This week I will be trying an experiment. Seeing as how when I am home I am constantly attached to an infant, thus rendering me one-armed, I will be attempting to use Google’s dictation software to write this week’s intro and outro. This comes with pros and cons. The pro is that I can write one-armed. The con is having to listen to the sound of my own voice asking a machine to provide a punctuation mark, thus interrupting my flow of thought, which is already rather ruptured.
Nothing is crueler in the long fantasy baseball season than the three days that make up the All-Star break. It is during this Great Gulf of Gloom that we tend to make poor decisions. Any chance of relaxing with one’s family, taking care of hobbies neglected, or practicing mindfulness is destroyed by 4:30pm trade offers that are just terrible enough to make you use Razzball’s Trade Analyzer. Even when getting results confirming that you should avoid said trade, you’re on Twitter and in comments asking anyone to justify your trade.
Let me put this in loud neon cocaine daymare Lisa Frank bubble font: If the trade helps you, then do it.
If you are trading Cedric Mullins for Kyle Finnegan, and you need saves and are good with steals, then you make the trade.
A final note:
When making a trade, I often think about how it would affect my place in the standings, but also whether the trade will also pull people above me down a few points as well. It’s great if you trade for a closer and make up a gap in saves, but if the guy you traded Mullins to will then cause the top two teams to drop a point or two in the steals category, then you have become the Wolf of Ball Street. You are the Joker, the Smoker, and the Midnight Toker. You are the Color of Money, even when you have that bodacious tank top tramp stamp sunburn.
Let them play their checkers, thinking it’s Risk. You’re too busy playing Crossfire when they think you’re playing Hungry, Hungry Hippos because they both are so loud it sounds like someone threw you in a dryer, lit a string of those Boogie Nights-style firecrackers, threw them in with you and selected “Bulky/Bedding” and “Start.”
You know what I mean.
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
Royals activated OF Andrew Benintendi from the restricted list.
Benintendi was among a batch of 10 unvaccinated Royals’ players that were unable to travel to Toronto last week for the team’s final first-half series against the Blue Jays. The 28-year-old outfielder, who will play in the Midsummer Classic on Tuesday evening in Los Angeles, is expected to be one of the most prominent names potentially on the move at the trade deadline in the next few weeks.
Source: Rotoworld
Normally, when a batch of players are reinstated for something like a suspension, blurb sites will tag one player and then list the rest of the players activated within that one player’s blurb. Not so for the non-vaccinated players. Every single one of them got these blurbs on Sports Roto Edge World, I can’t tell if this is a troll job to support the anti-vax players, or just a little troll, or no troll at all and the editor didn’t really care about the copy/paste aspect of things.
I truly hope he gets traded to the Pirates. May his trade destination be a lateral move, please.
Melanconny and the Infinite Sadness
Stephen Piscotty went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts on Sunday in his return to the Athletics’ lineup.
Piscotty started at designated hitter for Sunday’s first-half finale after missing four consecutive contests due to a minor left wrist issue stemming from a hit by pitch last week. He should be ready to roll after the All-Star break.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
Sometimes I read these player blurbs and they hit me with a wall of forlorn nostalgia. I remember when Stephen Piscotty was coming up and people were really excited about his career prospects. I was out of college and working a strange series of jobs before I warmed up to the idea of grad school. Here was a fellow that worked his baseball buttocks off, got called up, and did okay for a few years.
For anyone, getting to the majors is incredibly difficult. It’s like being the one guy a shark decides to absolutely demolish: the odds are low, and even if your day job is abalone fishing in a sea of chum, you might get bit but not swallowed (those are the wikipedia and shark bite database stories that absolutely haunt me. It’s not bad enough that you get destroyed by a predator, but when they find neither hide nor hair of you? Brrrrr).
So when Stephen Piscotty came up, there were projections of a 20-20 guy with good counting stats. I remember drafting him in 2017 and realizing a few years later that I managed to own him during his Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom season, and feeling down, miffed and even disgusted in my luck. With years to reflect on my disappointment regarding Piscotty’s statistical output, it makes me kind of sad that I, a stranger in a strange land, thought poorly of a talented baseball player. Call me soft. Weak. Ishmael. Secretary, even. But the thought of going on Twitter/Meta/Whatever and mocking a dude who’s just better at sports than I is a self-own for the ages.
Does anyone truly win when it comes to baseball? Well, the owners do. The owners win, and the shareholders as well, and maybe the top 2% of MLB players, but they’re absolutely vilified for it. So yeah, the owners win and baseball fans boo the really talented people playing a game so difficult that even with Christ’s guiding Hand, Tim Tebow could not break into the majors.
A sad little blurb for a talented player. This coming from a guy who will never stop ragging on Cody Bellinger, but ignore that paradox because it messes with my little micro-narrative. I’m turning this into a substack, then into a book, then back into a substack. I need my prose to have forced meaning at all times, people! Make sure to defend me on Twitter for all of my garbage posting as well. It’s important to reward my writing! I’m an idiot!
Q&Q
Mark Melancon tossed a perfect ninth inning for the Diamondbacks Sunday, striking out one and picking up the save in the Diamondbacks’ 3-1 win over the Padres.
Melancon has held opponents scoreless in four of his last six relief appearances for the Diamondbacks, posting a 3.38 ERA and 1.50 WHIP with seven strikeouts in that span. The veteran right-hander carries a 5.12 ERA and 1.55 WHIP to go along with a 6.25 K/9 ratio and 13 saves in 36 relief appearances this season.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
What a wonderful way to say that Mark Melancon has given up runs in two out of his last six relief appearances. What’s truly odd about this odd stat threshold is that if you used standardized ranges, like say, since June 1st, Melancon has a 3.77 ERA with a 3.18 FIP. That’s not so bad! How about since the beginning of July? Sure he’s 0-2 with two blown save losses, but he’s got an 11.81 K/9 with a FIP of 1.61 and an xFIP of 3.29! If you’re going to pick a random data set to goose a fellow’s job performance, do the goose right! Give that goose his gander!
That being said, Melancon is still walking too many guys, and that strikeout ratio means that whatever playoff team trades for him is getting a ticking time bomb. Or the Rays will get him, adjust his mechanics, and he’ll be their number one starter the rest of the way.
Hex Enduction Hour
Jacob deGrom’s simulated game was pushed from Tuesday to Thursday after he felt “mild muscle soreness” in his right shoulder on Sunday.
It’s hopefully just some routine stuff as deGrom nears the completion of his recovery from a stress reaction in his right scapula. He did play catch on flat ground Monday and Tuesday without issue, and he could line up for a fourth — maybe final? — minor league rehab start next week if Thursday’s workout goes smoothly. There had been some outside chatter about deGrom making his 2022 regular season debut immediately following the All-Star break, but that can obviously be ruled out. He’s probably more on track for the Mets’ road trip that runs from July 29-August 3 through Miami and Washington.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
Look, I really want Jake deGrom to dePitch this season, but I don’t want him to do it to deAppease fans and fantasy baseball mavens. I’d like him to do it where he’s completely healthy, and this guy has not been healthy for a good long while. There are a lot of words doing a lot of work in that blurb analysis, so I highlighted the hardest-working ones to better parse the extent of a curse placed on the player here:
Hopefully
Some routine stuff
Without issue
Could
Maybe final?
If
Probably more on track
That’s a lot of ifs, ands, buts, and even an interjected parenthetical phrase. I’d like to point out that deGrom hasn’t pitched more than 4.2 innings in any of his rehab starts, and the Mets don’t need him to be a horse down the stretch.
Even if they did, though, it would behoove (behoof, horse call back, yes!) them to rein (horse call back again, yes!) in their stallion (horse call back again again, yes!) before they spur him directly into the glue factory. I could keep going with the horse punnery, but I have a life to live and have orders to assassinate Mr. Ed, so don’t be a coward.
A brief stomp, but a screaming infant is interrupting my dictation experiment. Till next week!
