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everywhereblair

Author: everywhereblair

Editor for Razzball Baseball and Razzball Football. Told you I'm everywhere! Twitter: EverywhereBlair

Read some of everywhereblair's 206 posts

everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: Week 26

September 25, 2023 | Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 30 Comments

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I suppose if we’re being alphabetical, this is week Y. If you’re a Rush fan, consider it like YYZ. I mean, I think airports are chaotic polyrhythms too.

There’s a lesson to be learned here: It’s not the stimulus, but the response. You can’t control everything. What you can control, is your response to stimulus. Maybe you’re in a chaotic airport — how do you keep your cool and have a fun flight when a bar tab costs $90? Or maybe you’re listening to a track in 5/4 — what do you do with that extra information?

Or maybe — just maybe — you’re in the championship week of your fantasy baseball league. I hope you are.

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: Week 25

September 18, 2023 | Featured, Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 10 Comments

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Hello? Is it me you’re looking for? I see you caressing a butter sculpture of my face. It’s not weird, just a little…out of place. I mean, I thought our relationship was me being the whiffonator, and you being a feasting fantasy baseballer who can’t get enough whiffs. Supply and demand. Basic economics. 

Which is the long way of saying: we’re down to, like, 14ish games left in the season. From a writer’s standpoint, we are in meaningless territory. A player slumps, and it’s nothing more than variance. Unpredictable downtime. A player surges, and how can we tell whether it’s playoff adrenaline or they’re just flipping the coin lucky-side first? For the most part, we can’t. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: Week 24

September 11, 2023 | Featured, Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 11 Comments

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It’s everything you’ve been waiting for: the moment that EverywhereBlair surpasses Kerry Klug on the Razzball Baseball all-time poster leaderboard. I’ve already left Donkey Teeth and RotoWan in the dust this year. Today, I stand in front of Kerry Klug’s fantasy blogging grave and wave my Minnesota Twins hat in his face. Thanks to everybody who keeps showing up, even when the fantasy season is donezo for 95% of you. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: Week 22

August 28, 2023 | Featured, Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 8 Comments

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You know where this post is going. Shohei Ohtani is done pitching for 2023, and possibly heading for his second Tommy John surgery. I’m not going to say, “I told you so,” but earlier this month, I made the case for Ohtani to step away from pitching for the rest of 2023 and protect himself — and his potential forecasted most lucrative contract in baseball history. Instead, we watched Ohtani go out there in meaningless games for a team that probably wasn’t going to even bother making a contract offer. Now, Ohtani’s got a partially torn UCL and — at the time of writing — has been considering whether he’ll get his second Tommy John surgery.

The sports stations are now filled with reels discussing whether Ohtani loses his bid for AL MVP, and how much he’ll lose in his contract negotiations. Most surprising to me: the take that Ohtani, now hobbled by injury and made more affordable, might return to the Angels instead of going to a team that knows how to hire physicians and trainers. But hey, maybe my beloved Twins end up with Ohtani now (not a chance). 

Let’s jump in and figure out how this messes up your fantasy teams for this year and next.

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: Week 21

August 21, 2023 | Featured, Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 10 Comments

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You have seven days. [click] Maybe you’re a fan of The Ring or Ringu or Scary Movie (they’re all basically the same, right?), and you know the plot device well: there’s a limited amount of time for you to achieve a goal, or you’re out of the picture. This is where we’re at in the fantasy season — you gotta go matchup by matchup, regression be damned. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starters For 2023: Week 20

August 14, 2023 | Featured, Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 4 Comments

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I tell a lot of whoppers in this series, but here’s a totally true story about luck that happened to me this weekend. I’m up in the great north, on a cabin in a lake. Sure, that’s lucky, but it’s not the story. Now, I don’t fish a lot. I’ve probably cast a line less than 100 times total in my life, and almost all of those casts are me casting for my kids. I’m the kind of guy that goes fishing for other people.

So when I cast my kiddie reel into 5 foot deep water in the middle of the day, I didn’t expect to get much. But when I pulled out a 16” walleye, my fishing-familiar friends were impressed. I asked my kids to take a photo of me and my catch of a lifetime. Wouldn’t you know — three photos later, I had a picture of the dock, a picture of my face, and a picture of me in focus but the fish completely out of focus. At least I had a witness.

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: Week 19

August 7, 2023 | Featured, Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 15 Comments

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That time of the year is here: You jumped into first place in your standings behind the prowess of Shane McClanahan, Joe Ryan, and Nathan Eovaldi. Now they’re all on the IL and you’ve got to figure out what to do. First step: don’t panic. Second step: start emptying your bank account and sending all that money to sketchy charities because you’re not going to recover from those losses. Wait, I said don’t panic, right? Um, well, I guess I’m not good at this. Let’s try again! 

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: Week 18

July 31, 2023 | Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 14 Comments

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Maximum Madness Kentucky Scherzer — known to most of you as “Max Scherzer” due to SEO requirements — has joined the elite sniper squad of the Texas Rangers for another bid at the World Series. How greedy can a guy get? Just like Nolan Ryan piling up all those no-hitters. Come on, Nolan — share the wealth! It probably makes sense that Scherzer joins the team that Nolan Ryan served as President and CEO for during the financial crisis. 

Last week, I asked y’all to target Scherzer in any last minute fantasy trades. Although Scherzer was legit awful in July — like, top 5 worst starting pitchers in the league awful — his true skill stats looked pretty reasonable. We all know Scherzer is a playoff magnet. He’s got an opt-out clause in his contract and enough life left in his arm for another contract after this season. And now Scherzer gets to mentor a pitching room filled with the likes of [checks notes] Dane Dunning and Jon Gray. What a beautiful world! 

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: Week 17

July 24, 2023 | Featured, Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 10 Comments

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I really don’t know what “Week” we’re on. Weeks only matter in fantasy football because in Week 17 you’re in your fantasy championship game. Over here in baseball, it’s just another barrage of random starters. Baseball is wonderful that way. There’s a legit chance that the AL Central division winner goes to a team that has a sub-.500 winning percentage, while almost the entire AL East and 4/5 of the AL West have teams with winning records that will be watching from the sidelines. I dunno about y’all, but imagine if we did away with the minor league farm system and instituted a Premier League style relegation system. That way, the Athletics aren’t only not in Oakland next year, they’re not even in the Majors. No more tanking. No more Super 2 status. No more Quad-A jokes. If the East Carolina Yellowjackets have a winning year made up of players who work double-shifts at the Kroger, then they get promoted and are playing against the Miami Marlins next year. What a beautiful world. 

The Razzball Wordpress backend also tells me this is my 150th baseball article at Razzball, This will tie me with Donkey Teeth on the career baseball posting leaderboard. Over on football, I eeked out 158 articles, which was good for 8th most all-time. Adding in that one year stint I had on Razzball Basketball, I’ve topped 330 total articles. I suppose at the end of the month I’ll have my overall 333rd article, which will undoubtedly be worth celebrating with some jokes about Robbie Ray’s pants. 

Speaking of pitchers! 

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: Second Half Prep Edition

July 17, 2023 | Featured, Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 34 Comments

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Hey now! You’re an All-Star! You got your game on, got paid. OK, maybe you weren’t an all-star. Maybe you’re like me and drafted the front five Padres batters in RazzSlam. That seemed reasonable, what with them making something like $8 billion in contract money. What did the Padres do in the first half? A 103 wRC+ and trailing the Minnesota Twins in homers. I mean, I can feel foolish for having a bad fantasy team, but at least I didn’t spend the GDP of Panama on players who can’t outperform Joey Gallo.

You can — and probably will — win many leagues with imperfect teams.

Please, blog, may I have some more?
everywhereblair

Top 100 Starting Pitchers For 2023: All-Star Break Edition!

July 10, 2023 | Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 20 Comments

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In an article that was nominated for “Most Amount of Jibberish Put into a Blog” by the Fantasy Sports Writers Association, I made two points: 

Rankings are — for the most part — meaningless.
The culture of ranking incentivizes safe ranking. 

When I say that rankings are meaningless, this is because rankers have maybe a middling accuracy in predicting the median outcome of a player performance. You can see Rudy’s tracked success on the Razzball Ombotsman (and Rudy’s a really good ranker). The TL;DR of that portion of Razzball is that top players generally perform within their expected performance bracket about 50% of the time. Crappy players perform within their expected band of crappiness about 50% of the time as well. What do players do the other 50% of the time? Great players can be crappy, and crappy players can be great. 

Please, blog, may I have some more?
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