Some time in the last two weeks, a great schism occurred. It was silent, sweeping in with nary an announcement or erstwhile PR proclamation. The tapestry of our lives, the utter sauce to our specific pasta, altered with the stroke of fingers tapping on the loneliest keyboard: Rotoworld player notes were removed from the Yahoo fantasy baseball website.
Back in the halcyon days of the early 2000’s, one read those yellow sticky notes with the knowledge that a Yahoo staff member wrote them, a missive sent from inside the house, so to speak. ESPN had the same feature, but somewhere along the way, Yahoo must have sensed Rotoworld’s Blurb Dominance. Thus and so player blurbs were farmed out to Rotoworld, who was already successful in the instant blurb world we now inhabit.
This shift also happened with no notice. What then occurred from an optics standpoint (if there ever could be optics in fantasy baseball blurbs, my god what is happening to my life why I am making the choices I am continuing to make, we are all our own boiling ocean, aware of the doom but too stupid to change) was that any atrocious blurbs were accused of being written by “Yahoo” despite the Rotoworld source underneath each blurb.
It was a clean operation, made slightly dirtier when Yahoo introduced their vaunted Discussion feature for every blurb. I still don’t know why we need comments sections on every feature of every website, but I look forward to being able to comment on people’s shopping carts in Amazon with the appropriate false rage.
And now we are here. The end of the line.
Rotowire is now the sole author of blurbs for a website that, as far as I know, revolutionized the practice. I hope someone can verify that for me, as I’m both too young and too old to remember fantasy baseball sites that existed before Yahoo or ESPN. I’m also not willing to do the research, because this is the internet, where we don’t need to learn anything. Learning is for people who disagree with you on Twitter.
I’m happy to report that Rotowire’s blurbs have degraded slightly in quality since the sale of the brand a few years ago. Leave it to capitalism to continue to dismantle the things we enjoy.
In the meantime, keep in mind that your leaguemates who aren’t absolute freaks didn’t even notice the change, and you may be able to scoop players news from Rotoworld that Rotowire may miss. I’ve already noticed that Rotowire is not attempting to create blurbs the night the game occurs, which makes for confusing blurb news gathering.
While we have lost something most people did not know could die, we are blessed with the continuous fractured mazes that internet UI/UE provide. If fantasy baseball truly is a game of small numbers with a more level playing field than ever before, the angles remain. I’ll still read Rotoworld for this feature, but I’ll be covering more Rotowire and other sites moving forward for tasty morsels.
What is dead will never die. Goodbye, Rotoworld blurbs on Yahoo. I never loved you.
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
Joey Votto finished 0-for-4 with two strikeouts against the Brewers on Monday.
Votto has gone hitless in five straight starts and is 2-for-36 in his last 11 contests. The Reds aren’t going to pull the plug on him, but they probably will hold him out versus lefties until he heats up again.
Source: Rotoworld
For a website obsessed with establishing that hitters not getting a hit for two games is either a “mini-slump” or a “slump,” it sure is interesting to note the players not acquiring such labels. 2-for-36 is at the very least a mini-slump. It’s a dang drought. He’s showing bat malaise. Compare this to Jordan Walker or Christopher Morel blurbs and you’ll get the picture.
Also, in an industry inundated with hyphens, “hitless” somehow slipped through the cracks?
Does a “grizzled vet” like Votto get a pass from Big Blurb Media (I mean, yeah, he’s one of the best hitters in my lifetime), while we do not extend this nicehood to players of all sizes, shapes, and epochs. The threshold simply needs to be higher. I’m instituting my own hard and fast line in the sand: A player needs at the very least to have gone hitless in 51 at bats to be in a slump. I’ve seen 10 at bats used as proof that a player is in a slump. That’s offensive. Oh. Look at this next blurb below. Rats. 12 at bats is a slump?!
Flowery Diction
Jack Suwinski is absent from the Pirates’ lineup for Tuesday’s contest against the Guardians.
Suwinski has been an exceptionally-streaky hitter at the major-league level, and finds himself in the midst of an ice-cold spell at the moment, going 0-for-12 with five strikeouts in three games since the All-Star break. It’ll be lefty-masher Connor Joe taking over atop Pittsburgh’s lineup for Tuesday’s showdown against southpaw Logan Allen.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
Instead of Morel or Walker, Suwinski gets the Ice Cold treatment here. He went hitless…erm, hit-less in three games. What the holy heck. Can we accept failure in this society? Are we going to blow past robot umps and have robot players who are able to get one hit per game, and thus satisfy all fans of the games (and also the daily league/gambling sharks enraged when a human player does not do what their money said they would)?
My guess is yes, and my statement is, “I’m dead, leave me alone. Make sure to stay and watch the video advertisement on my tombstone, each view adds $0.0001 cent against my funeral debt.”
The future is going to be grand.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque
Esteury Ruiz (shoulder) will begin a minor league rehab assignment on Friday with Triple-A Las Vegas.
It’s a massive development for fantasy managers as the major leagues stolen base leader appears to be nearing a return to Oakland’s lineup. The 24-year-old speedster landed on the injured list back in early July with a right shoulder subluxation, but it sounds like he has a chance to return in early August, if not sooner.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
When this blurb was posted early on the evening July 26th, 2023, the MLB leader in steals was Ronald Acuna. The excitement is wonderful, as I would like every team to have a guy like Esteury to rip around the bases. There is a however coming, because as I told my child when she became scared at any sign of dramatic tension in her television show: “People find conflict interesting. No one would watch a show with no stakes, wherein the characters laze around and enjoy their time together.” They had already stopped listening to me and was creating more tears on behalf of Peppa Pig’s pet fish, whom they assumed would perish on the cross-town bus ride to the vet’s office. So…
However, citing Ruiz’s return as massive simply based on his stats is a bit sideways. If I own Esteury’s owner and I’ve already got the second-best 43 stolen bases, I am waiting for his first steal and dealing him to the team most desperate for steals in your league. Unless he magicks himself to another team, where he somehow hits atop the lineup despite his issues getting on base before his IL stint, I see him offering mediocre average with muted counting stats and a lot of steals.
I still don’t understand how fantasy teams can absorb a player like Esteury, as you truly have to get almost perfect performances out of most of your team to justify the lack of counting stats in runs/HR/RBI. He’s fun to own though. I should know. I owned him last year, and he didn’t even do anything.
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award
Jack Flaherty yielded three runs over five innings on Wednesday in a no-decision against the Diamondbacks.
Flaherty pitched well in potentially his final start in a Cardinals uniform, allowing just eight hits, including a sixth-inning homer by Emmanuel Rivera. He finished with four strikeouts and only issued a pair of walks. He’ll bring a respectable 4.43 ERA, 1.55 WHIP and 106/54 K/BB ratio across 109 2/3 innings (20 starts) into a home outing on Tuesday against the Twins, assuming he’s not moved at the trade deadline a few hours before that contest.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
This is interesting. Very interesting. If it looks like a trap, smells like a trap, and feels like a trap, it’s probably just that. However, much like the pirates in the Swiss Family Robinson, sometimes bloodlust takes over and the traps take everything from you. That movie messed me up when I was a tiny kid, probably the first not-animation film where people seemed to die. The tiger pit traps seemed necessary until dudes started pouring into them. It elicited a pathos I do not believe the filmmakers set out to draw forth my tiny boy brain. “Those guys are bad guys,” I kept saying, but then they’d play the tiger sound effect and probably the Wilheim Scream, and then never show what happens next.
I suppose you’re supposed to move on as you watch the pirates somehow get massacred by this family of Green Acres castaways, and even get excited as they die. My mind kept wondering, “What happened to them in the pit? How did the tiger kill them? How many pirates can a tiger consume in ten minutes? How many pirates can be eaten by a tiger in an hour?” I remember that the Swiss Family Robinsons have purposely starved the tigers to ensure everyone but the family proper is having a bad time. I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about any of this! I should be cheering on the massacre, and marvel at the Mousetrap-like island’s sheer killing efficiency. Instead, I just kept thinking about the tiger. And about the trap.
And this blurb is just that. “He’ll bring a respectable 4.43 ERA, 1.55 WHIP, and 106/54 K/BB ratio across 109 2/3 innings….” I see you Rotoworld. I see the word “respectable” next to that ERA and WHIP, I know you’re trying to whip me into a frenzy. The kind of thing where I’m so steamed I have an extreme sense memory reaction, and examine the implications at a granular level.
Not this time, Rotoworld. Not this time.
