Welcome my good and/or decent Razzball Commenter League managers.  How were your first four days of fun? Oh, you drafted Giancarlo Stanton, Justin Upton and Daniel Murphy did you?  Welp, there’s always next year! I kid, I kid, the RCL format is actually one of the easier formats to recover from these types of things.  Just pony up to the Hitter-Tron and make due with batty calls for the next few weeks, you’ll be OK. This Razzball Commenter League update will be a little different than most.  Throughout the year I’ll be bringing you stats, trades, weekly leaders and overall standings. With only four days worth of data (and most of them half days at that) it’s really not worth diving into.  Our RCL bots are not up and running yet either, so there’s not much to look at just yet. Instead, this week, I’ll be giving you a couple of FanTrax tips I’ve found helpful along the way, go over a few trades from the past week and let you peak in on the ‘Perts League.  So, let’s get down to business, shall we? We shall!

We have another week’s worth of draft data to work with and only about one week left of the Razzball Commenter League draft season.  All public drafts wrap up on Wednesday, March 27th, so if you’ve been waiting to join a league, wait no more! We managed to fill all but one league this past week and that one had a manager bail about an hour before the draft, so it drafted with 11.  That’s a darn shame, don’t be that guy that bails right before the draft, so not cool. We have drafts all weekend long that need filling though, starting Friday and going through to Sunday. There is even a $20 league with spots to fill, so go get that money!  The sign-up sheet is linked at the end of this article, but first, let’s dive into our RCL ADP and see what Razzball Commenters are drafting so far.

Razzball Commenter League drafts are off and running!  Don’t let the chance to play with your favorite writers and commenters in free leagues for an overall top prize pass you by!  We’ve only had a handful of drafts so far, but next week we’ll be able to dive into early RCL ADP and over-analyze to our hearts content.  As for now though, go sign up for a league drafting in the next week or so and contribute to our data pool. It’s so easy to sign-up, it’s really just one click!  Use it as a mock draft that is actually useful. We just had the Writer’s League draft Sunday night and it was nice to get a draft under my belt this season that didn’t have a 4 hour pick clock.  I’ll have more info on the Writer’s League draft in the coming weeks as well. Today, we’ll be going over how to approach your pitching in the RCL format. I’ll let you decide how well I followed my own advice in my recent draft.

Last week we covered why you should join an RCL, 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 RCLs though, I could see how some of this has been glossed over, so I’ll try to consolidate some info for the newbies.  Last season we made the change from ESPN to Fantrax and with that we changed a few rules, most notably we added a 500 move limit and we changed from Games Started for pitchers to Innings Pitched. I’ll be frank, I didn’t notice a big change in strategy because of these changes, but feel free to change my mind RCL Vets.  We’ll cover this as well as the basics for anyone still timid about jumping in the RCL waters.

QUICK NOTE: RCL drafts will start going off this coming Friday.  To avoid leagues drafting with less than 12 managers we’ve decided to just kill any league that doesn’t fill by 5pm EST.  We’re going to try our best to get everything filled, but if you are in a league where someone bails late or it looks like it won’t fill, let us know.  Jump in the comments or let us know on Twitter: @Razzball and/or @MattTruss and we’ll try to work some magic. We didn’t want to ruin someone’s night by waiting until an hour before a 10pm draft to kill it.  Hopefully, this won’t happen often, but help us help you.

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. It’s 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.  We’re back for another season partnering with FanTrax. FanTrax makes data collection much better which means it 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.