Avoiding The Blurbstomp – The Talented Mr. Cowser

The Tortoise and the Hare is a tale as old as time, even if it isn’t sung by everyone’s True Grandmother Angela Lansbury. The hare is lean, lithe, and lightning fast. In comparison, it seems the tortoise is loafing, langorous, and locomotively lugubrious. The hubris-pilled hare challenges the tortoise to a race, giving little stock to the tired tenacity of said tortoise. We all know how this ends: The Hare was later found shot in the woods near Tortoise’s home, a large hammer found near his body. The tortoise continues to live a long, fruitful life, having been cleared of any wrongdoing by a court made of moles and squirrels. Perhaps his crime will never catch up to him.

As we close in on one month of fantasy baseball, every manager is looking at their team and seeing either a tortoise or a hare. Teams off to fast starts may fall prey to the Hare’s myopic pride, making no savvy pick ups or trades and fading into obscurity. Teams off to slow starts may think of themselves as the Tortoise, a slow burn whose positive statistical regression will take a few months to show dominance. In reality, both of these teams are probably wrong. Teams with fast starts crash and burn, but sometimes they annoyingly keep the crown for six months. Teams currently in the cellar can climb out in two weeks or stay there for a season that feels like an eternity of agony.

As you read your daily blurbs, remind yourself that there is a sweet spot between optimism and pessimism. We need not throw out months of draft prep by doing something like dropping Jose Caballero for Jon Berti after two games played because your humble author has both an itchy trigger finger and a brain full of sloppy porridge. You don’t need to do something so mind-numbingly short-sighted that you have to publicly shame yourself to get rid of that empty anger such an action creates.

Be the Tortoise and the Hare. Italicize that conjunction and you’ll be Bradley Cooper in Limitless, just without the pills (unless you take pills, which I do too, which is fine and normal for some people, but habit-forming for others.)

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!

Flowery Diction

Jackson Holliday picked up his first MLB hit while going 1-for-4 with a run scored in a win over the Brewers.

The ball was well hit at 101.4 mph off the bat and will certainly be a weight lifted off Holliday’s shoulders. He would later come around to score the go-ahead run. However, the 20-year-old did also strike out twice and has nine strikeouts and no walks in his first four games. He’s an incredibly talented player and should be rostered in all fantasy formats, but he’s not the currently the player we know he will become. He had just 12 home runs last season and it’s realistic to expect him to put up 10-12 home runs and 10 steals this year while hitting near the bottom of the Orioles’ lineup. Expecting more might be tough for a player this young with just one season of professional baseball under his belt.

Source: Rotoworld

Let us begin with our first inevitable phenom call-up of 2024. The hype machine roared loudly for this apple-cheeked individual, and for good reason in real life baseball terms. One thing that seemed to elude fantasy writers (besides Grey it seems) in the drumbeat leading to his debut was his ceiling for the current season. Drooling stashers would read blurb after blurb regarding his ascension to the majors with nary a place to hang a statistical hat. This blurb sums it all up better than I ever could, but let’s paraphrase the flavor text for fun:

Holliday should feel good about getting his first hit, and then he scored a run. He also has a 9:0 K:BB ratio. However, he should be owned everywhere, even though he’s not his projected future self. He’ll probably have a 12HR/10SB line with almost decent counting stats. We should all lower our expectations.

Hex Enduction Hour

Freddy Peralta limited the Orioles to one run in six innings and struck out 11 in the Brewers’ 11-1 rout Friday.

The lone run came on a Colton Cowser homer. Peralta has six career games with 11 or more strikeouts, four of which have come since last 13 starts. He still seems like a bigger injury risk than most, but he’s performing like a top-10 pitcher right now.

Source: Rotoworld

What’s this, a blurb writer casually invoking an injury to a top pitcher? This, my good friends, is a blurb whose flavor text soaks in a witch’s cauldron, bubbling over with the froth of jealousy and Anchoring Bias. Anchoring Bias is significant in the world of fantasy baseball. We read one piece of information regarding a player before our fantasy drafts, and we hold onto believing our truth will be borne unto our reality. It’s not recency or confirmation bias, as it’s a bias based on one specific piece of information that calcifies in our skull and becomes a truth.

Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque

White Sox’ general manager Chris Getz told reporters on Friday that Luis Robert Jr. (hip) is trending toward a six-week absence.

The timeline that the club gave earlier in the week was that the 26-year-old superstar would miss around 6-8 weeks, so it’s encouraging to hear that he’s trending toward the quicker side of that return. It’s much more optimistic than the 3-4 months that Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported that the White Sox had mentioned privately. Barring any setbacks, it sounds like he could be back in action before the end of May.

Source: Rotoworld

We love Bob Nightengale at the Blurbstomp HQ. His stubbornly inaccurate reporting inspired this category of blurbstomps. I believe that Bob’s reporting should be followed in order to leverage his botched scoops for trading purposes. Before this bit of clarity, you could have traded for Robert at a discount if the owner took Bob’s 3-4 month timeline seriously. Bob Nightengale is the audience plant at an old West flim-flam show claiming that this Magic Tonic cured his cancer and his shingles, and it can be yours for only $0.75! Which was a lot in the Old West! You could buy a horse for a nickel! A plot of land set you back twelve pennies! I’m still shouting! Maybe I’m an auctioneer now?! What happens when I switch the exclamation point and question mark!? Did you read that differently?!? See you next week, and until, please help make me stop!!??!!