This week’s Fantasy Roundtable is being hosted by our boys Zach and Pete at MLB Front Office’s Rotonomics. I picture them having cubicles outside Bud Selig’s office and being summoned from time to time to get him a brat and a brewskie.

THE TOPIC: What injured pitcher and hitter do you think will pleasantly surprise owners when they return later this season?

I did the pussy thing and picked as many guys as possible in hopes that one or two come through so I look good in hindsight. But if my surprise pitcher actually does perform, I’ll be as surprised as anyone….

Back in the preseason, we launched a new method for rating players called Point Shares. The objective was to create a methodology that converts player’s projected or real stats into a metric that would allow for easy comparisons across players. The metric we settled on is deceptively powerful - Roto points.

Assuming you have a completely average team (55 points in a 5×5 10 team league), each player’s point shares reflect how many points they would add/subtract from your team’s totals if they replaced the average stat projections at that position. For example, if you swapped out an average team’s 1B (Mark Teixeira, David Ortiz) with Lance Berkman, they would increase from 55 points to an estimated 67.5 points. Point Shares also allow for basic trade comparisons (add the points of each side) and assessing your team vs. others (just add up the points and add to 55).

Seeing that we’re 2 months into the season, we thought it was a good time to update our Point Shares rankings - in this case, it is based solely on actual stats through June 8, 2008. So this is more comparable to the ESPN Player Rater vs. ESPN’s player rankings or Yahoo’s Big Board. Except better. (Not saying there aren’t flaws in ours but, c’mon, Ichiro is #17 among all players with a .290/43/3/17/26? At OF?)

June 8th - Point Shares for 5×5 10 team league and for Fantasy Razzball (play for worst team)

(Click on images to enlarge)

Pre-Season - Projected Point Shares for 5×5 10 team and 12 team leagues

Pre-Season - Projected Fantasy Razzball Point Shares

This week’s Fantasy Roundtable is being hosted over at the Poughkeepsie Journal Fantasy Baseball blog hosted by our pal Mike Muschiano. When I’m in the Hudson River Valley (b/w NYC and Albany) and need FLB news, I turn to the PoJo, fo’ sho’.

THE TOPIC: What are three things that aggravate you the most as a fantasy baseball manager?

Click the link to see my answers as well as those of other Knights of the Fantasy Roundtable….

Razzball is hosting this week’s Fantasy Roundtable. Aw yeah. Scroll to the end for my post. Feel free to add your story in the comments.

THE TOPIC: Who do you consider your biggest fantasy baseball rival and describe your most gratifying victory and most painful defeat involving them?

Tim Dierkes - RotoAuthority
A former coworker of mine, Matt Richards. He talked a ton of shit in our office H2H league last year, and I just had to win. Many of the other teams quit on the league toward the end but Richards and I were going toe to toe. There were no innings or transaction limits, so it became a stream-a-thon. We’d both pick up any warm body who was starting the next day. It got to the point where I would set my alarm for 4am just to pick up the following day’s starters before he woke up. I did beat him. That was the only time I played him in a league.

Patrick Dicaprio - Fantasy Baseball Generals
Without naming names, I was in a high stakes league a few years ago where the commissioner was not only a colluder, he threatened to sue one of the owners in the league for emailing around a portion of the league’s constitution, which he had allegedly copyrighted even though it was written by the league itself (!)

Easily my most gratifying victory was being a new owner in that league and winning three years later. We developed a three year plan that included a complete rebuild in year one, cashing in year two and winning in year three. Over his cavil on this strategy, this plan worked like a charm, and it was my first victory in a high stakes league. Sadly though my worst defeat was two years later, my last in that league. We made the mistake of trading Johan Santana after a slow start for Mike Mussina. Santana promptly went on a ten game winning streak, and we fell from first to third. Ugh.

Pete Abbate - MLB Front Office/RotoNomics
My biggest fantasy baseball rival has to be my co-blogger at RotoNomics, Zach Piso. I got him into fantasy sports (football first, I had played with family and started talking to him about it), but he really has surpassed me in knowledge in many regards. We played in a head-to-head league with friends last season, and I started off the year with a nice victory over him. His team was definitely better coming out of the draft (I was playing with Ryan Shealy in my utility spot, that basically sums it up), but I still managed to beat him thanks largely to a Roy Oswalt complete game. He got the last laugh, however, because only the top three teams got into the playoffs, and he ended up beating me for the last spot by one victory. If there hadn’t been collusion amongst my friends, we would’ve both been in, but as it was, I was forced to watch the playoffs from home. This year, in a Roto league, I’m holding down second place with an underwhelming roster that includes David Wright, David Ortiz, and CC Sabathia. I’m hoping I’ll be able to catch him for a true victory by season’s end.

Mike Muschiano - Poughkeepsie Journal
Although I have it out for several friends in my longtime keeper league, only one person can be considered a true rival. That person happens to be in the family- my brother, Nick. Every match-up has a little bit more meaning than the rest. Granted, he used to live in the same house as me- there has to be a little more pride involved. Fortunately, last year was a special year for my team (league champ) and wins came a little bit easier. However, the year before was not the same story. That year was the first official season of our keeper league. It also happened to be the first season my brother became a
part of our league, as the new tenth member. After being blown out during week 1, I had a chance to bounce back with a win against my brother. However, I suffered an agonizing defeat by a good margin, 9-4. Besides facing his verbal abuse and smack talk about his win, my team would then hit rock bottom and find itself in dead last almost until the All-Star break. But Week 11 was a turning point. Week 11 marked the second match-up between my brother and my squad. Prior to the match-up, my brother spent that Sunday at dinner at my grandmother’s house running his mouth. However, I remained confident in my team and did not consider having any kind of fire sale. My team answered the call - thrashing my brother, 9-2, and evening the score. Since my team didn’t give me much to talk during the first half of the season, the win was very gratifying on more than one level. I became confident that my team was playoff-bound and more importantly, my brother would shut his mouth for the time being. That “time being” became almost a two year period, as my team would beat his all three times during the 2007 season. It is a new year and as brothers, this rivalry will certainly only continue to get better over the years.

Mike Sessa - Fantasy Phenoms
By far, the most painful experience I’ve had in my fantasy career (if it can be called a career) came at the end of the 2006 season. In my NL only, head to head points auction league, it came down to the last week of the season. Not only the last week, but the last game of the last week. And to take it one step further…it came down to the last inning of the last game of the last week of the season. Here’s the backdrop: going into the week, it was down to just me & the defending champ. He was 1 game ahead of me & we happened to be facing off against each other in the final week. The first tiebreaker was record in head to head matchups, followed by overall points. We had played 3 times before and he was up 2-1 on me. So if I won, it would have evened the season series at 2, meaning the tiebreaker would be points. I had a comfortable 500 point lead heading in, so it was win the week & I win the league. We were neck and neck and after all of the early games were finished, there was just one game left on the schedule - St. Louis at Milwaukee. Huge, because I had Carlos Villanueva throwing (it’s a weekly league and Villanueva was a nice 2 start option at the end of the season). A win from him would have put me up by a few points and sealed the deal on the title, and Villanueva came out pitching great. He had a shutout after 8 innings and even if he didn’t throw a complete game or a shutout, I would have won the week by a few points. Then…in the bottom of the 9th, Chris Duncan & Albert Pujols hit back to back HRs. Allowing the runs alone would have been fine because Villanueva was still in line for the win, but my opponent had Pujols. The positive points for Pujols combined with the negative points for Villanueva caused me to lose the week and the league, all with one swing of the bat in the last regular season game of 2006. It hurts me just to write about this even to this day. I had the best team but just couldn’t pull ahead. And in case you don’t believe me about how that game went down, here is the boxscore.

So how did I avenge this painful loss? It wasn’t an immediate strike, but it was effective. The next year I came out on a mission, won the league by a comfortable margin and prevented my nemesis form pulling off a three-peat. It’s a painful game sometimes, but the high from winning far outweighs the misery of losing…I think. Maybe not.

Jason Collette - RotoJunkie
My biggest rival is one Andrew Smith. Use his name, he’ll enjoy it. The guy has been the bane of my fantasy existence from the get-go as he is the first guy I made a trade with as I took over an abandoned team midway through the 1994 season. The pitching staff on this team was in shambles, and so when he offered Steve Trachsel for an injured Larry Walker, I took it. After all, I had just seen Trachsel throw a gem on WGN and Walker appeared to be out for the year. I follow that up in 1996 by trading him Ken Caminiti for Jeff King about two days before Caminiti went on the tear that earned him the NL MVP that season and I lost the league title that season by three points.

Rudy Gamble – Razzball
My longtime fantasy baseball nemesis is my blogmate Grey Albright. It’s like the equivalent of Yanks-Sawx + Cubs-Cardinals + Giants-Dodgers + some crazy European soccer rivalry.

It started maybe 10 years ago with a public 4×4 ESPN league. I won the league the first three seasons. Was it skill or luck? Both. Did I rub it in? Of course. So much like Yanks-Sawx fans, our rivalry began out of a storm front of success and resentment . The most gratifying victory was the 3rd one where, after a 2-year hiatus, I can back and whooped his ass on a team fueled by breakout seasons from Gagne and Soriano.

Bored by all the success, we changed things up. We added two other people we knew and moved to 5×5. All of a sudden, Grey started kicking my ass and won two seasons in a row – one that I faintly recall being a rout. Was it skill or luck? Both. Over the years, we’ve added friends who’ve served to add more drama to the proceedings. One season I trounced Grey only to have the season marred because another friend has a miracle stretch of streaming pitchers to beat me.

This all built up to last year where my team took an early lead. Grey’s team lurked in the distance making shrewd trade after trade where he was paying 80 cents on the dollar for players. As the season wore on, my team went to shit based on frustrating underperformers like D-Lee, J-Bay, Furcal, and Bonderman and he rode the wave of trade pickups + Peavy + Holliday to contention only to beat another friend on the luckiest single-day ever seen. Streamed 7 pitchers – none of them good – and ended up with like 5 wins and a sub 3.00 ERA.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, reviewing his friend DW’s role in last year’s victory drove me off the deep end. This guy 1) drafts Carpenter and Webb, leaving a gift-wrapped Peavy for Grey, 2) ‘Accidentally’ picks up Brandon Phillips the pick before me even though he’s got 2B/SS/MI and fucks me out of a monster season, and 3) Goes MIA for 2 months, won’t return any trade offers, and then suddenly agrees to trade Reyes to Grey for Vlad. WTF? You take this guy out of the equation and I win in a rout.

Ah, rivalries. The more bitter the better…

Note: Razzball is a fantasy baseball game where you try to manage the team with the worst stats. See here for more info. See here for the results of the inaugural 2008 draft.)

For a man and a woman to produce a great baseball player, it takes an ovum with a very good eye to spot a 5-tool sperm out of the pack. While there is more room for error if the father is a former player like Bobby Bonds or Ken Griffey Sr., it’s extremely rare that the same pitcher/catcher combination produces more than one HOF caliber player. (Note: Ms. Koufax’s eagle-eyed ova managed to find the one athletic specimen of the 180 million nebbish sperm provided by her husband. Jonas Salk purported that if he had access to Ms. Koufax’s womb, he could have cured blindness. Then again, Jonas would say anything to get into a girl’s womb…)

There are some exceptions to this rule:

1) Paul “Big Poison” and Lloyd “Little Poison” Waner amassed 5,611 hits for the pre-WWII Pirates (back when they were good).

2) The Alou triumvirate of Felipe, Matty, and Jesus amassed more than 5,000 hits. Ms. Alou was so fertile that her vagina was used for agricultural purposes during fallow reproduction periods.

3) The DiMaggio trio of Joe, Dom, and Vince may have been the best set of brothers but their combined stats seem less impressive because of time lost in service (Joe and Dom both served 3 years during WWII) and that the DiMaggio’s were 3 of about 40 DiMaggio children (as was de riguer among Italians of the era).

The more common scenario among baseball playing progeny is at most one heavyweight (say, Sly Stallone) and one lightweight (say, Frank Stallone). Could the lightweight brothers ever have been contenders (aka contendas) or did they just ride their brother’s coattails? Tough to say. But here are some examples:

1) Tommie Aaron. Brother Hank hit 755 HRs. Tommie hit 13. He got hate letters…from African-Americans.

2) Ozzie Canseco. Jose and his twin combined for 462 HRs and stole 200 SBs in the majors. Ozzie was responsible for 0 HRs and 0 SBs as he managed just 13 hits (6 doubles!) and 4 RBIs in his 65 career ABs. Thus, Ozzie had about the same impact on their brotherly combined statistics as, say, Lizzie McGwire would if you combined her stats with those of Mark McGwire.

3) Steve Larkin. Brother Barry played 19 seasons in Cincinnati and starred in 12 All-Star games. Steve played one game for the Reds in 1998 going 1 for 3. I wonder if Steve rubs it in that he has the higher career batting average

4) Chris Gwynn. Brother Tony hit 3,141 hits and won 8 batting titles. Chris managed 263 hits in 10 years. Based on the below photo, it’s no coincidence they both ended up on the team owned by the founder of McDonald’s.

That takes us to Billy Ripken. Billy shot through the minor leagues on a wave of mediocrity and nepotism - making it to the majors in 1987 at the young age of 22 (then again, you never know the true age of Oriole infielders). He soon beat out Alan Wiggins for the Oriole 2B spot as Wiggins, much like Robert Downey Jr., couldn’t choose between speed (66 and 70 SB in 1983/84) and cocaine.

Ripken’s surprising .308/.363/.372 over 234 ABs in 1987 didn’t dupe Oriole fans and brass into thinking that they had another Cal Ripken, but it did have them thinking they had their starting second baseman for 1988 and a #2 hitter to hit in front of his brother and Eddie Murray.

In retrospect, they could not have chosen a better 2nd baseman for their Razztastic 1988 Baltimore Orioles. The season started ominously with a 6 game losing streak. It wasn’t all Billy’s fault - he hit 6-for-24, a respectable .250 clip. But Cal and Eddie were riding the US highways (.091 and .130 respectively) and the axe fell on Cal Ripken Sr. The firing after 6 days shattered Yogi Berra’s unofficial ‘quickest firing’ record of 16 days by the Yanks in 1985 and it broke Cal Sr’s streak of 168 straight games managed. One wonders how Cal Sr. reacted to it given he was ‘wiry, blunt, quick-tempered and given to salty language’.

Baltimore legend and HOFer Frank Robinson came in and got the team into the W column….on April 29th in their 22nd game of the season. Yes, much like a senior undergrad at Oral Roberts University, the team went 0 for their first 21.

Hitting primarily out of the #2 slot (right in front of his brother), Billy had a tough April and May, finishing the two months with a .173 AVG in 162 ABs. Students at nearby Johns Hopkins Medical School ironically mused, “How could Billy’s stats be so anemic given his brother is known as the ‘Iron Man’?” and debated whether to nickname him Anemia Man or Irony Man.

On June 14th, Billy Ripken hit his first HR of the year off of the Tigers’ Doyle Alexander - the sole hitting highlight of a first half that, in 287 ABs, amassed a .199 AVG. Given the Orioles finished the first half at 28-59, it’s not as if he was the only dead weight in the lineup.

During the All-Star Break, Frank Robinson had some thinking to do. Do I send Ripken back down to AAA and potentially anger Cal Jr.? Can I really spoil a Razzterful season in the spirit of meritocracy and honoring the game when our season is already in the shitter? Frank compromised - he kept Ripken in the lineup every day but stashed him in the 9th slot to minimize the impact. To make sure Ripken didn’t lose momentum during the All-Star break, Frank scheduled some extra hitting sessions with former Baltimore SS Mark Belanger.

The 2nd half basically played out like the 1st half - 1 HR and a few more hits to put him over the Mendoza line.

The final line:

512 AB / 52 R / 2 HR / 34 RBI/ 8 SB / .207 AVG / .260 OBP / .258 SLG

Among AL batters with 300+ ABs, Billy Ripken finished last in AVG, OBP, and SLG. His 2 HR did place him ahead of 13 AL hitters including a power-deprived Ozzie Guillen (0 HR in 566 AB), a coke-deprived Willie Wilson (1), and a steroid-deprived Brady Anderson (1 in 325 AB).

That said, Billy felt positive going into the 1989 season. Yes, my 1988 was Razztastic but I’m a Ripken, damnit! I’m only going to get better. It really can’t get any worse than being the worst hitter in the league on the worst team in the league and my father being axed in the first 6 days of the season, could it?

Billy’s optimism, however, stood no chance against the naked ambition of Fleer Corporation which was, at the time, in a fight with Donruss for #2 in the baseball card market. In what is on record as an honest mistake, Billy Ripken’s 1989 baseball card came out with the nickname ‘Fuck Face’ on the knob of his bat. Traumatized, Billy missed the first 15 games of 1989 on the DL with a bruised ego and ended the season with only slightly better results (.239 AVG w/ no power).

During 1990, a reinvigorated Billy blocked out his 1988-1989 mistakes like Fleer blocked out the ‘Fuck Face’ in subsequent printings of the card. He had his best season as a pro when, in 406 AB, he led the Orioles in hitting at .291 - stomping his .250 hitting brother. Granted, Cal out-HRed him 21 to 3 but still…

While Billy’s glove (and surname?) kept him in the league another 8 years, a mix of injuries and responsible coaching kept him from ever topping 330 ABs again. He recently represented Ripken Baseball on a US government-sponsored envoy to China to help build support for baseball. You know Lenn Sakata HAD to be pissed that he wasn’t invited.

Let Cooperstown have Cal. Razzball will take Fuck Face any day of the week (twice on Sundays!)