Week Fourteen

In Head-to-Head fantasy baseball, the practice of "Streaming Pitchers" is as close to cheating as you can really get. All three of my leagues have taken measures to prevent it, and rightly so. My Keeper league has weekly rosters, my Yahoo league has a maximum of 35 transactions for the season and for a player to be elligible for a given week in my longtime league, he must have been added to your roster by midnight Sunday.

On top of this, all three of my leagues also have an innings minimum. 30, 40 and 50 innings respectively. In my longtime league, what this means is that if you have one - or let's say two of your starting pitchers - struggle to finish four innings, you'd better have enough starts remaining to compensate. I went into the week with 7 starts, 3 relievers and needing 50 innings. My staff has a lot of innings-eaters on it like James Shields, John Lackey, Sabathia (really more of an "everything-eater) and Hudson so I figured I'd be just fine.

For those who don't know, when you miss your innings minimum, you automatically forfeit every pitching category. This can be particularly damaging during a week in which your offense has shit all over itself and the only points you're winning are in pitching. Thanks to a great Saturday from Lackey and Bedard (17 IP, 1 ER, 26 K's, 0BB) I was dominating ERA, WHIP and K/BB. These performances blinded me to what took place on Thursday, the events of which went largely under my radar. Hudson and Sabathia had combind to go 7 innings, allowing 13 runs and about a million hits. But after Saturday's performances, I'd forgotten how terrible Thursday had been. I was flying high.

At least, temporarily. Late on saturday, after admiring my pitching stats for several minutes, I clicked on the "week" tab in my Stattracker (for those not in the know, the "week" tab shows what your players have done for the whole week). It was then that I noticed it. At the bottom of the pitching tab, the weekly totals appear. From right to left, I see my sparkling K/BB, WHIP, ERA, K's, Saves and Wins. Then on the far left, I notice my innings pitched: 48.2. Houston, we have a problem.

On Sunday I had no starters going. Because of the Fuentes "injury" I had three relievers: Putz, Saito and Borowski. When you look at your team and see that you need 1.1 innings on the last day, the outcome seems inevitable, but on Sunday, when the Mariners and Indians are playing close games, you let yourself believe that you might not get completely fucked, even though you know deep down, you definitely will. Sure enough, it was Paul Byrd out there in the 9th inning of that tie game in Toronto allowing a walk off single. No Borowski inning. Then there were the Dodgers quickly up 7-0 after two innings in LA, seemingly eliminating the need for Saito. Only the Mariners seemed willing to help me out, as they were clinging to a 6-3 lead in the 7th. That's when I went out for the night. When I got home, I opened up my Stattracker and saw what I knew I would see all along. For the week, my pitchers threw 49.2 innings. I missed it by 1 out. 1 fucking out and a close 6-5-1 loss became an 11-1 debacle that knocked me out of first place for the first time since April.

In my Yahoo league, thanks again to Sabathia and Hudson, I needed 8 (EIGHT) starts to get the 40 innings I needed, highlighted by Rich Harden's 2.2 innings of walks and homers. I had to add 2 starters, using 2 precious transactions. Thankfully in that league, my offense (led by Berkman, Atkins, Braun, Konerko, Hanley Ramirez, Hafner and Sheffield) dominated. They combined for 16 HR's, a .376 AVG and a 1.146 OPS. I had 5 players hit .450 or higher (sheffield, Ramirez, Atkins, K. Matsui and Estrada). Yes, that's a 12 team league.

In other news, my decision to start Adam LaRoche over James Loney was nothing short of a stroke of genius. LaRoche went 8-23 with 3 HR's and OPS of 1.249, leading my Keeper Team to a huge win that propelled me into first place in my (shudder) division. Of course, the main reason I won so handily was that my opponent started Andy Pettitte, off of whom the Angels took batting practice for about 5 innings last week.

So at the All-Star Break, here are my standings in my 3 leagues.
Keeper League: 1st in division (2 divisions, 10 teams)
Yahoo League: 3rd overall (95-64-9)
Longtime League: 2nd overall (91-68-9)