When one hard-boils an egg, one toys with an intense set of expectations and potential regret. Will these be perfect ovals, with a bright yellow yolk that crumbles in delicate sheets, or are you a fraud who produces dank green yolks that only Dr. Suess could truly love? Did you use the right pan? How much water? Did you account for your current sea level and general elevation?
Right now your team is a dozen hard-boiled eggs. Their shells are the preseason projections and your own feelings of love and bias. However, you don’t care about the shells anymore, because you’re all about the yolk. Hope is the thing with bright yellow yolk. We desire all of our players to be of the same yellow beautiful, creamy consistency of those yolks. As we enter this last week of April, you will be keening to smack your eggs against the side of your bowl and find out whether your team is bright yellow or dank green.
Alas, the time for shell-cracking is not yet here. The end of April is when you throw those eggs into an ice bath. You let them chill so they stop cooking. Please do this with your team. Resist the urge to truly diagnose most of your eggs as boom or bust. There will be outliers (the end of your bench, streaming pitchers, closer committee musical chairs), but you drafted these eggs for a reason! Have some principles! Stiff upper lip! Weirdly saggy lower lip! Sounds strange and looks strange, just like you dropping a top-100 player after two-to-three bad weeks. You’re not cutting your losses, you’re cutting yourself in twain. In twain!
Anyways, I love eggs. 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:
- On the Tense – When a mixture of past and present tense creates a tear in the space-time continuum
- Dour-y Diction – Instances of word choice and usage distracting from the blurb
- Q and Q – Qualitative and quantitative look at how a site’s editorial vision colors the blurb “analysis”
- Bob Nightengale Award – When a blurb completely misses the mark
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 that he did not address in his post. Onward to Roto Wokeness!
On the Tense
Julio Rodriguez went 1-for-3 with a walk, run and two stolen bases in a 6-2 victory over Texas on Tuesday.
The highly touted Rodriguez contributed to the win by singling in the seventh inning, stealing second to avoid what would have been a double play and scoring on an Abraham Toro home run. He later added a walk and second steal in the eighth to bring his season total to four– one off the MLB lead. While the 21-year-old’s bat has been cold, his wheels have been on full display as Rodriguez totaled 21 swipes in 74 minor league games last season.
Source: CBS Sports via Rotowire
I can get behind most of this blurb, it’s just the last sentence’s almost dadaist present/past tense whiplash that makes me feel like I experienced a full Quantum Leap bottle episode in less than three seconds. Were all Quantum Leap episodes bottle episodes, or was it a weird hybrid of long-form narrative and serialized bottle episodes? In a sense, it piggybacked on the hybrid premise-based narrative of a show like Star Trek, but because of its bleak, absolutely terrifying nightmare of a premise, I see the long-form nature of Quantum Leap more, well, tense. The framing of the show as a whimsical, almost light-hearted slice of content furthers my druthers that television screenwriters are gleeful masochists, willing to dress up the most harrowing of scenarios as a pleasant Van Dyke-ian sitcom trope. Case in point: Home Improvement. I don’t think I have time to fully address this thesis. Never mind. Julio Rodriguez. Yes. Him.
Rodriguez’s “wheels have been on full display,” which is true in the early going this season. The present tense at the beginning of the clause sets the expectation that the writer will be referencing the present season of baseball. Instead, we get “…as Rodriguez totaled 21 swipes in 74 minor league games last season.” Were his wheels on full display last season? What is “full display?” It strikes me as an awkward idiom for an incomplete number of minor league games. If I had my druthers, one would not give a quality to the word “display,” and my druthers deserve a moment in the sun.
There. I put my druthers in the headline. My job is done.
On the Tense
Taylor Ward went 2-for-5 with a double and a run scored Tuesday as the Angels took down the Astros.
A couple of at-bats after he singled to left field off of Framber Valdez in the top of the fifth, Ward scored on a Matt Duffy RBI single. He now has five hits over his first 12 at-bats of the season. He’ll be worth a look in most fantasy formats if he continues to produce and play regularly.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
Again, the wording at the end of this last sentence is a bit odd: “…If [Ward] continues to produce and play regularly.” We have Joe Maddon, the king of bowing to metrics in the most cloying manner possible, stating a few weeks ago that as long as Ward is healthy, he starts for the Angels every day. Not “if he produces.” Ward is healthy, meaning he is playing every day (with the caveat that Cal Ripken Jr. made a deal with the devil that no team will ever let anyone take a shot at his consecutive games record).
We’re all a bit cheesed, and maybe even stomping mad that Maddon is willing to start Ward instead of allowing Adell and Marsh to accumulate at-bats in the majors. We’re engorgingly enraged that he’s platooning Jared Walsh. We’re obviously outraged that when Matt Duffy starts, he’s hitting clean up. The most Vaudville Villain-esque vexation is that it’s working. The Angels are winning. I absolutely hate it. If you like the Angels, fine. Enjoy.
Ward is sadly worth a look in most formats, as he will be playing every day, he’s trying to steal bases, and he could go 20/10/.270 if this Maddon Experience continues. Meanwhile, I’ll stand in the corner with other Walsh/Adell/Marsh owners like the end of Blair Witch.
Q&Q
Adolis Garcia went 1-for-4 with a stolen base in a 6-2 loss to Seattle on Tuesday.
Garcia reached on an infield single and subsequently stole second in the top of the first inning, though that would be the entirety of his damage. It’s been a disappointing April after the 29-year-old experienced a breakout rookie campaign, but Garcia has registered a homer and stolen base in consecutive games and looks to build on that momentum.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
As of today, Garcia is ranked at 114 in a standard 5×5 roto league. In a head-to-head points league I’m in with extended offensive categories, he’s ranked 104. This preseason, he was ranked by Yahoo at 177. Fantasypros had him at 114. Grey had him at 118. In what world is his production a disappointment? He proved incredibly streaky last season, but he piles up the homers and steals as long as he’s starting every day.
On a side note, how does one “build momentum” from last season while also stating that the player has been a disappointment? Building momentum indicates a steady (if slow) upward curve of production. No troughs. This isn’t a rogue wave study. This is a kid’s pool at a public park, the kind that’s two feet deep and drowning in chlorine, urine, and feces. No troughs, though. Again, if you’re employing idiomatic expressions, take the time to consider their full meaning. Please.
Dour-y Diction
Yusei Kikuchi pitched five innings against the Red Sox on Tuesday, allowing one run, three walks, and three hits.
Kikuchi did strike out three batters and lowered his season-long ERA to 3.24 on the season. It has been a rocky season watching Kikuchi pitch but he somehow has a 3.24 ERA despite a 1.56 WHIP and only five strikeouts in eight innings. Both of his starts this season have been against the Yankees and Red Sox so better days could be ahead for Kikuchi.
Source: Fantasypros.com
Aye, but when could these better days occur?
Bob Nightengale Award
Matt Bush will be starting pitcher for Friday’s game against the Angels
Bush, the former first-overall pick of the 2004 who served 39 months in prison stemming from one count of DUI with great bodily injury, will likely be an opener; going an inning of two before giving way to a bulk pitcher. That could be Garrett Richards, who was activated off the injured list on Thursday.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
This one’s a doozy, and I won’t even be addressing the fractured grammar and egregious use of a semicolon in a fantasy baseball blurb. I screenshot this fellow, as I had a feeling it would magically disappear or transform within a few hours of being posted. I believe I am overusing the word at this point, however: I cannot fathom the utter hubris it takes to type that Wikepedia Legal Issues entry into the opening sentence of a player blurb. I have a theory on all of this, and it involves a delicate conversation about an indelicate person.
Before the season began, fantasy baseball Twitter had a reckoning of sorts regarding the fading of Trevor Bauer in drafts. Phrases like “virtue signaling,” “clout-chasing,” and “cancel culture,” were bandied about, so you know this was a nuanced, curiosity-piqued Socratic dialogue. Or, it was simply: “All of those not ranking/drafting Trevor Bauer because he’s getting canceled are hypocrites, because what about Marcell Ozuna or Aroldis Chapman?” You know an argument is sound when someone uses spousal abuse to prove a point, right???
I believe this blurb to be a little performative jab at this conversation. Call me a fancier of clownish conspiracy, but there are those who believe a baseball player’s off-the-field issues don’t belong in our game of numbers. I think this is stupid. I have never been able to separate the artist from the art, because that’s ignorance framed as intellectual dissonance. Whether it be Ernest Hemingway, Koichi Sugiyama, Chris Brown, or Lou Reed, the artist’s attitudes in their personal life reflect on the art they create. No one told me about Gary Glitter’s atrocious life before pumping his music into every sports venue. That’s gross, and I wish I’d known so I could avoid places that willingly give that guy or his enabling record company money.
Methinks this Matt Bush blurb was a misguided attempt to show readers what life would be like if every player’s personal life was given the same treatment or exposure as a Trevor Bauer. This attempt is about as ham-fisted as they come, hence the rewrite that now exists:
Matt Bush will be the starting pitcher for Friday’s game against the Angels.
Bush will likely go an inning or two before giving way to a bulk pitcher. That could be Garrett Richards, who was activated off the injured list on Thursday. The 36-year-old Bush was the first-overall pick in the 2004 draft. While the early part of his career was derailed due to personal and legal issues — including a 39-month prison sentence — it’s injury issues which have kept him off the field in recent years.
In some ways, the rewrite is even stranger. If every player is going to get a Wikipedia entry in miniature for every blurb, then they’re not really blurbs anymore. I do appreciate that this blurb brings out the elephant re: writing about fantasy sports: There is something beyond gallows humor that happens when a player is suspended for domestic violence or even murder. Peruse Twitter or the Yahoo player update conversations to find some of the darkest aspects of our hobby, whereupon hearing the news several commenters either laugh, curse the player for negatively affecting their fantasy team, or ask who’s a good waiver replacement.
It is in these moments that I ponder what my enjoyment of fantasy sports really means. I still love it, I write about it, and bond with friends old and new. Maybe I’m tired of the things that I love acting as a mirror to the real world, where the deathmask of idealism hides a broken writhing mass of dark consciousness that can only process outcomes. Which outcome will it be? The bright yellow yolk or the dank, stodgy green mistake?
I guess I love eggs, only I don’t know why.
Till next week, consumers of blurbs!
