We all avoid certain players every fantasy season, for better or worse. I normally avoid rookie pitchers but made an exception for Grayson Rodriguez. We all know how that went. The classic “I’M EXCITED-to-I’M ANGRY-to-I’M EXCITED-to-I’M DISAPPOINTED-to-I’M DISGUSTED” pipeline. You know it’s bad when you agree with management regarding a player being sent down to the minors.
Every season we tell ourselves, “This season I will not draft pitchers who start the season on the IL. I will not draft UTIL-only players.” We take these players out of our draft pool, but sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes we need to go into the Draft Prep Room and delete the players from the drafting pool entirely. Just kidding, I never do this. Any time I’ve done this, the Canceled Player ends up out-producing my fourth round pick.
You can’t just delete something you don’t like and pretend it doesn’t exist. Well, you can try if you’re the Dodgers and the Catholic Church, apparently.
There is no taking politics or culture out of baseball. The Evergreen Dipshit Reply Guy will say, “Let them just play the game.” And I agree. Parts of baseball are wonderful, others are ugly. For every Kenley Jansen hitting the 400 saves mark, there is the opioids scandal for the Angels, a problem I’m sure is not limited to that one ball club. There is no purity in sports. There are advertisers, and shareholders, and vendors, and scalpers, and sports books. There are agents and owners.
You can’t erase military fly-overs or predatory underage contracts with children outside of the U.S. It’s all political and most of it is uncomfortable.
So don’t erase players from your mind. Cody Bellinger will redeem himself and you’ll feel a fool because you arbitrarily decided he was canceled from fantasy baseball forever. It doesn’t work in fantasy baseball, and it doesn’t work in the real world.
And if you think this intro was a stretch, you haven’t been reading Blurbstomp dutifully for the past few years.
A Blurbstomp Reminder
We will analyze player blurbs from a given evening, knowing that 1-2 writers are usually responsible for all the player write-ups posted within an hour of the game results. We will look at:
Flowery Diction – how sites juice up descriptions of player performance
Friendly Reminder – when a blurb insists upon itself
Q and Q – when a site contradicts a player valuation on back-to-back blurbs
The Blame Game – a player takes on the fault of the team as a whole
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award – Given to the player blurb that promises the most and delivers the least.
Bob Nightengale Syndrome – instances of updates that don’t update anything
The hope is that by season’s end, we’ll all feel more confident about our player evaluations when it comes to the waiver wire. We will read blurbs and not be swayed by excessive superlatives, faulty injury reporting, and micro-hype. I will know that I have done my job when Grey posts, and there isn’t a single question about catchers that he did not address in his post. Onward to Roto Wokeness!
Flowery Diction
Clayton Kershaw yielded two runs over four innings on Tuesday in a loss to the Twins.
Kershaw took the ball on Tuesday evening at Dodger Stadium just days after his mother passed away and wound up striking out seven batters over four frames. Unfortunately, he didn’t get a ton of support from the Dodgers’ offense and was saddled with a loss. The 35-year-old veteran southpaw has allowed two earned runs or fewer in seven of his nine starts this season and will carry a sparkling 2.52 ERA, 1.02 WHIP and 63/11 K/BB ratio across 53 2/3 innings (nine starts) into a challenging road tilt on Sunday against the Cardinals. He’s expected to be placed on the bereavement list at some point prior to Wednesday’s series finale against Minnesota.
Source: Rotoworld
People deal with their grief and trauma in a lot of ways, and public-facing athletes usually put it out on the field. I do hope Kershaw gets some time away from the game,
however,
the blurbist did a weird little thing in here: “Unfortunately, he didn’t get a ton of support from the Dodgers’ offense and was saddled with a loss.” That’s not exactly how it went. Kershaw pitched four innings, throwing 90 pitches, and was then pulled. Dude never qualified for a quality start, let alone a win. Blaming the offense for the fact that Kershaw went four innings is one of the weirder takes out there. Guy is on a pitch limit because someone like me would like his arm preserved, like Ted Williams’s freezer-burned head. Kind of like him for the Cy Young, just for funsies.
On the Tense
MJ Melendez is not in the Royals lineup for Monday night’s showdown against the Padres.
It appears to be just a routine day of rest for Melendez. Hunter Dozier will draw a start in right field in his place and bat seventh for the Royals against Michael Wacha and the Padres. Nick Pratto will slide into the cleanup spot in the team’s lineup with Melendez on the bench.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
The blurb is pretty standard, although maybe I’m not alone when I read it like this as an owner of Melendez:
MJ Melendez isn’t playing tonight.
Analysis: Who cares unless it’s a player you truly hate who’s trying to Pipp your boy off full-time at bats.
But there’s a kicker here: It was posted at 10:55pm that night. The game apparently started at 6:40pm, although time zones in the world of MLB blurbs and fantasy sites in general get confusing. When I checked on Wednesday evening, it then showed an 8:55pm posting time. This makes me think that RotoSportsEdgeNBCworld posts things in the Pacific time zone? Why would you do a Cover Your Ass about something so small? I’m trying to think of smaller things I’ve CYA’ed:
- When I say I’ve taken the garbage out to my better half, knowing there’s still an hour before she gets home
- Nothing else. This is the most boring list I’ve ever tried to create in my short yet long life. It makes me itch under my skin to try and even riff on this subject. We all CYA all the time. To children, most adults wander around in a fashion that promotes a sense of order, a manner that creates a safety in knowing what comes next. In reality, we all make everything up about ourselves every single day. There are a few type-A personalities taking care of the Bell Curve, but man the sheer crushing pain of waking up every day, convincing oneself that the flesh one occupies carries the burden of enough signifiers as to compliment a constructed world begging for Oz’s curtain to remain unpulled. It is pain.
- I have a few therapists, I’m fine.
Q&Q
Marcus Semien logs three hits in loss
Semien had three of the Rangers’ 10 singles and extended his current hit streak to six games (9-25, .360). The second baseman is batting a career-high .297 through 41 games.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
I love the minutia of mentioning that Semien’s .297 batting average is his career high, through the first 41 games of the season. It’s a funny enough little line, especially when considering that Semien was batting .400 on the first day of baseball this season following a 2-5 performance on March 30th. That would then constitute his career high, would it not? Unless this blurbist ran 41 game samples to come up with this fact, consider this Marcus Semien Career High Batting Average myth completely busted. No need for a pair of ginger brothers showing up. And no, former teammates Dustin May and Justin Turner were not brothers, even though they have basically the same first name, and are both ginger as heck. I was talking about Myth Busters. And no, I will not be explaining Myth Busters. I will be explaining the television show “Fishing with John.”
In the 90’s, musician/actor/painter John Lurie convinced HBO to let him film a show where he goes fishing with his friends. Episodes include cultural behemoths such as Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, and my personal favorite, Willem Defoe “going fishing.” An incredibly prescient satire of a reality TV-style travel show, with a deadpan absurdism that few can pull off. I mean, the guy who did the voice-over work for 60 Minutes and thousands of other shows narrates the show, sometimes in complete opposition with what’s being shown on the screen. I’m telling you, watch the Willem Defoe episode. It changed me for the better (also, you can watch Painting with John now, it’s on season 3!).
You can figure out Myth Busters on your own. I’m not here to make friends.
All Filler, No Killer
Brandon Drury delivered a go-ahead sacrifice fly in the ninth inning as the Angels rallied past the Guardians 5-4 on Friday night
The Angels tied things up against Emmanuel Clase in the ninth when Andres Gimenez made an errant throw to home plate after fielding a grounder, allowing Brett Phillips to move to third base in the process. Drury brought him home on a fly ball to center field and Carlos Estevez made the lead hold up in the bottom of the frame. The 30-year-old drove in two runs on the night, including an RBI single in the Angels’ three-run fourth inning. Sporting a .225/.259/.465 batting line, this has been a disappointing start to the season for him, but this was a big win for the Angels.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
My god what a blurb, just an absolute dream slice of content. First of all, we have a full sentence that includes the closer and outfielder from the team the Angels opposed that night, and then Drury’s teammate Brett Phillips makes a cameo. Did Phillips hit a homer, drive in a run, anything worth nothing in another player’s fantasy baseball blurb? No. He advanced to third on an error. Which set the stage for…Drury’s sacrifice fly. You could (and should) excise the first two sentences from this blurb (unless blurbist is getting paid by the word, in which case keep it going, bleed your employer dry, anything to get revenge for the “adblocker” pop-ups saying that an NBC-backed website desperately needs your money (I know Razzball does this too, but we’re not backed by 500 venture capitalists who are already going to hell)).
Secondly, Drury at this point has a 17/7/22 line. Were people actually expecting an exact replica of last season? Are there still people out there who believe last year’s production is actually this year’s production? Are those the blockheads in every comment section on the internet that makes you lose hope in any future for any abberationally living object on this planet?
We’ll end on this hopeful note for all of humanity. Until next blurb!
