I am late on this. Rotowire has taken over as the primary source for blurbs on Yahoo’s fantasy baseball page. You may think this passage will not apply to players using CBS, Fantrax, NFBC, or hell geocities, but I promise you this is going somewhere. And if you’re a long-time reader, you know my promises are real and rendered coherently.
The beauty of blurbs in the nascent years of fantasy baseball was the immediate dopamine pop of a blurb next to your player name on Yahoo or ESPN. It was the good stuff. Even those among us clinging to our Buick-sized personal computers, watching Statcast dictate how you would feel for the rest of the night in real time. Us freaks in those pre-universal cell phone years would already know the box scores, but the blurbs that popped up within an hour of the game to spike our confirmation bias into the face of our recency bias were pure bliss. A pat on the back. A salute with a smile. A cape on the back of James Brown.
Now that Rotowire is providing blurbs, they appear on Yahoo delayed by at least half a day in some instances. It stretches the soft pink meat of our sweetbreads temporally in a world where information is so finger-tipped that one has to look up the date constantly because we have three to four calendars apps on our phones at all times. Here is an example.
Jordan Walker could have a great game Friday night. It’s true! He’s had some good games! On that Friday night he could hit a home run and a stolen base.
On Saturday afternoon at 1pm, after games have started, a blurb will then appear stating, “Jordan Walker had himself a day at the plate, homering, doubling, driving in 3 and stealing a base.” You then check the game going on and see that he is 0-2 with a K. “But the blurb!” you say to yourself.
It is miserable to try and celebrate your player’s great performance when they are in the midst of a bad game. We love blurbs that are hot and fresh, steaming with silly giddiness and occasionally scorched with take so hot that it’s simply a charcoal briquet. Any other type of blurb carries dark connotations. They can mean your player is hurt, is benched, is suspended, or someone decided to kick you and the player when they are down and blurb about an extended slump. I have a general rule of thumb regarding blurbs and timestamps:
- 12am-6am — Player performance recaps, smoke them like bath salts
- 6am-10am — Player injury updates, minor league updates, procedural moves
- 10am-noon — Player injury updates, line up alerts
- Noon-5pm — Early game recaps, line up alerts, injury updates
- 5pm-12am — In-game updates (injuries, ejections, etc), player recaps
This is a list I conjured after entering a trance state 25 minutes into the Tony Conrad and Faust record Outside the Dream Syndicate and reflecting on my unconscious tracking of esoteric gamified time. I have a feeling if you did the same, you would be rad for listening to that record and we would be friends, but also your Unconscious Timeline would also appear. Expectations exist everywhere, and Father Time is often the referee goading us into red cards when we realize we have been disappointed.
The rage I feel when realizing I have set up unconscious expectations around something as trivial/obsessive as fantasy baseball blurbs is an empty rage. Blurbs are the most thankless of objects, which we assume are produced by underpaid and burnt out contributors worthy of both a living wage and the most Cadillac of health care plans. Nothing will change due to my annoyance or discomfort. Instead, I realize I must distance myself from those player alerts. I already have all the notifications turned off on my phone (and you should too), so the loss is not significant.
However, this is a significant changing of the guard. Rotoworld is again in its own silo, the player news buried several clicks past Matthew Berry’s Livejournal, while also using anti-adblocker castle walls to ensure NBC gets every last page view hay penny, all the better to appease The Shareholders. The days of free content on the internet is starting to come to a close, as the Venture Capitalists and Surveilling Governments ensure that the word “free” refers only to the complimentary bouquet one will get on their NASCAR-branded coffin.
“Better” can be a concept we ascribe to, but the subjectivity of the word has a dulling effect. People pining for a “better” world find themselves toddling, child-like, a naked little person in a world of big people wearing big clothes, who tell you to turn your dreams into elevator pitches and your hopes into Instagram reels. “Your better world needs to be monetized, children,” they say as they eat apples made out of snakes.
There are some nouns that can be made “better,” subjectivity be damned. Blurbs are not these. They are ephemera’s ephemera. They are the anti-matter of copy, a sea of empty if-then statements that will blip out of existence the day we no longer figure out how to vampire the energy out of this earthen mass we call home.
And so will this column.
Unless.
Unless I print out all of Blurbstomp and put it in a satellite sent to the depths of the cosmos. As my manuscripts lose contact with ground control, I will know of a life eternal. Not knowing whether anyone or anything will ever make contact with my writing means there is a question without an answer, a purity unsullied by the greedy hubris of mankind.
We all will continue living, if we’re willing to rebrand Razzball into a company also researching deep space tourism. Grey will be our Jim Jones, our Hale Bopp. I’m willing to follow anyone into the sun. It’s hot enough here.
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:
Flowery Diction – how sites juice up descriptions of player performance
Q and Q – when a site contradicts a player valuation on back-to-back blurbs
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award – Given to the player blurb that promises the most and delivers the least.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque – instances of updates that don’t update anything
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!
Flowery Diction
Shohei Ohtani went 3-for-4 with a solo homer on Wednesday against the Rangers.
Ohtani took Jon Gray deep for a solo homer in the first inning. It would end up being the one of two runs scored in the game as the Angels came out on top in the pitcher’s duel. Ohtani did add a pair of base hits, ending his day hitting .306/.407/.664 with 42 homers, 92 runs, 85 RBI, and 17 steals across 533 plate appearances.
Source: Rotoworld
Nary a superlative for the greatest baseball player on Earth? 42 homers and only 85 driven in? Might be a nitpick, but I think it’s worth mentioning that on a team with any semblance of a competent supporting cast, Ohtani would be dueling Matt Olson for the RBI lead, if not utterly blowing him away.
Anyway, that’s not Ohtani’s fault. Blaming a player for his team not having anyone on base to drive in would be ridiculous. Can you sense the dramatic foreshadowing?
Flowery Diction
Riley Greene came up a double shy of a cycle and knocked in four runs Wednesday as the Tigers edged the Twins 8-7.
Even though he’s been very productive, Greene, who has typically hit second this year, hadn’t driven in more than two runs in a game until collecting four RBI today. He’s batting .309/.368/.491 with 11 homers in 356 plate appearances.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
You’re going to hold his RBI total against him? That’s a team stat! On top of that, we don’t even get an RBI total to corraborate the low RBI total. How many RBI can we attach to Riley Greene this season? 33 RBI in 84 games is pretty low! He had almost the same exact pace going last season, why did our expectations shift? Someone like Marcus Semien could get to 90 RBI as a leadoff man, but that’s because Texas’s bottom three batters have constantly gotten on base this season. The Tigers lineup is Greene, Tork, and Kerry Carpenter against righties. Everyone else is a mediocre guess.
I’m insinuating that Greene has done quite well despite his supporting cast. Not everyone can so nonchalantly transcend the very fabric of his team and pull counting stats out of thing air. Ohtani is that man. Maybe Greene will also be that man someday.
Q&Q
Justin Verlander was not crisp on Wednesday despite earning a win over the Marlins, allowing four runs on nine hits in five innings.
The veteran had just a six percent whiff rate and 14 percent CSW on the night, which is not what you want to see. His velocity was up, so there’s likely no concern of injury. It’s more likely that it was just a poor performance from the veteran, who now has a 3.36 ERA on the season. Despite Verlander having two personal defenders every time he pitches and stating that the Astros were ahead of the Mets in their analytics, he’s now allowed nine earned runs in 18 innings across his three starts with Houston, while striking out 11. He’s likely to rebound, but he’s also not likely to replicate last year’s performance.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
A team can be ahead of another team’s analytics department and still have their pitchers get unlucky. Great players go through horrendous slumps, hitter or pitcher. Do I think it’s weird that pitchers want the best defenders possible behind them whilst hurling balls competitively? I certainly hope not.
The final sentence does a good job of reminding the reader that there isn’t a lot of substance to this blurb: “He’s likely to rebound, but he’s also not likely to replicate last year’s performance.” Might as well just say he’ll probably a bit better moving forward, or he may be injured, or cite last year’s statistics against this season, or pull his pitching stats from last August to see if he slowed down last year too. Stuff that would provide some help to fantasy owners.
I myself refuse to help. It feels good to cross my arms, lean back and watch bad things happen.
Esteury Ruiz scored two runs and stole his 48th base in a win over the Cardinals on Wednesday.
If it weren’t for an injury earlier in the year, Ruiz would be challenging Ronald Acuna Jr. for the stolen base crown. The Oakland outfielder now has 48 steals in just 95 games, compared to Acuna’s 55 in 119 games. Ruiz’s lack of power is evident from his 1.9 percent barrel rate, but he has minimized his strikeouts this season with just a 19 percent strikeout rate that has allowed him to get on based and run at will. He will likely never be a high batting average hitter, but a .251/.303/.329 triple slash is nothing for fantasy managers to be mad about when it comes with that much speed.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
There’s something weird about the argument people make for rostering a speed-only option. I missed Esteury in every league because my leaguemates were more aggressive, and I devalue steals-only players. He’s ranked 137 overall in the Player Rater even after missing time, so my response here is more about me calling out my own bias. Whilst locating the rare one-category stud remains more random than remembering the exact layout of the first floor men’s bathroom at the Ikea in Schaumburg, IL upon waking up on this fine Thursday morning, you’re fine if the rest of your team is made up of four category Solids. Hmm. I may be coming around on “solid” again.
Traveling and vacationing took me out of blurb loop. I apologize for the lack of blurbs. I hope my elegy about a constantly dying internet makes up the difference.
