Week Twenty-Five

This was week 1 of my 2 week LongTime League Yahoo final, and the semifinals in my Keeper League. I'll save all the Yahoo talk for next week. Let's talk about my keeper league.

I had the #4 seed and was playing the #1 seed. I liked my chances. I had 7 starts and a quality stable of middle relievers able to get wins, K's and keep everything else down. My opponent only had 6 starts, so I had a good shot at K's and wins. My offense was on a roll, with Furcal finally running and Piazza heating up.

On Monday morning, if I had made a list of 5 things that could possibly go horribly wrong and derail my run to the finals. It would look something like this.

1. Hot-hitting Rafael Furcal will get hurt in the first of 4 games in Colorado to start the week and not return.

2. Mike Piazza will no longer be in the starting lineup. He will only pinch hit 1 time in each game.

3. The day of his first start of the week (Tuesday) James Shields will be shut down for the season, leaving me with a completely useless active roster spot and 2 fewer starts than I was counting on.

4. Kelvim Escobar will continue his September struggles and get killed once again.

5. Jacquin Benoit, set up pitcher extraordinaire of the Rangers, will be given 3 save chances this week and he will blow them all. He will not recieve any vulture wins in those games.

Here's the shocker. All 5 of those things happened. They actually happened. Rafael Furcal, coming off of a week in which he stole 8 bases and scored 9 runs hurt his back on Monday in Colorado. He would not return all week, finishing at 0-3. Mike Piazza would stop starting games, going 0-6 as a pinch hitter. That's 2 spots in my lineup. 2 spots. 2 spots that combined to 0-9. This was the single most important week of my season in this league. How does a team make that up?

At least Teixeira, Rollins, Ibanez and Wright got the memo:
Teixeira: 8-26, 8 H, 2B, 2 HR, 6 RBI, 5 R, 2 BB, 0.977 OPS
Ibanez: 12-29, 12 H, 3 2B, 3B, 2 HR, 8 RBI, 7 R, BB, 1.226 OPS
Rollins: 9-36, 9 H, 2 2B, 2 HR, 5 RBI, 5 R, SB, BB, 0.742 OPS
Wright: 14-31, 14 H, 5 2B, 7 RBI, 7 R, 3 SB, 2 BB, 1.099 OPS

Hafner even chipped in 1 homer and Matsui woke up enough to hit 2. I had a real good offensive week from those 6 players. Unfortunately, my offense was made up of 10.

My replacement for Theriot was Mark Loretta, who was in the midst of an 11 game hitting streak when Monday came around. Houston had 7 games during the week, all at home. Seemed like a good bet. The good news - Loretta didn't lose his hitting streak this week. The bad news - he only played in 4 games, going 5-16. What the fuck? Why are none of my players fucking playing? Thank god this is a weekly league, so I can't do a thing about it. I can just sit there and watch my chances of winning money vanish.

Meanwhile, my opponent's hitters didn't take so much as a few innings off. Not that it mattered. His 2 marquee hitters - Howard and Thome - fucking killed me. They were unreal.

Howard: 8-23, 8 H, 2B, 4 HR, 10 RBI, 6 R, 12 BB, 1.496 OPS
Thome: 8-18, 8 H, 2 2B, 4 HR, 7 RBI, 6 R, 2 BB, 1.722 OPS

8 homers and 17 RBI between them. And an OPS closer to 2 than to 1. Ridiculous. Only 1 other hitter on his team had an OPS over .900 and the other 8 players hit 3 homers combined.
I suppose it only really gets funny when looking at the final numbers, which resulted in a depressing 8-2-2 finish.

I lost hits by 4, homers by 2, and tied in RBI and Steals. I can't help but wonder how my numbers would have looked had Furcal and/or Piazza actually played some baseball. A safe assumption would probably be that they would have combined for 5 hits, 1 steal and at least a single RBI.

That would have made the score 7-5. Still a loss, but certainly closer. Now let's look at pitching. Had Shields made his two scheduled starts and not been shut down "as a precaution" I probably would have made up the 9 K's that I lost by. That would make the score 6-6. Interesting....

But hey, why bother thinking about that. It just angries up the blood. Why not focus on the Red Sox game in Toronto in which Eric "Bye bye millions of dollars" Gagne choked away a 2-1 win for the Red Sox in the 8th inning, turning it into a 4-2 loss. I think about this game particularly because my opponent started AJ Burnett last week, and sure as shit, Burnett picked up the win in that game. Thanks Gagne. Thanks. Number of wins I lost by? You guessed it just 1.

Kill me.

Without a doubt, the worst thing that happened out of all of this was the pathetic message board trash talk thrown up by the moron who beat me (team name "Jackalopes" by the way) in which he stated "I just beat the piss out of your team." When I pointed out that my shortstop had given me only 3 at bats all week and 1 of my pitchers - instead of starting twice - sat it all out, he responded by writing: "That's what you get for starting Furcol." Furcol. Furcol. That's what it's come to. I lose to people who don't know how to spell. He also put a poll up on our league page, which I will copy and paste for your enjoyment:


"Three Coles signed there name to a Wedding Card, which one didn't have there girlfriends name on the check???"

Obviously, unaware that "there" and "their" are not the same thing.

But I digress. I'm obviously just upset about my team not getting it done. And the fact that I was done in by the format of our league (weekly changes) and not my team's poor showing. Like in real baseball, bad luck can derail a playoff run as quickly as bad performance.