Monday, March 19, 2007

More on My Yahoo Team

In the comments section on my 2nd post about my Yahoo team, Nimrod (his name for himself...not mine) said that he doesn't think my pitching looks that good. He's not the first one to say that, and that's usually the case for my teams. I still believe that I will be able to win or come close to winning most of the pitching categories. First of all, I like the pitchers I got...I suspect that they're generally going to outperform most people's expectations and make this at least a middle of the pack pitching staff. But the real reason I'll excel in the pitching categories is that I'm allowed to make transactions and this is a daily league. You can expect me to drop several of my lesser pitchers (and hitters on my bench) and rotate through top middle relievers in favorable situations (at home against weak opponents) as well as possible rotating some 'spot starters' in especially favorable situations. This will let me lower my ERA and WHIP substantially (because of the middle relievers) while accumulating a ton of Ks and Ws. Because I'll be making so many transactions during the season, I'm going to spend most of my time with one of the lower waiver priorities...its just not worth delaying my pick-ups to keep a high selection. With that in mind, I solved my problem of having only 3B on my bench by using my #1 waiver priority to drop Alex Gordon and pick up Delmon Young who had just been dropped. Now all I need is another closer (assuming Owens doesn't win the role in Florida), but there's plenty of time to pick one up.

I think it's worth discussing the general lessons here - tailor your team to the strategy you plan to use, and come up with a strategy that takes advantage of the type of league you're in. In leagues, but especially those with daily transactions, there are TONS of opportunities to tinker with your rosters and gain many, many small edges over your opponents over the course of the season. Those edges add up to an extremely high likelihood of winning your league. Ulimately, I think that's what this blog is about. Other blogs are almost entirely focused on preparing for your draft, and then keeping up to date on the news during the season. The Waiver Wire will be focused on finding opportunities to gain the upper hand throughout the season.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

i'm not sure if i like your pitching staff at all. myers is normally good, hamels has the potential for 200k's but also has a very, very suspect injury history, ted lilly is a fly ball pitcher in an hr lovin park, he pitched in a cavern last year, one or two weeks of bad pitching and broxton's in for saito, and lidge is anything but a sure thing. it's all risk/reward sort of stuff but that's also how i ended up having to draft my pitchers so i sympathize. i ended up with peavy, kazmir, harden, patterson, millwood, buerhle, street, jenks, and bj ryan. talk about risk/reward.