Fantasy Baseball Advice

The Razzball Commenter League Master Standings are now available. We added a link in the top left of our main menu under ‘Razzball Commenter Leagues’ for future reference.

Early congratulations / unintended jinx to…

1. The Pesky Pole Dancers who are in 1st place among the 456 participants (38 leagues of 12)! And thanks for putting an image in my head of Johnny Pesky pole dancing. At least you didn’t name it after this guy.
2. Everyone in RCL 5 as you are currently the most competitive league (competitive index of 105).

We’ll do our best to update the standings on a regular basis. We’re currently talking to a commenter about becoming the league commissioner of which the duties will be to update the standings regularly, mine for interesting data, and sell used cars in Milwaukee.

League Competitive Index is based on the total stats for the whole league. The index page can be found here. The points formula is courtesy of Tom Tango at InsideTheBook.com and is: HR + SB + R/3 + RBI/3 + (H-.27*AB) + 2*W + 1.5 * SV + K / 5 + IP – (ER+H+BB/ 2).

One last item. It would be great if we can attach each team to a Razzball Commenter handle. Please fill out the below form so we can add your handle to the Master Standings page (note: you can also enter this for a leaguemate if you like).

We’ve posted the first update of the Razzball Commenter League (RCL) Master Standings! All 21 leagues (252 teams) are included.  We’ve added a permalink in the left sidebar as well for easy access to future updates.  We’ll do our best to update it every week or so.

A team’s points are calculated as Points in League * Competitive League Index/100

Leagues are indexed based on the overall performance of the league using the following points formulas that were devised by Tom Tango for his projections contest where, incidentally, I finished in the top half for 2009 and I’m competing again in 2010.  (Note:  For RCL leagues, I tweaked his Save multiplier from 1 to 1.5 and using some wizardry to estimate AB and IP).

Hitters:  (HR + SB + (H – .27*AB) + R/3 + RBI/3)
Pitchers: 2*W + 1.5*SV + K/5 + 2*W + SV + K/5 + IP – (H + BB + ER)/2

The average league gets an index of 100.  At this point, the lowest index is 98 and the highest is 103.  Basically, this index just serves as a tiebreaker should two teams have similar point totals at the end of the year.

If you want to boast or complain about your team, feel free to comment on this post or, better yet, comment in the dedicated forums section.

Two last items of business:

1) If you want your commenter handle added to the standings, please comment on this post with your RCL team name.

2) Early congrats to ‘Nobody Beats the Wiz!’ and team swpayton who are 1st and 2nd respectively.

This post goes out to all you lovely surfers participating in one of our leagues.  Going forward, we’ll have weekly updates (on Sunday nights) to the Master Standings and we’ll note the ‘last updated’ date on the standings page.  The standings links are available in the top left of our page (under Razzball Leagues).

Here are the top 10s for both leagues.  You can click the links below to see the complete standings.  A tip o’ the hat to Anthony G and Mike Podhorzer for setting the pace.

Feel free to trash talk away in the Comments…

Razzball Commenter League Standings

Fantasy Razzball Standings

The battle for best fantasy baseballer in Razzball Nation has begun! Actually, it began with opening day but I’ve finally got around to creating the master standings (also available by clicking the ‘RCL Master Standings’ link on the homepage).

There are 108 competitors across 9 leagues. We created a league index based on the strength of each league. It takes all 10 categories into account and considers the average of all 9 leagues to be at 100. So if a league averages 1% better across all categories than the 9-league average, the league index is 101 and we multiply the point total for everyone in that league by 1.01. This helps to neutralize the playing field across all the leagues.

So who’s #1 at the two week mark? ThirdandKing’s ‘L’Atelier de Joël Piñero’ is crushing the field right now with an 106.5 point score in the toughest league (A Latin 9). Here’s a glance at his Active Stats if you’re curious how he’s managed it.

A couple of notes on the standings:

1. We’ll start with fortnightly updates (that’s fancy talk for every 2 weeks!). We’ll consider weekly updates as we get deeper into the season.
2. We prefer to have your commenter handle in the Standings next to your team name. If you want to claim your team, please add a comment to this post and I’ll add it in going forward.
3. For those in the Fantasy Razzball League (aka the league where you purposely have your team suck), this will be up next Sunday night.

Good luck and may the trash-talking begin…

Suffering through a 1st half that you wish would go away? Wanna draft Jay Bruce in the first round? Simply want another team because your fantasy baseball obsession hasn’t pulled you sufficiently away from your loved ones? Well, here’s your chance. Razzball.com, the number one fantasy baseball blog according to Ballhype, Google, us, Larry King, Alexa, Technorati, Nick Markakis’s family, and everyone else that has too much time on their hands, is hosting a commenters’ league. (Actually, we’re not hosting it. Yahoo is.) So do you crave fame amongst fifteen random people you don’t really know? Or simply have a lot of time on your hands because you can make your Economic Stimulus Tax Rebate last longer than others? What, need more reason? The winning team will have the opportunity to write a post at the end of the year to revel in victory and razz those schmohawks that couldn’t do any better in the 2nd half than they did in the first.

Direct inquiries to gl0bal.p0rk[at]gmail.com (those are zeros, people). Priority will be given to active commenters so include your Razzball.com name. Lurkers welcome as needed.