Rudy and his robots are on vacation this week, which means we won’t have the usual weekly Razzball Commenter Leagues data to go over this week.  Do androids dream of electric beach? I can (and will!) still recap the ‘Perts League and we’ll go over the trades from the week. Next week, we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming.  In the meantime I thought I’d toss out a friendly reminder about pacing yourself. No, this is not advice for becoming a competitive eater so put away the Sam’s Club industrial jug of mayonnaise.  This is about pacing your innings pitched. Some simple math tells us there are 25 weeks in the season and we need to get to 1400 IP. That means you should be looking at about 56 innings pitched per week in order to stay on track.  In other words, you should be sitting at about 170 IP as of this writing. FanTrax does offer you a glimpse of your current pace if you click the Min/Max button on your team screen. I’m not sure I trust their math though. I followed that calculation last year and with about a month and a half to go had to stream my arse off in just about every league to catch up.  I’m not sure where the breakdown was, but I’m doing my own tracking this season. With any luck, you’re reading this early enough this season that you won’t fall into the same trap.

The starterpocalypse is still in full effect this week as ERAs across the board are less than stellar.  Grey led the ‘Perts League in ERA with a 2.35 this week, but no one else is under a 3.23 with seven teams over a 4.50 ERA.  That is, how we say in the business…not good. Meanwhile, power is through the roof. Since I’ve tracked the Razzball Commenter Leagues for the past, *carry the one*, long time, I’ve got the weekly stats that I track all saved to look back on.  Last year the weekly record for HRs in a week was 26. That was in all of the weeks last season. We’ve already matched that in week 2 this year. The same goes for Runs scored. All of this is a fancy way of saying, offense is up this year and it’s still cold outside baby.  Just wait until those hot summer months combined with whatever may or may not be going on with the ball this year. We could be in for some real offensive records. Oh, you drafted a top pitcher in the first three rounds, well, best of luck to you, this could be a long year. More weekly stats and the rest of the happenings in the week that was week 2 in the RCLs:

First of all, a big thank you to Rudy for getting his Razzball Commenter Leagues robots crunching numbers even faster than last year.  We have real, live standings in what is really the first full week of games! It’s awesome to have a starting point for the Master Standings in week 1.  I hope your first full week is going better than my team that owned Trea Turner, Giancarlo Stanton and had snagged Ryan McMahon to replace Matt Olson. Yikes.  I also don’t own nearly enough shares of Cody Bellinger this year. I am excited for Ronald Acuna to visit Coors this week though. There are simply not enough eggplant emojis in the world.

It’s the silly season for our leagues at this point, where we can have huge swings in the standings based on 2-3 good days of stats.  So fear not if you’re off to a slow start. Who’s the number one team after the first week (OK, week and a half) of the season? You’ll have to click below to see that.  Let’s take a look at the standings, the top teams in each stat category and some trades in the week that was, week one plus in the RCLs:

Welcome my good and/or decent Razzball Commenter League managers.  How were your first four days of fun? Oh, you drafted Giancarlo Stanton, Justin Upton and Daniel Murphy did you?  Welp, there’s always next year! I kid, I kid, the RCL format is actually one of the easier formats to recover from these types of things.  Just pony up to the Hitter-Tron and make due with batty calls for the next few weeks, you’ll be OK. This Razzball Commenter League update will be a little different than most.  Throughout the year I’ll be bringing you stats, trades, weekly leaders and overall standings. With only four days worth of data (and most of them half days at that) it’s really not worth diving into.  Our RCL bots are not up and running yet either, so there’s not much to look at just yet. Instead, this week, I’ll be giving you a couple of FanTrax tips I’ve found helpful along the way, go over a few trades from the past week and let you peak in on the ‘Perts League.  So, let’s get down to business, shall we? We shall!

We have another week’s worth of draft data to work with and only about one week left of the Razzball Commenter League draft season.  All public drafts wrap up on Wednesday, March 27th, so if you’ve been waiting to join a league, wait no more! We managed to fill all but one league this past week and that one had a manager bail about an hour before the draft, so it drafted with 11.  That’s a darn shame, don’t be that guy that bails right before the draft, so not cool. We have drafts all weekend long that need filling though, starting Friday and going through to Sunday. There is even a $20 league with spots to fill, so go get that money!  The sign-up sheet is linked at the end of this article, but first, let’s dive into our RCL ADP and see what Razzball Commenters are drafting so far.

Razzball Commenter League drafts are off and running!  Don’t let the chance to play with your favorite writers and commenters in free leagues for an overall top prize pass you by!  We’ve only had a handful of drafts so far, but next week we’ll be able to dive into early RCL ADP and over-analyze to our hearts content.  As for now though, go sign up for a league drafting in the next week or so and contribute to our data pool. It’s so easy to sign-up, it’s really just one click!  Use it as a mock draft that is actually useful. We just had the Writer’s League draft Sunday night and it was nice to get a draft under my belt this season that didn’t have a 4 hour pick clock.  I’ll have more info on the Writer’s League draft in the coming weeks as well. Today, we’ll be going over how to approach your pitching in the RCL format. I’ll let you decide how well I followed my own advice in my recent draft.

Last week we covered why you should join an RCL, so this week let’s start covering what to do once you’re in there.  To be honest, most all of this has been covered somewhere on the site over the years, most often by Rudy. If you haven’t been playing in RCLs though, I could see how some of this has been glossed over, so I’ll try to consolidate some info for the newbies.  Last season we made the change from ESPN to Fantrax and with that we changed a few rules, most notably we added a 500 move limit and we changed from Games Started for pitchers to Innings Pitched. I’ll be frank, I didn’t notice a big change in strategy because of these changes, but feel free to change my mind RCL Vets.  We’ll cover this as well as the basics for anyone still timid about jumping in the RCL waters.

QUICK NOTE: RCL drafts will start going off this coming Friday.  To avoid leagues drafting with less than 12 managers we’ve decided to just kill any league that doesn’t fill by 5pm EST.  We’re going to try our best to get everything filled, but if you are in a league where someone bails late or it looks like it won’t fill, let us know.  Jump in the comments or let us know on Twitter: @Razzball and/or @MattTruss and we’ll try to work some magic. We didn’t want to ruin someone’s night by waiting until an hour before a 10pm draft to kill it.  Hopefully, this won’t happen often, but help us help you.