On Sunday, Nathan Eovaldi had a start against the Kansas City Royals. The Royals have been screwing over my fantasy pitching for years, friends. I forgot to bench him, and he gave up seven hits in four innings, including a homer to Whit Merrifield and some doubles to Adalberto Mondesi. I had a feeling that my curse would be continued though, and I checked replays. There they were: Run scoring bloop singles from the likes of Jarrod Dyson. One hit split the infield perfectly with the bases loaded. A blurb might tell this story, but in a way that’s not as painful. 

I tell this story to illustrate the relationship we have with our fantasy teams and how it influences our behavior. Hittertron had Eovaldi’s start as a neutral one, but my curse acted as a hitting buff on the Royals like I got a bad roll with the RNG and baseball is a role playing game. I take this sequitur that firmly lives in the non world because sometimes you have to ignore fantasy advice. I keep waiting for my curse to be lifted. Not that day friends, and never again. Never will I start my pitcher against the Royals.

Or I’ll ignore my own advice, and do it anyway so I can write another introduction wherein I create a Russian nesting dolls of self-inflicted humiliation and regret. On to the blurbs!

Batting average is down this time of year, all the way down to a .236 league-wide average as of the Sunday morning I searched it. I know you all think I write these as you’re reading them, much like the Late Show airing at a later time than it is filmed. My world was forever changed when I realized that I had been duped by my parents, my friends, my teachers, but most cruelly, network television. Fake media indeed. It should be called “This Afternoon, But Later” with whichever comedian you used to respect hosting. 

Anyways, batting averages are way down for most players, so you would think blurbs would have caught up to this fact. Well, good sir, let me tell you, this week…HEY I’M TRYING TO TELL YOU, YOU HAVE TO LET ME DO THE TELLING. As I was telling, this week I present a murderer’s row of batting average-based blurbs to remind you to not drink the Gallo-haters Kool Aid. There is no Mendoza line this year. It is the Year of Mendoza, so don’t let any blurb try to say, “His counting stats are there, but his bat leaves a lot to desire in the batting average department.” That is pure and utter laziness, a hack sentence meant to be a pithy put down but landing like a wet fish on a cement floor. Buddy, the entirety of baseball is leaves a lot to desire in the batting average department, not just you. Ready for some simple context?

There was a time in the mid-2000’s where only some of my friends had found daily box score websites. This was when ESPN and Yahoo were the only fantasy platforms that I knew of that weren’t some dude’s excel spreadsheet. Yahoo had their own player updates that were separate from Rotoworld, and I think ESPN had their own blurb system? Rotoworld existed, but you had to look for it. I’m sure there were others (Rotowire, etc) but they existed [Vincent Price voice] BEHIND THE PAYWALL. As a younger person, I had more important things to spend my money on. Like ramen. Or a dozen eggs, most of which I over-fried and over-salted. Let me tell you, I smelled great those days. 

To be clear, I don’t want to go back to those halcyon days, and not only because of the funky scents. For every site, even the dying phoenix of Yahoo that seems like it’s on it’s last rebirth cycle, there are blurbs, and Research Assistants, and Match Up Ratings, and now there are Prop Bets too. It behooves you to figure out which update site serves you best, but it also serves you to figure out what tools your league mates are using. Do they use whatever blurb system defaulted to the league site? Do they read multiple sites? How do they have time to do that? Are they one of those tab hoarders that lifehack sites write about, and then they feel personally attacked, so they open ten more tabs out of spite?

I struggle to remember a world without alternate sites, and I miss the minors. Prospects really got crushed by the pandemic much harder than any recent pool of players. They were already being paid dirt, but to lose a year of development, or even a year of service time, is absolutely brutal. It’s like if the Beatles never went to Hamburg and tried to develop their talents in Liverpool instead with spotty gigs mostly attended by McCartney’s family. He seems like the kind of guy whose family is a little too supportive. Anyways, without Hamburg, the Beatles would have sucked. Without the minors, we don’t get to pick apart prospect blurbs that are absolutely sure that Prospect T. Neuplayer’s call-up is imminent. It never is, friends. Do you know what is imminent? Blurb injury curses!

I’ve introduced a section into this old series called “Hex Enduction Power,” where we will analyze injury blurbs that accidentally guarantee that a player goes on the IL. I’m talking something like this:

One day, someone working in development at Yahoo(!) woke up and decided that fantasy managers needed new ways to express mirth and/or derision at the players they “owned.” I can’t begin to fathom the reasoning behind giving people with usernames like Uggggghhhhh or 420YrMomm69 the ability to comment on a player’s page via phone. Here is a little snippet of Fernando Tatis’s “Discuss” section.

The Discuss function has everything Twitter offers, only it’s hidden from computer users. This guarantees a bizarre playground of awful takes, trade questions, and add/drop schadenfreude. My dark familiar Nick Solak’s Discuss is full of people cursing him out for producing useful fantasy production after dropping him for the likes of Luis Urias, while everyone else dunks on the droppers. The Luis Urias Discuss page is full of dynasty owners proclaiming him “already better than Tatis.” The Discuss pages for players are car crashes in two ways: It’s absolutely gross and awful, and you can’t look away from it. Will this give way to user-generated blurbs? Will RotoEdgeWorldSport.com become the Buzzfeed of fantasy update sites, letting college students create their most popular quizzes while paying them with email compliments? Probably.