It’s the time of the season wherein we look at our teams and some people see a magnificent juggernaut, while others see a mirage, a trojan horse of confidence hiding grisly innards of broken dreams and decaying hope.
In my main league, my trojan horse is vast, even globe-spanning. I am either last or second to last in every offensive category, as every one of my top 5 picks has been injured, came back too early from injury and is awful at baseball now, or like my top pick Julio Rodriguez, simply forgot he was supposed to hit for any kind of power and has turned his ISO into a whisper of a ghost. In this case, the ghost is David Eckstein, whom I may have killed to better ground this metaphor.
While the children who the good Gods shine the beautiful light of glory (they’re in the top-5 of their leagues) might have a single category they could consider punting (usually steals or saves in a standard league), I have convinced myself that I could maybe punt my entire offense. And maybe I won’t get anything in return. Just release my team based on their own recognizance. Why not? It’s better than trying to convince oneself they have any shot of getting a third-place finish.
That is my pessimism speaking. I would never besmirch any league I joined by mass-dropping my team, even if it were public. I’m definitely guilty of mass-ignoring certain teams, which is sometimes an even nastier if passive approach to alienating friends and neighbors. I digress because it’s fun to do, and have you ever read this column? While I do sneak a bit of digestible content into this experience, I don’t think it would be out-of-turn to call this an exercise in aggressive digressions. I could write about fantasy baseball like everyone else, but AI is already copying and pasting these blogs elsewhere on the internet for ghost traffic websites.
I’d rather point you to this performance by Boredoms at All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2012. Fourteen guitars, five drummers and Eye, the hypnotic ringleader making music that activates my nervous system into physical bliss that I have trouble replicating elsewhere in my life. This is a band that went from being the most chaotic band pushing the boundaries of the very form of what constitutes a song (you listen to Sonic Youth or any “noise” band, they tend to have a 4/4 bedrock on which they append their noise, so while being noisy, you still had one foot firmly rooted in known territory of pattern recognition, whereas Boredoms, well, try Pop Tatari, my words would not do that maelstrom justice) suddenly shifting gears playing the most propulsive, cosmic and transcendent music I may ever hear in my lifetime. Sadly Boredoms are no more, and their final three records are not easily available.
You should seek out Super AE and its follow-up Vision Creation Newsun, in that order. If, however, you are like me and are fascinated when a band undergoes such a dramatic transformation, you should seek out the Super Roots collection, 1-10. My personal favorite is Super Roots 7, but there’s so much good stuff here. And no, this isn’t a situation where you’re listening to how the sausage is made. I posit that each Super Root release can stand on its own two legs. This is coming from me though, a man confined to the past, whose favorite artists these days range from early Motorik-inspired Spiritualized, to the outrageous zeal of Sun Ra, and ending with the so sweet I want to vomit work of The Raspberries. One of my favorite things about a YouTube video of the Super AE album is the top comment, which reads, “I like music.”
Yes sir. And you should like your fantasy team while also being realistic. Don’t force the Trojan Horse like I did with this intro, where a simple piece of fantasy advice (“Figure out what categories you’re probably going to lose, and punt them at this point in the season”) can be used to hide my true objective, which is to make everyone fall in love with Boredoms so they magically reform and I can see them perform live. As always, you don’t have to like what I like, but boy howdy is it incredible to find new things and share them with others (real meaning: force people to sit in your room and listen to music they probably find a bit uncomfortable while you stare at the side of their head trying not to skip to the next song because you’re over-thinking every facial tic as some kind of signal that they both the music and you personally).
On to the blurbs!
A Blurbstomp Reminder
We will analyze player blurbs from a given evening, knowing that 1-2 writers are usually responsible for all the player write-ups posted within an hour of the game results. We will look at:
Boy Scout’s Flowery Diction Badge– examining how words create meaning, and sometimes destroy meaning altogether
Mathletics Participation Ribbon – Quantitative and Qualitative Oddities in a given blurb
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award – Given to the player blurb that promises the most and delivers the least.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque – blurbs don’t always need to make sense, friendo
Max Scherzer Crown of Leaking Insane Rage – blurbs so angry at a player it’s uncomfortable
The hope is that by season’s end, we’ll all feel more confident about our player evaluations when it comes to the waiver wire. We will read blurbs and not be swayed by excessive superlatives, faulty injury reporting, and micro-hype. I will know that I have done my job when Grey posts, and there isn’t a single question about catchers in the comments section. Onward to Roto Wokeness!
Mathletics Participation Ribbon
Elias Díaz left Monday’s game with a tight left calf, according to the Rockies.
This didn’t really use to be a thing, but teams these days just love calling the initial injury “tightness” before admitting to a strain (or sometimes even worse) the next day. Jacob Stallings is filling in for Díaz.
Source: Rotoworld
Hoo boy, Grey himself caught this doozy and this was my word-for-word reaction:
“It has it all. Crankiness. Pining for days of yore. Injury hex. What a beauty.”
It truly is a thing of beauty. Now let’s address the chief accusation in this glorious blurb. The blurbist seems to be accusing teams of being purposefully vague when discussing player injuries that happened that same day, sometimes within an hour of the injury occurring. This is one of the funnier accusations I’ve read in a good long while.
Let us shoot the easiest fish in the barrel: Teams refer to injuries as “tightness” or are vague in their language because we usually assume the player still has to be tested, and those tests then need to be viewed by the team’s radiologist and doctor. I didn’t think anyone faulted teams or players for waiting to discuss test results before this inane hypothesis popped into existence. Who benefits from what we can safely call “standard medical practice?” I would say people generally do. Would we prefer a world where you discuss stomach issues with your doctor – namely that you can’t seem to eat garlic, onions, and most wheat products without experiencing severe gas pains and uncomfortable bowel movements – and the doctor says, “We’ll take an MRI, but I’m telling your family it’s stomach cancer.” You’re putting the cart in front of the horse.
None of the above touches on the idea that sometimes players have MRI’s and ultrasounds and the team still misses major injuries. Christian Encarnacion-Strand was just revealed to have ligament damage in his hand after a full month of recovery.
Now, onto the temporal nature of this argument. “This didn’t use [sic] to be a thing….” As has been said a trillion times over, you really can say whatever you want on the internet, truth be damned. This was a thing! I remember reading game breakdowns in the Utica, NY’s Observer-Dispatch back in the day, and players were constantly being listed as day-to-day with whatever ailment was causing concern. I would argue it was worse back in the day, because ESPN’s Sportscenter was the closest thing we had to Twitter breaking news.
It is a thing and was a thing because teams want to tell the public what their doctors told them. I’m sure there’s some tomfoolery with teams faking injuries to manipulate roster crunch, but again, who does that harm? Mostly gamblers and fantasy baseball players, which is to say that this decision harms no one worth mentioning. We’re all pissed when teams lollygag putting a player on the IL, thusly preventing us from grabbing someone off waivers without having to drop someone, but this is not that.
My absolute favorite aspect of this blurb is the self-own that occurs when the blurbist types out, “teams these days just love calling the initial injury “tightness” before admitting to a strain (or sometimes even worse) the next day.” In his complaint about teams being purposefully vague regarding injuries, he is then purposefully vague regarding injuries. What’s worse than a strain? The answer is a partial or complete tear of the muscle. What’s worse than a tear? Death. They should have a site for blurbs about dead players that is just this:
Ted Williams (dead) unable to play today.
Ugh. With his head being frozen in a cryogenic chamber, the rest of Williams’s body was either cremated or has become soil under a since-decayed casket. Either way, he won’t suit up for today’s game.
Source: Rotoghoul.org
Color me surprised no one else has thought of this tasteless idea. Finally, any time you see a “back in the old days” complaint, you can usually dismiss it whole cloth. Anyone referencing the past as superior is being ornery for orneriness’s sake.
Boy Scouts Flowery Diction Badge
Logan O’Hoppe said a major injury has been ruled out after he took a foul ball to the groin area during Tuesday’s game.
O’Hoppe was still hurting after the game, but it sounds like there’s a chance he could be ready to go on Wednesday. If not, Matt Thaiss will start.
Source: Rotoworld
But which part of the groin area? The left or the right? Why are we so afraid of the truth? As I laid out in a column last season that I don’t have time to look up, I’ll always find time in my day to ponder how best to describe an injury to a catcher’s Mike & Ike’s, or even his Snowcap. “Groin area” is too vague for my liking, but I’ll also point out that like Grey, I dislike the specificity of an injury to someone’s “left or right” groin. There has to be a middle-of-the-road here. There’s a joke here about, but ain’t gonna happen folks.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque
Christian Yelich went 1-for-4 with a double in the Brewers’ 3-0 loss to the Blue Jays.
Yelich’s double was one of just five hits the Brewers could muster on the night as Yusei Kikuchi and the Blue Jays bullpen shut them down all evening. Yelich is slashing .278/.341/.306 on the month with no home runs
Source: Rotoworld
I enjoy the idea that certain players will go maybe a week without a home run, and a blurb will mention the horrifying lack of power on display, and then we have this Yelich post. While it does seem like the blurb itself was published before completion (you can usually tell when the last sentence has no punctuation), the casual tossing off of a statistical fact on Rotoworld is unnerving. Where is the snark? No reminders that he’ll never be the player he once was? No silver-lining data mined from either Fangraphs or Baseball Savant saying he’s getting unlucky?
To be clear, I appreciate the lack of snark. I have been poisoned by the constant and creeping jabs that have littered blurbs over the years, so it seems suspicious when we get a vanilla Yelich blurb like this.
In summary, I have fully lost my mind and you are all my witnesses.
Boy Scouts Flowery Diction Badge
Byron Buxton went 2-for-4 with a home run and two RBI in Tuesday’s loss to the Rockies.
Buxton’s two-run blast in the seventh marked his fourth home run of the season. The veteran center fielder is hitting .230 on the season but has tallied five hits in his last 16 at-bats. It was a rare solid night for Buxton, who has struggled to regain his old form after multiple injury-plagued seasons. He offers little to no fantasy upside at this time.
Source: Rotoworld
Buxton, like a good many baseball players, has had a severe power drought. I guess my issue is with the concept of “upside.” In my view, a player has upside if they have a set of tools that has yet to be fully tapped into, or have shown flashes of brilliance that could be recaptured. The player need not be a young phenom or even a post-post-post-post sleeper. Upside always means that the player has the ability to outperform what the general public has decided is their base statistical output.
It’s a bit misleading to state that Buxton has no upside, but I give points to the blurbist for hedging with the phrase “at this time.” What a great cheat. You could say that Yogi Berra has no upside “at this time,” and be technically correct without losing any street cred. We all have upside, and yes, I’m aware that I’m generalizing to make a point. However, sometimes the lack of specificity helps you win arguments online, especially with anonymous fantasy baseball content mill creators who will never read this article.
All of you, dear readers, have upside. Especially if you’re getting stomped by blurbs upside your head. Until next time, listen to Boredoms and blurb on!
