This week I daydreamed about what fantasy sports might look like in twenty years. At that point I’ll be close to 60, a fossil more likely to bend your ear to remind you that glaciers were real than ask how your day is going. As soon as one hits AARP Magazine eligibility age, one wins the right to descend into curmudgeonly narcissism whenever the fancy suits the scenario. Oh, you’re worried about the climate my generation completely screwed up through a complacency so transparent that we all played Final Fantasy VII and still let everything go to hell? Well, I’m an old man, so it’s time to learn about my goiters.
I digress, as is my wont. Here are my prognostications for fantasy baseball in 2043:
- It will be heavily regulated due to its spitting distance to gambling
- All leagues will be run on apps, after the dissolution of the internet as we know it
- Most fantasy writing will be AI-generated waiver wire articles, which will only be read by other AI
- We will finally abolish saves as standalone category
- The Main Event will aggressively evolve into a Squid Games scenario
- The Las Vegas Addicts will continue their Oakland tradition of having no draftable starters
- The bases will expand 50%, causing replacement level players to average 20 steals per season
- Bat flip distance will become a category
- If one of your players bunts, your team is deleted from existence
- Bartolo Colon has unretired for the 15th time, and is scooped up in deep NL-only leagues (it’s the Mets, who else would sign him)
We don’t have to prognosticate fantasy football, because football will be illegal in 20 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
Q and Q – when a site contradicts a player valuation on back-to-back blurbs
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award – Given to the player blurb that promises the most and delivers the least.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque – 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
Carlos Carrasco yielded four runs in 4 2/3 innings Tuesday against the White Sox.
Carrasco tossed eight scoreless innings in his final start before the break, earning him some extra leeway in New York. However, he still might find himself out of work before long if he can string together some solid outings. He has a 5.35 ERA and a 48/29 K/BB ratio in 65 2/3 innings.
Source: Rotoworld
Always proofread. It’s an obnoxious truth and one which I practice knowing my writing desperately needs a second pass. You ever go back and read your old high school or college essays? I read one of them a few years after graduating, and my god. I managed to be both full of bluster and pomposity. You ever want to read a 15 page attempt to prove that Wire was the only band able to live up to its genre of origin, the semantically troubled “punk?” If you are a wrong person living sinfully and said, “Hey, that would be interesting actually,” let me remind you that I was 21 when I wrote that essay. You don’t want to read that trash.
Also, my computer died and ate it, and I saved nothing on a cloud. It’s gone, living only in my embarrassed nightmares.
Leaving off an apostrophe and a “t” creates a beautiful swirl of mind-crunching when trying to synthesize the information. Credit for the hallucinatory quality of that penultimate sentence.
As if we didn’t know this blurber was having a tough night, the very next chronological blurb:
Flowery Diction
Despite walking two and allowing a run, David Robertson recorded his 13th save Tuesday against the White Sox.
It was an 11-9 game, so it was only right that Robertson made things interesting in the ninth. In all, the Mets bullpen allowed six runs in 4 1/3 innings tonight. If they’re going to have a shot of rallying this year, upgrading the relief corps is a month.
Source: Rotoworld
A shout-out to all blurbists everywhere. Unless you’re a bot, in which case, go away. Two blurbs in a row with broken grammar, and this one with what looks like an auto-corrected word. Editing software can be really great, but word-prediction programs create these broken sentences.
Anyone who believes writing blurbs is well-paid or laid back need to go lie down somewhere, preferably your least favorite piece of furniture. If you’re outside with no options, just sit down on the ground, only you can’t use anything to prop your up your back. No arms, no objects. You need to hold the sitting pose for maybe an hour, and if you slouch you have to start over. If you’re jacked and have a great core, instead of sitting, you have to lie down and miss a day of aerobic exercise, and you have to eat like 3 donuts and a hot pocket. The point is you’re uncomfortable.
Moderating chatrooms, sending email for a living, writing copy, writing blurbs – these positions require a level of consistency and focus that people often attain in elusive bits and bouts. The stakes are high but they feel low. Your job is boring until you almost miss a big thing, and then it’s stressful and you begin to wonder if you’re focusing on a topic that is meaningless to all else on this earth.
All this to say that this looks like text-to-speech. Otherwise, I don’t know how “much” turns into “month.” Text to speech is not be trusted, friends, and this is a non-egregious example.
Flowery Diction
[CJ] Abrams went 2-for-4 with a solo home run and an additional run scored in Saturday’s 9-6 loss against the Cardinals.
Abrams pegged Steven Matz for a solo shot in the third inning — his first home run since June 21 — and turned in his fourth straight multi-hit performance. Over that span, Abrams is 9-for-18 (.500) with six runs scored, two RBI and four stolen bases.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
He did what to Steven Matz?
Q&Q
Kyle Schwarber went 1-for-5 with a solo homer on Tuesday against the Brewers.
Kyle Schwarber greeted Julio Teheran with a 386-foot bomb in the bottom of the first inning. Sadly, that would be all the noise Schwarber would make on Tuesday, and he is now hitting .189/.313/.449 on the season. While that is surely not what many fantasy managers had in mind when they selected him on draft day, his 26 homers and 57 RBI makes stomaching his poor batting average a bit easier.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
I’m not sure people are stomaching a Rob Deere-ian season in 2023. Remember last season, when the first two or three months had the league using a dead ball that drove all hitter’s batting averages down to the .220’s? Remember when I just hyperbolized and summarized a nuanced argument about the league tampering with the ball in the last sentence? Remember when you started reading this article? That must have been nice. A lucid mind, unfettered with this inanity.
Speaking of Rob Deere, I don’t give two hoots about a player chasing a .400 batting average. Give me Max Muncy and Kyle Schwarber battling to see who can best emulate Deere’s incredible sub-.190 BA 30+ homer season. I want it messy, and also to troll all the Three True Outcomes Haters. So many bad columns will be born from this competition of powerful futility.
By the by, Schwarber was ranked 62 on the Razzball player rater, but I doubt you can get anything good from in a trade unless it’s a league that omits batting average. Fun to think that people used to hate on Adam Dunn, while true heads knew that Beefcake Burly was ahead of his time.
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award
Tyler Wells was torched for five runs over two innings on Tuesday in a loss to the Dodgers.
Wells was chased early after serving up six hits, including a three-run homer to Jason Hayward, in his shortest outing of the season. He finished with only two strikeouts and also handed out a pair of free passes. He’ll carry a serviceable 3.54 ERA, 0.98 WHIP and 105/26 K/BB ratio across 106 2/3 innings (18 starts) into a tough road tilt on Sunday against the division-rival Rays.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
Serviceable. A serviceable pitching performance in 2023 is now 3.54 ERA, 0.98 WHIP and 105/26 K/BB ratio across 106 2/3 innings (18 starts)? I thought we established a 4.20-ish ERA as serviceable on Rotoworld?
That is a fabulous set of digits there. I am salivating. If those ratios were a person riding a float during Mardi Gras, they’d have died of suffocation under 10 tons of beaded necklaces.
A thirst trap labeled as serviceable raises my hackles and again has me asking if a few people on staff at Rotoworld have been following my obsession with their usage of “serviceable.” I’m sure they don’t though. I have no idea how many people actually read this here article. There are so many on this website, and they’re all written so well by wise, attractive, and generally not smelly people. I never asked Grey. Maybe I will.
I probably don’t want to know, though. Better to create with no expectations.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque
Tarik Skubal was tagged for seven runs in four innings by the Royals on Tuesday.
Skubal’s velocity was well up during his rehab stint and in his first major league start July 4, when he averaged 96.7 mph with his fastball. In his second start, though, that dropped to 95.7 mph. Tonight, he was at 95.2 mph, and his slider fell off even further. Perhaps he still didn’t deserve to give up seven runs, considering that he allowed only five hard-hit balls and one walk. However, that extra velocity led to some additional margin for error that he’s quickly lost. We’d stick with him for Sunday’s start against the Padres, but if he’s not better then, mixed leaguers could move on.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
No one “deserves” anything bad that happens to them, besides the people who go out of their way to harm others. I’m assuming Skubal doesn’t have any skeletons in his closet, so once again I’m begging people to stop writing like this (or how I’m writing, to be honest). If Skubal had burned down a high school, or started a sex slave cult, or paid for Twitter Blue, or was Trevor Bauer, then sure, have at him.
But baseball has a finite amount of fielders in a game, and the chaos we attempt to carve our reality around cares nothing for exit velocity or launch angle of a squib. When I’m angry at life and one of my pitchers gets shelled, I’ll sometimes scroll through MLB’s user-unfriendly app and check the contact quality and/or defensive lapse that could have contributed to such an atrocity on my ratios. Nothing changes. My ratios are melted. I will find no scoring decision to turn a hit into an error. I am powerless, as we all are to the Official Scorers of Major League Baseball.
Some errors aren’t errors. Some errors are hits, like when a fielder loses a ball in the sun. That’s an error, you monsters! I’m not asking for perfection. Fielders cannot be everywhere a ball is hit, otherwise, it’s the home run derby. No one would watch that sport.
Tarik Skubal gave up those runs. The contact he gave up was legitimate. We need not explain away such results.
We can wish for different outcomes while lamenting the truth of our reality in a way that does not pre-suppose humanity’s supposed divine right to succeed.
Or we can yell at middle relievers when they allow all their inherited runners to score.
Which shall you choose this week, blurbers and blurbees?
