Communication is fundamental when discussing baseball. Without communication, we wouldn’t talk about baseball. We wouldn’t talk about the filmography of an actor to our friends while watching a movie they’re in. We wouldn’t shake our heads and frown when a rival car does a rolling stop at a four-way intersection and cuts the line while pretending to be embarrassed or catatonic as their despised profile zooms by .05 seconds faster than if they stopped.
That’s what makes Yahoo’s decision to completely remove message boards for their fantasy funny and brutal. Message boards on the major sites used to be non-threaded stream-of-conscious blast ways, full of running jokes, unmasked awful trade proposals, and gifs. A few years ago they made the message boards threaded, which makes sense if it’s a bunch of people on a Discord server. Writing messages to friends and foes began to become stale, as everything started to look like an email chain. Then they removed GIFS, images, and basically anything one can embed on a message board.
The note from “management” stated that message boards were too difficult to maintain, but let’s face it: the fact that Yahoo! offers any service at this point, let alone a free one, is a miracle. I’m grateful for the gift we once had, and I appreciate you facing it with me. Surely we won’t end on a sour note. Much better to live in the memories of yore, when your team had to be checked on an honest-to-god computer. Or when Stat Tracker had the ability to ruin your life every single day. Why bask in negativity?
Because they replaced it with a knock-off Direct Message clone that has a repellent UI, and the tone of a Double Dare Physical Challenge. Just bright and shiny and awful. We have iMessage and whatever Android has. We have Twitter too (for now). Why do I need to monitor another messaging system that I assume is full of advertisements? If they did it to gas station pumps, anything is possible.
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
Elehuris Montero struggling in return to lineup. Montero went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts Sunday against the Mariners.
Montero started at third base for the second consecutive day since returning from a three-game absence caused by a thumb injury. He collected an RBI knock in Saturday’s matchup, but he has gone just 1-6 with three strikeouts since his return. Despite a 31.8 percent strikeout across 44 plate appearances on the season, Montero has maintained a .310/.341/.452 line.
Source: Rotowire
Small sample size is not your friend early in the season. Your fantasy team has become an extension of your soul, a homunculus waiting in the wings to either destroy your enemies or you. Just because a fellow has two bad games in a row does not mean he is struggling.
However.
Montero has already been told by Prospect Soul Crusher Bud Black that his defense needs a lot of work and that both his hitting and defense need to be solid for him to keep his starting position. So what happens with Montero?
Misses three games due to finger injury.
Goes hitless over three games
Commits two errors in most recent game.
He has been benched for the team’s last two games.
This is exactly how you crush a player’s motivation and confidence in one fell swoop. You tell a young player, “One false move, and you’re riding the pine.” No room for error(s), discipline is swift, and when you return your rhythm will be completely off. I get giving a guy a day or two to get his head on straight, but the Rockies blindfolded him, pushed him into a helicopter, and dropped him into the wilderness with only a bat and the paranoia that he is being hunted.
The Rockies aren’t the only team that employs this strategy, but it’s pervaded the team’s system for years, with the notable exceptions of Nolan Arenado, Chazz Noir, and Trevor Story. Every player is platooned, even if the splits are negligible. One gets the feeling that the Dick Monforts, John Fishers, and Bob Nuttigs of the world actively curse when one of their prospects shows they belong in the majors.
So here we find ourselves. The blurb is fine, but it sure helped me process a few of my very old and annoying Rockies takes. I have so many thoughts and ideas I still have to share with the world. In fact, I’ll use this paragraph to tell you that if you haven’t yet heard it, Boredoms album Super AE is maybe the greatest experimental music record I’ll ever hear. When you hear the scream in track 2 (and you’ll know the scream) you too will be stricken with a desire to create things yourself. And the drumming. My god the drumming.
I hope Monfort’s helicopter collides with Fisher’s and Nutting’s. They live of course, but their helicopters are ruined though, and they throw a tantrum and then a comet obliterates them.
Q & Q
Craig Mish of SportsGrid reports the Twins and right-hander Pablo Lopez are close to finalizing a four-year, 73.5 million contract extension.
Mish adds that the agreement is expected to be finalized soon. The 27-year-old right-hander has made the leap into an elite-caliber fantasy starter this season in his Minnesota debut, compiling a stellar 1.73 ERA, 0.81 WHIP and 33/6 K/BB ratio across 26 innings (four starts)…
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
This blurb is a liar and I love it.
Pablo Lopez last April: 23 IP/3 Wins/23:4 K:BB/0.39 ERA/1.66 FIP/2.73 xFIP
If you owned him in 2022, you had a fantastic start to the season. The blurbs and analysis last spring were cautionary though, making sure to remind FMLB’ers after every gorgeous start that the other shoe was going to drop, that the cat was going to get out of the bag, or at least out of its towel burrito (shout out to fellow feline followers, lord knows we’d like to just clip our maladjusted pet’s nails without having to straitjacket them with our mangiest beach towel, but some of us raise monsters, although the cats would argue we are the monsters. Eye of the beholder is a fine argument, but I clean their poop and pee and feed them for free. Cats are the animal kingdom’s landlords, sitting around and looking kind of miserable as they lazily prosper). A lot of the talk was about Lopez maybe getting traded, or how lucky he was, and they were right!
For the rest of 2022, Pablo Lopez threw 149.2 innings with 7 Wins/144:46 K:BB/4.45 ERA/4.05 FIP/3.68 xFIP
I hate it when they’re right in a situation where you can’t even enjoy the performance of a guy you got in the later rounds because he’s been Cinderella Pumpkin’ed to an early grave by fantasy analysts. The lurking specter of future correction to the mean is already in my head, I don’t need it tattooed on every billboard!
All that being said, I’m pleased Pablo Lopez got his bag, even if he reverts to his May-September mediocrity.
Q&Q
Marcus Semien crushed a grand slam in the seventh inning on Sunday, powering the Rangers to a 9-1 victory over the Astros in Houston.
Semien capped off a six-run uprising in the frame with his 365-foot (100.0 mph EV) blast off of Hector Neris. He also led off the ninth inning with a single, finishing the evening 2-5. The 32-year-old is off to a slow start at the dish again this season — slashing just .250/.279/.406 with a pair of homers, 12 RBI and one stolen base through his first 15 games.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
Ah yes, a slow start at the dish. Marcus Semien with a slow start at the dish. Let’s look under the hood here:
68 Plate Appearances/12 runs/2 HR/12 RBI/1 steal/.250/.279/.406
Maybe I’m in the minority in this one, but in 15 games this is a fine start. It’s okay. It is the Restaurant Menu Printed on 11×7 Office Depot Printer Paper of starts. Its boredom inspires negativity.
This is an easier analysis to write now that Semien has gone 4/2/4/0/.500/.667/1.500 in his past two games. Baseball is a slow and steady death march of statistical accumulation. Ignore all slow start posts, as I’ve said many times unless you’re using them to sell low. Sample sizes are laughably tiny this time of year, so take advantage of others as they would take advantage of you. One of my favorite proverbs, that.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque
Randal Grichuk (abdomen) will begin a minor league rehab assignment on Sunday with Triple-A Albuquerque.
Engel has been out since the middle of February after undergoing hernia surgery. He will need plenty of time to ramp up, so the rehab assignment is not expected to be short.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
I keep trying to figure out how auto-correct hit on the “Engel” instead of “Randal” or “Grichuk.” My other conspiracy theories about this blurb:
- This blurbist has Adam Engle’s (autocorrect made this “Engle” and now I’m worried that’s a verb) last name as a hotkey on their computer
- They were trying to type Randal, which is good. I think anyone named Randal should only be referred to by their first name, like Prince or Cher.
- Adam Engel saved them from a forest fire, pulling them out of their vehicle and sprinting with them on his back to safety.
Sorry about all the Rockies mentions this week, my eyes are also scalded with acid from the experience. I love the players, and whichever coaches are toiling against the tide of tanking.
Also, if anyone talks any more Cinderella Pumpkin regarding my brand new baby boy Mason Miller, I’m going to drop you like a glass slipper. He’s my everything and we love him. All of us.
