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.

Technically the first “week” was from (Re)Opening Day, July 23rd  to Sunday, July 26th, but that was just too short, with too few games and just didn’t feel right.  Instead, I’m going to combine that short week with this week to form week 1.5 of the Razzball Commenter Leagues.  How has the first week plus gone for you?  Are you overloaded on Blue Jays and Phillies like I seem to be everywhere?  Did you draft Roberto Osuna, Nick Anderson, Wade Davis and Mychal Givens as your closers?  Perfect!  Unlike in past seasons at a similar point in the season we can’t really say, “It’s still early” this season, because it’s already getting late!  If you are sitting in last and haven’t been trying to maximize those empty roster spots left by Mike Trout, Lourdes Gurriel and Rhys Hoskins, then it’s time to drop a would-be closer and start working that waiver wire like a boss.  This is where the RCL battle is won and lost.  We’ve already had races for more closers than I care to remember, the latest being Jairo Diaz and Ryan Pressly and we’ve had races for prospect call-ups in Nick Madrigal and Jo Adell.  Again, there can be no resting on your laurels this season, so set those Twitter notifications and hit the wire.  Let’s take a look at which RCL teams are getting an early jump on their league standings in part to streaming and batty-calling their butts off:

With only four-ish days of games so far, the RCL overall standings don’t amount to a whole lot, we’ll get those running in full force for next week.  In the meantime, I thought we’d finally take a look at all the draft data we collected over the period known as the longest draft season of our lifetime.  Our very first draft of the season was way back on March 1st, in the before times.  Our final draft was July 22nd.  During those 143 days we drafted 77 Razzball Commenter Leagues (four more than last season!) and 463 different players.  It’s been a long time coming and it could be short lived, but we’ll be here for every bit of the MLB season that we can piece together.  If you didn’t get in on the fun, well, there’s always next year, we hope!  For now, let’s crunch some numbers on our RCL drafts.

It’s hard to believe that there will be some real baseball being played in just a few days.  I still feel woefully unprepared as I feel like teams have hardly any clue who is starting Opening Day.  We’re still getting opt-out news for crying in the clouds!  We just found out a couple days ago that the Nationals could play Opening Day in their park and we have no idea where the Blue Jays are going to be playing, AH!  Regardless, we soldier on and make the best of what we get, I’ll be watching Thursday night because I’m a sucker for baseball and because I have about 30 Razzball Commenter Leagues to try and manage this season.  Speaking of which, we have a league, drafting tonight at 9 PM ET and you can click HERE to join and draft one last team this season.  What’s one more at this point?  If you’re just coming out of your long spring stupor and starting to check your RCL team pages again, I have a few tips and tricks below on how you can customize your teams to make viewing things easier.  Unfortunately, there is no way to copy settings from one team to another, so if you have many teams *raises hand*, you’ll have to do these steps on every one.  Let’s get to it!

Typically I write a “Why Join” article when the Razzball Commenter Leagues first open for business.  I did that this year too, way back in February.  You remember February right?  We were younger then, it was a simpler time and you imagined all the fun you’d have managing your various fantasy baseball teams to victory.  While all the initial leagues are filled, we have opened up a couple more RCLs for those of you who would like to draft a team or two given what you know now.  These have been open for a couple weeks now and the most we have is two managers in these leagues.  So, I thought perhaps you all may need a little coaxing.  Let’s look at a few reasons you should join and then give you the skinny on how to go about signing up.

I will be honest with you, I’m still not sure how to approach this season strategy-wise.  I was pretty certain we were heading to no baseball, then Manfred dropped 60 games on us and even said we were never going to play more than that anyway.  What exactly was the point of dragging your league through the mud for two months of negotiations then?  This makes no sense to me.  Couldn’t we have just announced a 60 game season back in April?  Oh baseball, why are you so screwy?  Now I’m scrambling trying to figure out how to approach this season all while keeping tabs on who has tested positive, who is asymptomatic and who isn’t and also who has opted out and if I’ve already drafted them.  This is bonkers with a side of crazy.  I do have some thoughts on how I’ll be approaching this crazy Razzball Commenter League season though, so let’s dive in.