Avoiding The Blurbstomp – Some Of Us

The itch that brings us back to fantasy baseball every day is a special little needler. No matter if your team went six whole days without a home run, and your top four picks are on the IL, or your hitters are only demolishing home runs off pitchers that you own, you still want back in. There are several reasons why we daily league people hear our phone alarm going off at 5:30am, snooze it, set it down…but then pick the phone back up to see if our waiver claims went unchallenged.

1. It’s May. We are in the senior year of high school of our fantasy team’s lifetime. We still have time to change our team’s entire psychology before we head out to college.
2. Anchor Bias – We are still starting the likes of Corbin Carroll because we saw what he did last year, and still believe in his pre-injured shoulder batted ball profile. In May, staying true to your players reigns supreme.
3. Tension with the promise of eventual release – This is the biggie. This is so biggie that it gets its own paragraph. You don’t believe me? Your eyes can see the entire page as you’re reading these words, you can see the paragraph(s) below this. Don’t lie to me. I’m begging you, but that also makes me a liar, so we’re equals. Yes, we’re two horizontal lines hanging out in a parallel and platonic manner. Anyways th(os)e paragraph(s).

The simplest form of tension and release in fantasy baseball is drafting your team, followed closely by the day to day line up management you hopefully haven’t given over to some AI server queen bee. It’s a thrill when you bench the right guys and start some unlikely ball bashers. Then there is the tension of waivers, the classic “will they, won’t they” that reminds me that Moonstruck will never leave my head as a television I’ve never watched, but understand its basic form enough to create an unhelpful reference that loses the 18-30 year old demographic I assume I never had in the first place.

A final form of tension and release is the relationship between the FMLB blogger and the commenter asking line up questions. The initial rush lies in getting a response to your brain-melting “please rank these corner infielders whose profiles and projections are extremely similar, and do so without any league size or scoring parameters.” The tension begins building now. Do you follow the advice of this internet parasocial prognosticator? What if you choose to ignore the “expert” like the iconoclast you (think) you are? Did you ask a follow up question even after said author answered your query, and feel the cold sweat of anxiety creep across the nape of neck when you realized your follow up question was more important? Were you upset when another commenter answered your second question, but the expert seems to have moved on, so you don’t know if the expert agrees with the commenter’s answer or simply forgets you exist? Do you then regret your choice of username for its banal forgetability?

Sidebar: In my attempt to come up with a forgettable username, my brain immediately began producing usernames that I believed to be both memorable and high quality. My list:

RicktheTruckMan
Darius’s Rucker 420
The_Original_Gout
Alex.Lifesons.Son.Named.Sunny
Brimp Quigley
711_is_an_indoors_job

Do you think about tweeting to one of the Razzball writer’s twitter account with both the original and second question with an apology that bleeds into a second and third tweet? Do you then apologize for the apology in a direct message, and delete the original tweet responses? Maybe later do you try to condense those tweets you deleted into one response tweet and save it in drafts in case the writer still hasn’t responded? Have you thought about doxxing any fantasy writers for not responding to your questions that could be answered if you read the content that’s on the website? Do you go to the library and wonder why they insist on having so many books about local history? Do you count the amount of rotating battery displays when you’re at the grocery store? Do you wonder how people evolved enough to stop looking at the sun directly all the time, thus avoiding a present day where we live underground with pale, glassy eyes that have no use while cursing the fiery ball of blindness that has trapped us in our earth prison?

As you can see, there is no release in fantasy baseball. The tension is relentless, and we are gluttons for a slow cooking festival of agony. We are teased by the Great Release in the Sky, that feeling that we’ll never truly get. Much like reading these articles every week. Onwards to the blurbs and stomping!

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 – examining how words create meaning, and sometimes destroy meaning altogether
Q and Q – Quantitative and Qualitative Oddities in a given blurb
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award – Given to the player blurb that promises the most and delivers the least.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque – blurbs don’t always need to make sense, friendo

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 in the comments section. Onward to Roto Wokeness!

Q & Q

Jo Adell went 2-for-4 with a homer and two RBI as the Angels edged the Pirates 5-4 on Wednesday.

Adell, who hit second in three straight games last week, entered in a 1-for-20 slump, so he was back down to eighth in the Angels lineup today. Manager Ron Washington keeps trying to go with the hot hand at the top of the order, but he can’t seem to get the timing right. Adell is batting .259/.311/.506, which is the best line sported by any currently healthy Angels player.

Source: Rotoworld

After last week’s smorgasbord of Jo Adell, I thought I’d check in on a guy that Rotoworld was specifically trashing because of his past issues with strikeouts, while ignoring his improvement in the category this season. Well, ole Jo has decided forego the outhouse and drop a statistical deuce on the kitchen table. He was 1-18 coming into Wednesday’s game since last week’s Blurbstomp, with one run, one RBI, and two steals “chipped in.” Seems like the haters won…

Except when you look at his 16.7% K rate! That’s pretty dang encouraging! He’s seeing a ton of pitches too, which finally resulted in Wednesday night’s good showing. But why would the Rotoworld blurb mention his improvement in the K rate department when they could instead ignore and only bring it up when he strikes out more than twice in a game.

He was also trashed for his poor base running and caught stealing numbers. His SB:CS ratio this past week was 2:0. Again, recognize the bias when you’re analyzing your players or researching other team’s players. Be wary of editorial slants, they’re real and they make it hard to read with the words all sagging diagonally across the page.

Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award

Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque

Ryan Mountcastle slugged a two-run homer in the 11th inning on Wednesday night, helping to propel the Orioles to a wild 7-6 victory over the Nationals in 12 innings.

With one out left to get in the ninth inning, the Orioles had a comfortable 3-1 lead, then insanity ensued. Neither team scored in the 10th inning, then Mountcastle clobbered a 386-foot (98.8 mph EV) two-run shot off of Hunter Harvey in the 11th that gave the O’s a two-run lead. The Nationals would answer in their half of the 11th. The O’s then pushed two runs across in the 12th and allowed just one to escape with a victory. Mountcastle finished the night 1-for-5 and is now hitting .277/.324/.485 with six long balls and 18 RBI on the year.

Source: Rotoworld

The flavor text of this blurb irritated me in a familiar way. There is a recap of Mountcastle’s performance on Wednesday night, but sandwiched in between is an account of the game in general. The blurb becomes an Orioles/Nationals recap sandwich, with Mountcastle’s recap as the bread. That’s not a sandwich that should be on offer. In fact, going back to last year, some of us were already giving a hard pass to the Recap-style blurbs for fantasy purposes. This is a good moment to remind everyone that when a person writes “some of us” on the internet, what they really mean is “me.” It’s a snarky little way to make yourself bigger in front of a problematically broad and bold take. Being a jerk keeps food on the table for some people. It might be a small table, like in a dollhouse, and yes, the food is plastic and is glued to the table, but jerks don’t eat food. They merely look at it, hence them being jerks.

Rotoworld has jumped the shark and now labels the “analysis” portion of their blurbs as “Recap.” I don’t understand the point of the flavor text, as a brief description (or recap, lol) is usually provided by the headline of each individual blurb. Blurbs on that site are now to be read like this:

One sentence recapping a player’s individual performance in a game.

5-6 sentences describing that same recap using more words, sometimes with content that has nothing to do with the blurbed player. And maybe, if you’re lucky, a tiny bit of opinion and advice.

To this I say no thank you, but also thank you. Without these little decisions this article would not exist. Lord knows we’re rocketing towards a future internet with content that is paywalled by default, so let’s get it while we can! Avoid the blurbstomps while our minds are still supple and quasi-innocent, because original sin. Till next week!