be found here.

So, since my projections are based on a team's lineup for a given day and presume "here's what will happen if no one could make any batting changes the rest of the season", it's subject to an abundance of fluctuation. Let's say your best player is in the lineup one day, and has a day off the next. Well your projections are gonna smell a little funky.I apologize. Take Riley's team for instance. As of last week, they were projected to win 57% of their hitting categories for the rest of the season, and now they're only at 49%. Why? Joe Votto went on the DL. If that's the case, then we know that he's worth 8% over a replacement player for all hitting categories over the course of the rest of the season.

8% * 6 categories * 16 weeks left = 7.7 wins in the standings.

Better hope he gets back soon, Riles.

But we're not here to talk about Riley, we already talked about him. We're here to talk about our newest member of the top 4, Yung's $1 Store.

Coming into the season, the limitations on weekly transactions were a big talking point in regarding to whether it would affect Joe's strategy. He was certainly the dominant force to be reckoned with last year, and now we see him clawing up the standings. Well, what's he got in his arsenal?

Well firstly, Joe has YET TO LOSE A STOLEN BASES CATEGORY this year. (No other team is totally undefeated in any one category, so congrats Joe!)

So he must have a lot of good speedsters then? Well not exactly.

He's only tied for 4th in the league in total SB this year. If anyone should be undefeated it's the FCG, who have 8 more than 2nd place and is also projected to churn out the most SB for the rest of the season.

But we're not here to talk about Mike, we already talked about him.

So if Joe isn't a particularly fast team, what are they good at?

While they are particularly strong at SBs, they really don't have much left for offense. They are projected to have the 2nd least HRs and the 2nd least RBIs from here on out. Granted, I haven't checked his starting lineup to see if he's playing his best players today.

Pitching-wise, things get a little better, but it's still only mediocre. Joe is another relatively low SP, high RP kind of guy. But like with JP (though not as extreme), the K category is his biggest pitfall ....

HOWEVER HOWEVER HOWEVER the regular rules don't pertain to Joey Ballgame.

We've played 7.5 weeks of baseball with 7 max acquisitions per week. Joe has made 50 moves already. Almost the maximum each week. While it doesn't particularly boost his hitting stats, his pitching stats have been shored up quite a bit. To put it into context, he's projected to win 34% of his Ws categories and 30% of his K categories for the rest of the season, and yet he's .500 and .714 in those categories respectively.

You all should keep that in mind when you look at my projections, they don't yet take into account the streaming tendencies of managers. So while the numbers say Joe is finishing 9th, he has 112 moves left to make before the regular season is over.

The updated standings can be found here.

I had to make some changes to my code again after seeing a few discrepancies. Forgive and forget. The good part is that it's better now than it was yesterday. And the day before that. And so on.

We've got a real hodgepodge at the top with the top 7 teams all within 3 games of each other. Here's a W% graph:



So who haven't we covered?

Looks like New Team Name is on the bill.  Amazingly, this squad has gone 17-5-2 in the last 2 weeks since changing their name. Let's hope JP changes it soon.

Should we be worried? Yep. They now have a 64% chance of making the playoffs and are likely to be the 3rd best performing team from here on out.

What's their secret? Hitting hitting hitting.

What kind of hitting? All of the hittings. They don't have a weakness.

Runs, HRs, SB, you name it. They got it. It helps that they've got Adrian Gonzalez and McCutchen as solid foundations, and from there it's a lot of one or two category players that ultimately spits out a balanced, evenly distributed machine.

How's their pitching? Well. It's not great. In fact, it's projected to be the 2nd worst pitching team from here on out.

JP is one of them new age thinkers who thinks that the less pitching you have, the better your pitching stats will be as a whole. Yes he's tanking on Ks and Ws, but he's going to win Ls and SVs with the idea that fewer pitchers means better chances of winning ERA and WHIP. It makes sense on paper, but JP hasn't perfected this art just yet.

Wins
JP has the fewest total pitching wins this year to date, yet has a .500 W% in that category. I anticipate that to not be sustainable in the slightest, mostly because he's projected to have the least wins for the rest of the season.

Losses
This is a strong category for him. It's tough to lose this category if you're only sending out 4 SP per week and a few relievers.

SV
JP really doesn't have a lot of closers, however. Nathan, Romo, and Street are good, but there are other teams with a full starting rotation that have 3 true closers, so now SVs aren't really a lock for him anymore.

K
This one is futile. Read what I said about Losses and apply the opposite to this category. Except while he is projected to win 80% of Losses for the rest of the year, he may only win ~8% of Ks. Those two trades don't balance out to a positive.

ERA and WHIP have the most variance from week to week in terms which team wins. All it takes is one bad outing and you may lose that category.  I project he with ~55% of his WHIP and ERA categories the rest of the year. Hardly locks.

It essentially boils down to the fact that the categories that JP wants as locks aren't as certain as he may have hoped for, and the categories that he IS tanking in, are more sure to lose than the rest are to win.

That hitting though, can carry this squad to a playoff appearance.

The updated standings can be found here.


We are now 5/23 of the way through the season.

That's 21.7%

That's over a fifth.

That's seemingly quite a bit.

Strictly from looking at the standings we have a two way tie at the top for supremacy. Riley and Mike both want the glory but it will come down to who wants it more this year. It looks like Caff's current squad has more staying power than Riley's, who is projected to get nipped out of that 4th playoff spot. Then again, a couple moves here and there and we have a whole new outlook on the season.

And yes, it's starting to be that time of year. Trade talks. Talkin' trades. Proposals, rejections, counter offers. It comes with the sport. I'm hoping some people start looking at their farm squads and bad future contracts and say "screw it, let's go for it all this year". Remember, flags fly forever, gentlemen.

Going top down on the standings, finding the first team that I haven't covered yet, and we arrive at Seductive Wendepunkt,. A scrappy hodgepodge of misfits who have the most cohesive team chemistry since JJ's Maple Sausages from 2011.

Offensively, they'll kill you with their power and speed, but their rate stats are abysmal.  My team is projected to hit .267 for the rest of the season. To put that in context, Wilkin Ramirez hit .272 last year.

On the pitching side of things it's a bit of the same story. Wins, Saves, Strikeouts; they can hold their own. But those rate stats can hinder my quest to assemble the most beautifully run baseball team since Joe's Torn Ligament from 2010. Man was that team a joy to watch. They could do it all. I'd stay up late on my computer just to watch Joe make transactions in real time. It was a real thing of beauty the way he would drop one pitcher that pitched that day and pick up another pitcher who was pitching the next day. I would always think "Dang, that Joe is sure smart! Why didn't I think of that?!".

Anyway. Back to my team. I am going to tear all of your hopes and dreams into pieces. I am a savage and ruthless manager who is destined to go top of the league after 23 weeks. My computer program says so. I will then extract all of your best players and make you pay for the majority of their salaries, because it's written in the stars. All of you will finish below .500 since I will simply be that far above you all in the standings. You have been warned.