Welcome back Armchair managers and fans. It's that time of year again; the snow has melted, the Timberwolves are out of playoff contention, and Dick Bremer's voice can be heard in nearly every household throughout the state. Yes indeed, Armchair Baseball is upon us.
And with Armchair Baseball comes Armchair Weeks In Review. I do my best to inform us all on where teams have been, where they are, and perhaps where they'll be going. I've kept a similar format of my advanced standings from our Armchair Football League. Basically, I see where each team ranks up each week against everyone else and give them the proper credit, regardless of if they got a W or not in their actual game. This way, we can see how much scheduling has impacted our regular season wins and losses. I've got another method that's similar but a little more complicated that I'll probably whip out a few weeks into the season. Here's where everyone ranks after week 1:
The numbers for each category is the percent of other teams that they have beaten each week. Since this is week 1, you can do the math easily to see that Maewyn Succat had the most HRs last week and gets a 1.000 rating for beating everyone. If they do it again next week, they'll maintain their 1.000 rating. Likewise, ties count as a half of a win.
ASS 3.0 (which I hope to rename something else later) is not simply the average of each category. Rather, it finds the percent chance that they get an overall win (Winning more than 6 categories = overall win. Also an overall ties are included are are worth half of an overall win.) So for instance, Winston Wolfe has a .123 ASS 3.0 because if he were to play a team, say 10000 times, with .500 in each category and received 1 overall win if he were to win > 6 categories and half a win for tying the number of won categories, this would be his score. It's kind of confusing I know. But it's basically assessing a team's overall winning percentage. This will be very helpful later on when I matchup team vs team to see who is predicted to get an overall win for the following week.
So I'll Pick Later (IPL), as we can see, has a commanding lead. Only 3 categories of his were below the median team's score (SB, SV, K). However, you might be up in arms since they lost overall last week to Joe's Torn Ligament (JTL). Well that's how this system works. When IPL won their categories, they won big. That has an impact when looking at the rest of the league. When they lost to JTL, they lost close. Yes, they lost more categories than won, but JTL is a strong team as well. Also, JTL was one of the few teams that IPL could have played where they would have lost. It's all about matchups, luck, and scheduling folks. I'm here to get rid of all that noise and see how good a team really is.
What else can we take away from this? Maewyn Succat and Joe's Torn Ligament put up a ridiculously strong hitting week by any measure. Maewyn Succat was even more impressive because, after looking at their starting lineup each day, they had a total of 52 games played by their hitters. The average for our league was 53.9. So they're getting a lot of production out of each game for their hitters, rather than making sure every slot in the lineup is filled. Also, I'll Pick Later and the Sandbaggers were the top teams in pitching this past week.
As for our division rivalry, I'll come up with a calculation next week to see where we matchup. But looking at the numbers above, it's quite clear The Stu Crew has the better league thusfar (granted, again, that we've only had one week).
It's a little too early in the year for predictions, but I have a couple of ways of doing it that I'll try to bust out in the future weeks. I've realized that my job is figuring out more about Fantasy Baseball team strategy, rather than looking at individual player strategy. So which types of players should you draft higher: pitchers, hitters, catchers, closers ...? Will David's strategy of not having a closer pay off? Should you draft quality starters or just use the waiver wire to bolster the counting categories? Stay tuned this year and hopefully we'll find out this and more.
Although I haven't been as in tune with viral videos as last fall, I'll supply what funny material I can and leave the rest to Dave. Here's one that my roommate showed me that had me ROFLing:
I'll try to cover the other looming Armchair Topics another time; playoffs, money, etc. I've also got a lot of strategy topics in store that should be interesting (hopefully). I've just been a busy boy here at SJU this semester, which by far has been the busiest, and they profs are not cutting me any slack when I tell them I have an Armchair WIR deadline I need to meet. So apologies if my contributions are a little slow until the summer hits. Man, I can't wait for summer. But at the same time, Man I Love College. HEY!