The Razzball Commenter League trade deadline went out with a bang, we have nine trades to go over today and another few to cover next week that just squeaked in at the deadline Sunday.  With the Labor Day holiday, Rudy’s robots took the day off as well, so we have one extra day of data included in the weekly stats.  It’s crazy that we only have three weeks to go in this strange season.  Hopefully you made some trades that will make a difference down the stretch.  I don’t know about you, but it seemed weird to trade for a starter knowing they’d only have 4-5 more starts to come.  Everything about this season feels weird honestly, but we’re making due.  Things are still in so much flux in the league standings that big swings are still happening all over.  I kicked my teams in the rear this week and pounded the innings pitched, which had me gaining points in strikeouts and wins across my many leagues.  I don’t want to be caught that final week of the season needing to stream 100+ innings, because who knows what in the world that week will look like.  Keep an eye on your own IP and stream accordingly.

There you have it, we’ve passed the halfway point of our Razzball Commenter League season.  The next milestone is the trading deadline, which takes place this coming Sunday night at midnight EST.  The MLB trade deadline has been pretty awesome so far with major names all going to the Padres.  Between that and teams changing closers like underwear, there should be plenty to get you in the trading mood for the RCLs.  Normally, this is the time of season where you can understand some overpaying for players, but with the shortened season and so much still up in the air, I’m not sure things will be quite as crazy as previous seasons.  Still, take a look at the overall standings in your league and see where teams are bunched together.  If there’s an opportunity to leap over multiple teams by taking a category by storm, make your move now.  If you’re in second place right now, make that move for first, play to win, go out and make it happen.  Release your inner AJ Preller!  We managed seven trades this past week, which we’ll break down below, let’s see if we can top that this week.

By about the time you read this, we’ll be halfway through our interesting fantasy baseball season.  We’ll have completed four and a half weeks of Razzball Commenter League action and have four and a half weeks left to go.  That means, if you’re planning on maxing out your pitching innings, you should be sitting at about 260 IP right now, or be planning on streaming your buns off the final month of the season.  Our IP leader as of right now is Team WahooFan76 of RCL #47 with 342 IP.  Bringing up the rear is the Master Batters of RCL #1 with 40 IP (not including one of Park Barkley’s 20 teams that were drafted and abandoned, including one with an illegal roster which has zero IP).  That league drafted all the way back on march 1st, so chances are, the Batters have been abandoned as well.  In addition to innings, we need quality innings, including a high K/9.  Fortunately for you, and especially those that are bad at math, we’re tracking your K/9 for you on the Master Standings page.  There, you can see that among teams with at least 40 IP/week we have Team CobraKaiMeansNoMercy with an impressive 12.2 K/9.  The worst K/9 offender is Team SeniorBootyFace with 6.3 K/9 in 217 IP.  That’s almost impressively bad.  There’s still time to correct though, so fear not!  Just snag a high K/9 reliever here and there if your current roster allows it.  Something I like to do is sort players by K/9.  You can do this by hitting “Extra” on the player page when viewing pitchers.  Then just sort by K/9 and make sure you’re looking for players with a substantial amount of IP.  It’s also going to be important to monitor your innings usage.  You can click “MIN/MAX” on your team page to see your innings used and your pace.  I like to keep my pace pretty close to right on the money, but your mileage may vary.  Just don’t leave innings on the table if you can help it.  Let’s take a look at the rest of the week that was, week 4 in the RCLs:

Welcome to week three of the Razzball Commenter Leagues!  We are now one third of the way through our season.  That’s just wild and I have the feeling there isn’t enough time to correct the ERA hole some of my teams have dug.  Yikes.  A huge thank you goes out this week to Rudy and his FanTrax data-mining robots who were able to snag all our RCL data.  That means, we have real, live standings.  Week one and two I simply had to take whichever teams had the most roto points, but this week to get to factor in League Competitive Index or LCI.  This system rewards players who are in harder leagues for eeking out those extra points.  We also get to factor in the Master Points.  Master Points are basically like you’re playing in a 924 team roto league.  If you have the most HRs in the RCL-universe, you get 924 points, if you have the fewest, you get 1 point.  Pretty cool, huh?  For more info, you can scroll to the bottom of the MASTER STANDINGS page and read all about the secret sauce that is the Master Standings.  This also means, we’ll have weekly leaders starting next week.  Of course, there will only be five weeks worth of weekly data, but hey, it’s better than nothing.  Hmm, that sounds like it has potential to be the new MLB slogan!

I hope everyone had a fun second week in the Razzball Commenter Leagues.  There was some good, like Fernando Tatis Jr.  going bonkers with six homers in six games.  There was also some bad, like Giancarlo getting hurt yet again.  Juan Soto returned and immediately hit a bomb.  Maybe he can give Andrew Benintendi and J.D. Martinez a little pep talk.

It’s the silly season for our leagues at this point (who are we kidding this whole year is silly season), where we can have huge swings in the standings based on 2-3 good days of stats, or a week of Tatis-level production.  We had 23 leagues change leaders this week and I’m a little surprised it wasn’t more.  Four teams remain in the top 10 from last week and one of them just so happens to be the first place team.  Let’s take a look at the standings as well as some trades in the RCLs this week.