RCL draft season is still creeping along.  We are up to 7 drafts now with another one that went off late last night.  We’ll be getting into the thick of it here shortly but while we wait for draft-mania to start, let’s look at some more RCL strategy.  

This week I wanted to briefly go over some notes on pitching in the RCLs.  I say briefly because this subject has been covered many times before, quite brucely, much more succinctly than I could cover it.  I’ll tell you young Razzballers a story, about where it all got started, way back in a time known as ten after twenty.  There was a man that went by the name Oaktown Steve.  If there were a Hall of Fame for commenters, Steve would be first ballot.  Occasionally, the Steve from Oaktown still pops in with a comment or two but gentlemen and six ladies, OTS was all over this streaming phenomenon; the pioneer of the movement if you will. Next came Simply Fred.  Fred was onto the streaming movement along with a handful of others and this is where the revolution really picked up steam.  Rudy felt he could improve the process and the Stream-O-Nator was born!  The world hasn’t been the same since.  Finally, Rudy covered the importance of maximizing IP and how to value our streamers here.  That should be enough clickbait and reading to get you off to sleep tonight where visions of ERA, WHIP and K/9 will dance in your head.  If you’re feeling lazy though, I’ll give you the cliffs-notes version with a couple of my own notes.

Last week we covered why you should join and 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.  I covered this info last year, Big Odio has covered/ranted in the comments plenty about it as well.  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.  Frequent players, feel free to skip ahead.

Should you take all my advice as gospel?  Nah, you do you, I’ll do me and we’ll both be happy.  All I can give you is a voice of experience.  I’ve played in these leagues for quite some time in some very tough leagues.  I’m not the best player around, but I can hold my own.  I’m here to help you do the same.  No one wants to be fighting for 11th place, so here we go!

Boy does it feel good to be back!  I can’t wait to be half as productive at work and start losing countless hours of sleep staying up to watch the finish 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 Razzball Commenter League (RCL) tour guide.  I love these things.  Really, they play to my strengths and offer ample opportunity to test strategy and ideas.  I love the constant ability to go for every last hit, RBI, SB.  Weekly lineups/moves have their place, I just don’t find them as fun.  The format, 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.  I’m also a huge nerd for all the numbers and data that gets collected from running so many leagues under the Razzball umbrella.  I will do my part to share some of these numbers with you along the way and try to glean some info from all that data.  VinWins was my hero back when he ran the RCL Updates, so I’ll do my best to be his protege.  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.  For those of you that aren’t so eager, let’s sit down and chat it out.

First of all, if you’re on the fence about joining an RCL, that can’t be comfortable.  You really should hop down from there and just join a league already.  I get it though, back in the late aughts, when I first started lurking around Razzball I too was reluctant to join an RCL.  I kick myself now though for not joining in the fun sooner.  I’ll give you the reasons I was staying away and then explain why it was complete bunk.  Maybe I can sway another 2-3 of you to come join the masses.  If you have other reasons for keeping away, by all means, lay them on me in the comments.  I love talking RCLs and if we can be doing something better, I’ll be your voice to the big wigs.  So, here we go:

The end is here my friends.  I thought for a second there we might have some Monday rain delay controversy, but it all worked out and it was Team Levy who took all the glory!  We’ve never had a team with a perfect season until now.  This guarantees Team Levy will remain in the RCL record books for all time as the perfect season can never be beaten, only tied.  That’s pretty amazing to think about.  Out of all the teams that have been managed throughout the the (seven?) years of RCLs and all the leagues we’ve seen, no one has ever pulled off the perfect season.  An amazing achievement!  For their efforts Team Levy takes home a shizz ton of loot.  Let’s see…hold on, searching the site to find the list of goodies…ah-ha, here it is: an autographed baseball of the player who is Grey’s avatar.  That’s right, an autographed baseball of… Well, I guess only Grey and Team Levy will know.  Levy will also receive an autographed baseball of Oscar Gamble!  That’s two, count ‘em, two autographed balls and last, but not least, a $250 Best Buy gift card.  I remember Best Buy, that was the place we used to go before the internet was invented to buy things like video games, CDs and speakers.  I’m pretty sure my local Best Buy just went out of business as a matter of fact.  Good times!  Oh, and Grey says he’ll throw in a Razzball T-shirt as well.  I don’t believe Team Levy has checked in via comments at all this year, but now would be the time.  Levy fended off some very tough competitors this year to claim the RCL crown and it took every bit of that perfect score to win.  Cram It put up a valiant final few weeks but came up 1 point short of going back to back.  Still first, followed by 2nd overall, beating out thousands in the process is no laughing matter.  Cram It deserves some major kudos.  This is Team Levy’s moment though, so hopefully they show up, take a bow and soak it up, they earned it.  Here’s what else what happened this year and this final week of the RCLs:

It’s hard to believe there’s only one week to go in this marathon of a season.  We’ve tortured ourselves for 25 long weeks, agonizing over batty calls, dipping into the streamers with mixed results, cursing players and praising others.  We’ve ignored our families, our jobs and our personal hygiene and now it all comes down to the final week.  You may smell like stale Funyuns, but dagummit, that virtual fantasy trophy is all yours.  Team Levy is perfect yet again, gaining back the point they lost last week.  After some good conversation with the crowd I came around a bit on Team Levy last week.  I was surprised to learn that no one in the history of the RCLs has ever gone perfecto.  That just goes to show you what a special feat it is, regardless of league competitive index.  We’ve had 117, 118, even 118.5, but never 120.  That’s a lot of teams in a lot of leagues, some of them pretty terrible I’m sure.  We could be witnessing RCL history folks and if it takes a historic achievement to take down a team from a high LCI league, so be it.  Let’s take a look at what else happened in the RCLs this week, in the week that was, week 25:

We now have two weeks to go and a new contender has made a push.  Team Levy slipped back down to 119 points this week and Team Lion of South Side Titans gained two points, bringing their league total to 112.  The South Side Titans somehow holds an LCI of 101.  I say somehow since, you may recall, this was the league where Cody Allen was drafted 4th overall…right.  It appears to be a battle of the higher scoring teams in less competitive leagues right now.  The next three teams in the standings have all scored between 104-105 points in their respective leagues and all three leagues have a very high LCI of 106.  These three teams all sit 6-7 RCL Points behind Team Levy though.  It’s a bit of a bummer that the RCL Point formula doesn’t make this race a little tighter right now.  Having played in several of the higher LCI leagues over the years I have a bias towards those leagues.  I thought the formulas for this year was pretty solid and I suppose if it takes a perfect score in a below average league to win, that says something.  Still, a 108 or 109 in a high index league should be more in the mix.  I’m rooting for one of those to take that next leap these last two weeks.  Here’s what else took place in the week that was, week 24.