The fantasy baseball season has officially kicked off and we have real, live draft data to sift through.  Numbers nerds, assemble! We have spreadsheets, charts and ADP, oh my! It was a busy first week here at Razzball Commenter Leagues HQ, but I’ve gone through each league that has drafted and added their drafts to a master spreadsheet in order to calculate RCL ADP.  We’ve had sixteen leagues draft already, so there’s plenty of numbers to look at. The first week wasn’t always smooth with a few RCLs not filling to the required twelve managers, but drafting anyway. We even had one draft start with ten managers and finish with eleven!  The managers, they’re multiplying! As with any changes in life, bumps and hiccups are to be expected. If you are in one of the leagues with too few managers, you are welcome to play the league out, that’s your call, however the stats unfortunately will not count towards to the RCL Master Standings.  In the future, if you notice your league is close to drafting but someone has dropped out, leaving you short a manager hit us up on Twitter: @Razzball or @MattTruss and let us know. You can also leave a comment in Grey’s most recent post and/or invite a friend to join. I know, sacrilege to tell your fantasy baseball friends you read Razzball, but sharing is caring.  Speaking of sharing, jump below and I’ll share with you a fancy RCL ADP spreadsheet for your perusing pleasure…

With the season starting early this year, it seems like everything is a bit crunched.  This includes preparing for the Razzball Commenter Leagues drafts.  March is already upon us and it’s time to get drafting!  Hopefully, you’re not caught unprepared.  This week I just wanted to drop some additional strategy notes I couldn’t cram into last weeks posts.  This time next week we’ll have an assortment of draft data to wade through, which will be much more exciting and make it seem like real fantasy baseball season!  As of now one league has drafted, the Writers League jumped in first with a draft this past Saturday evening.  There were a few autodrafters (raises hand in shame), but an overall good looking draft (just don’t look at my lack of pitching staff, wow, that’s ugly).  There will be a Q&A style recap of that in the coming weeks.  Keep an eye out for that if you’re interested but in the meantime, let’s cover the last few tips you need before tackling your own drafts in the weeks to come.

Once again, you spoke and we listened.  Razzball really is the fantasy baseball site of the people, for the people.  Thanks to commenter “howtathor” who said he would much rather join a league called “Tehol is a Sexual Panther” than one titled, “RCL #27”, or something along those lines.  We’ve now added a “Play With” column to the Razzball Commenter Leagues sign-up sheet.  Now, when perusing for an RCL to join, you can scan for your favorite writer (Dreamy Lance perhaps?) or your favorite easy target (Tehol perhaps?) or maybe your favorite angry commenter (Cram It).  Either way, hopefully it drives you to sign up for another league or two.  Go ahead and skip to the end of this post to check it out, pitching strategy will be here when you get back.

Last week we covered why you should join a Razzball Commenter League, 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 Razzball Commenter Leagues though, I could see how some of this has been glossed over, so I’ll try to consolidate some info for the newbies.  Even with the recent rule changes, I don’t think the strategy is going to change a ton.  We’ll all be learning and adapting to the new format together though, so even RCL rookies will be on an even playing field to start.  If you disagree, or think my strategy is whack, let’s talk about it in the comments.  Like I said, we’ll all be trying out the new format for the first year together, so let’s see what we dig up.

Pitchers and catchers have reported and the Razzball Commenter Leagues are open, it’s beginning to feel a lot like baseball!  I can’t wait to be half as productive at work and start losing countless hours of sleep staying up to watch the end of the Marlins@Padres game, just in case there is a closer injury.  Football was a fine diversion, but I always feel a little empty without baseball.  I’m happy to be back for another season as your RCL tour guide.  I love these things.  Really, they play to my strengths and offer ample opportunity to test strategy and ideas.  Weekly lineups/moves have their place, I just don’t find them as fun.  The daily moves, the League Competitive Index competition, battling hundreds of other managers for the top of the overall standings and of course, the non stop action make this a unique and fun challenge.  It’s kind of like pounding a pot of coffee every hour, on the hour for six straight months.  Even with the changes this season (IP vs. GS and a 500 move limit) I still think it will be the fantasy baseball equivalent of snorting Red Bull.  I’m also a huge nerd for all the numbers and data that gets collected from running so many leagues under the Razzball umbrella.  The move to FanTrax should make data collection much better which means it I will be even easier to share these numbers with you along the way and try to glean some info from all that data.  In order to make the data pool even larger though, we need you, and you, and you too.  You see, what makes RCLs great is all of you.  Man that sounds mushy, but it’s true.  In an ideal world, every Razzball reader would head on over to the RCL sign-ups, pick a league and all would be right with the world.  It’s funny to see how many frequent commenters have never played an RCL.  What’s wrong with you?  I was there once upon a time, so for those of you that aren’t so eager, let’s sit down and chat it out.

Welcome Razzball Commenter Leagues friends to the preseason edition of the RCL update.  I can’t wait to get leagues kicked off in 2018.  Football just doesn’t satiate me the way fantasy baseball does and we have lots of excitement around the RCLs this year, as you’ll see in a moment.  I’m not sure if this makes me sound like a total old fart or not, but in 2017 I discovered there’s a lot of great content on YouTube.  Pre 2017 I would only jump on YouTube to figure out how to do something on my vehicle, my lawnmower, my generator or some other small motor around my house that needed fixing.  One of my favorite finds of 2017 was/is the VlogBrothers YouTube channel, specifically the videos posted by John Green.  I’m a big fan of his books and discovered the channel while searching out a pre-order of his latest work.  A recent post of his was about a concept presented to him by his therapist.  The idea was to write a letter to yourself at the New Year stating what you will be leaving behind in the previous year and what you will be bringing to the coming year.  That inspired me to do something similar with this first RCL post.  There are some big changes coming to the RCLs this year and Razzball is looking for your input.  So, click below and see what we’re leaving in 2017 and what we’re bringing to 2018.  Make sure to cast a vote as we’ll be catering the RCLs to your wants and needs.  How cool is that?  Very!