Welcome my good and decent Razzball Commenter League managers. How were your first four days of fun? Oh, you drafted a top starter who got absolutely shelled? Well, Grey warned you! I kid, I kid, it’s one start, you’ll be fine. In the meantime, pony up to the stream-o-nator and grab a streamer to balance things out (hopefully). Four days isn’t really enough to call a week, but nonetheless, VinWins has scoured the data while Rudy’s RCLbot oils its gears and gets ready to start churning out data. I also have a recap of all the RCL draft data for you to peruse. Number Nerds…assemble! Also this week, I’ll be giving you a couple of FanTrax tips I’ve found helpful for setting up your team page, give you a link to the ‘Perts League standings, and cover all of the trades in the RCLs so far. For those who are new to these updates this is where I will typically bring you stats, trades, weekly leaders, and a look at the overall standings. Let’s go ahead and dive int this week with some draft data!
DRAFTS BY THE NUMBERS
Our RCL ADP Sheet is all completed. Feel free to open that up and peruse the numbers as you read along. Here are some highlights from Draft SZN (Thanks again to VinWins for several of these nuggets):
- 44 Razzball Commenter Leagues were created this year for a total of 528 teams
- RCLers drafted 480 different players this fantasy baseball season
- 214 players were drafted in every, single RCL
- Rhys Hoskins (271) and Edwin Diaz (263)had the highest pick differentials thanks to injuries. Anthony Volpe saw a late surge that pushed him as high as pick 74 earning him a pick differential of 226. Vaughn Grissom’s demotion earned him honors in the opposite direction with a 222 pick differential.
- Ronald Acuna Jr., Kyle Tucker, and Yordan Alvarez had the smallest differential, all within five picks and all in the first round.
- There were 23 different first round picks.
- There were 8 consensus first-rounders (Ohtani, Acuna, Judge, J-Ramm Turner, Julio Rodriguez, Tucker, and Yordan.)
- Judge and Ohtani went as late as pick 8 in some leagues and went number one in 26 others. In fact, those are the only two of the top six to go later than pick seven. Juan Soto was a first round pick in every league but one…where he went 13th overall.
- Mookie was the next highest first-rounder, going in 38 leagues and Vlad followed that with 26 leagues.
- Corbin Burnes was the highest ADP pitcher going in the first round 18 times and falling as low as pick 27.
- 60 players were drafted in only one league.
- These players were all somehow missed in only one league: Anthony Rendon, CJ Abrams, Craig Kimbrel, Esteury Ruiz, Jarred Kelenic, Jason Adam, Ketel Marte, Kyle Finnegan, Merrill Kell, Miles Mikolas, Sonny Gray
FANTRAX TIPS
Next up, I want to give you a rundown of how I set my team settings to be more like other leagues I play in and/or just make life easier by reducing clicks. You might not find all of these useful, but even just knowing where to go to change these settings is handy in case you stumble upon something else. Also, if you have found any handy settings that I missed, please share. Likewise, if you have some FanTrax gripes, I’m happy to pass those on to my contacts at FanTrax. They are typically pretty responsive to site feedback.
The very first thing I do with my team page is set it up so I’m not looking at YTD stats. Maybe you’re into that, but I prefer to see today’s stats when I go to my team. I’ll click on a player to see their overall stats if I need to. To do this is pretty easy and brings us to a very handy spot on the FanTrax page. If you go hover over “TEAM” you’ll see a “Settings” section, click on that and you’ll be taken to a page with very few settings. However, clicking on “General” brings you to a page full of options…maybe too many. The setting we’re interested in here is under “TEAM ROSTER”. Find the section for “Default timeframe” and change that to “Period”. Period is the section of scoring for your league. If you’re in a weekly league, each period is one week, for the RCLs, each period is one day.
This section contains a lot of things that will make your navigation easier and result in fewer clicks. For example, clicking the slider bar for “Automatically submit lineups” will make it so you don’t have to hit that little “SUBMIT” button after every lineup change. I also unclicked the bar for “Show first unlocked lineup period by default”. This annoyed me that late at night when I wanted to check on my team it would switch to tomorrow’s period and I would have to click back. Just a personal preference.
If you scroll down to the “Players” section you can change the number of players shown on the players screen to 50, 100, or 200 instead of 20. This reduces a lot of clicking through pages and I’ve gone with 50 myself.
Next, we can adjust our notification settings. Once again, maneuver up to “TEAM” and right under “Settings” you’ll see “Notifications”. FanTrax seems to default everything to push notifications…except for letting you know about players heading to waivers. THAT it seems to think you need an email about. In the RCLs, this may cause your inbox to implode, so you probably want to turn that one off. If you do want to know about trades, message board posts, or trade block changes in the league, this is where you come to be alerted of those things. Adjust to suit and everything should auto-save.
TOP TEAMS
The RCL Bots are far from being ready to pul RCL data, but VinWins combed through all the leagues to find the highest scoring teams after four days of play and here they are:
Coolwhip ( PERTS ) 109.5
The Hippos ( ECFBL ) 103.5
Starfish & Coffee ( RCL 33 ) 103
Nordberg ( RCL 5 ) 100.5
It’s always nice to get out to a hot start, but I’m not victory lapping have two teams on this list just yet. Coolwhip, however, has filled his swimming pool with Coolwhip and we haven’t seen him since last night. These are the only four teams over the 100 points mark so far, so, congrats on the hot starts!
Vin found a couple other hot starts as well as the weekly stats found below:
Top Hitting team
Area Area Men ( RCL 37 ) 35 RUNS/ 12 HR/ 39 RBI/ 7 SB/ .360
Top pitching team
The Hippos ( ECFBL ) 45 IP/ 6 WINS/ 53 K/ 3 SVS/ 2.20/1.09
Vin ran his numbers and calculated that the Team of the Week this week was my ECFBL team, who just nudged out Coolwhip. I’ll defer honors to Coolwhip though as he’s having too much fun to bring him down. I will also refrain from naming my own TOW as it gives me another week to work on a TOW graphic.
Each week we’ll peek in at our resident ‘perts to see who is laying claim to best “expert” RCLer in the land. We’ll take notes, check the standings and generally stalk them. The heading is also hyperlink, so feel free to follow along as we go.
Again, it’s only four days and we already covered Coolehip’s amazing start. Lucky for me and Son, there’s nowhere to go but up!
Each week we’ll also take a look at the top ten overall standings in our other Razzball sponsored league, the RazzSlam. This is our NFBC Best Ball league with managers from all across the industry, from content providers to fans and readers just like you.
Todd Clark jumps out to the early RazzSlam lead with 480 points in four days. Grimey appears to be holding down a spot in the ten for commentators everywhere.
TRADES
All the trades that have gone down in the past week. Public ridicule is not only allowed, but encouraged.
| DATE | LEAGUE | DETAILS |
|---|---|---|
| 3/17/2023 | RCL 12 | Blue Squadron 12 traded Alexis Diaz to Kwantum Leap for CJ Abrams |
| 3/20/2023 | RCL 2 | Boh traded Pablo Lopez to cjsullivan3 for Grayson Rodriguez |
| 3/29/2023 | RCL 15 | Stumble Drunks traded Jonathan India to West Foundation for Merrill Kelly |
| 3/30/2023 | Original Recipe | Original Schmohawks traded Shane McClanahan to Trea Knobturners for Luis Robert |
| 3/30/2023 | RCL 29 | Ashley Schaeffer BMW traded Jose Berrios to Sillysmacked for Alex Lange |
| 4/1/2023 | RCL 29 | Longballers traded Rowdy Tellez & Sonny Gray to Ashley Schaeffer BMW for Jorge Polanco & Chris Bassitt |
| 4/2/2023 | RCL 34 | New Team 7 traded Ke’Bryan Hayes & Kevin Gausman to Vin 34 for Kendall Graveman & Alec Bohm |
| 4/2/2023 | RCL 25 | Night Boat to Thairo traded Ryan Helsley to KumaDeviL for Kevin Gausman |
We’ve had eight trades so far in the RCL preseason and early season. That doesn’t count the one that processed early Monday morning and will count in next week’s roundup. Early season trades are always interesting to look back on. Give me Alexis Diaz all day in the RCLs. I feel like I should try to take more advantage of early drafts and managers who don’t understand the value of a good closer in an RCL. Trading for Grayson Rodriguez is quite sad in hindsight. Vin got away with some robbery in RCL 34 as he traded Graveman before he became…badman and I’m not even sure he’ll see a save chance before Hendriks returns. Nabbing Gausman in the process is gravy. New Team 7 took over an auto-drafted team with about 30 starters, so trading below value is maybe to be expected here.
WEEKLY LEADERS
The best of the best from the week that was.
Here is how the stat leaders have shaken out so far:
AT BATS – 199 The Sultan (RCL 20) & 199 Diamond Archers (RCL 37)
HITS – 66 Vegans (FCL)
HOME RUNS – 12 Area Area Men ( RCL 37 )
STOLEN BASES – 9 (11 teams)
RUNS – 35 Area Area Men ( RCL 37 ) & 35 jjbanks (RCL 14)
RBI – 39 Area Area Men ( RCL 37 )
AVERAGE – .3642 Ghost of Yogi Berra (RCL 27)
WINS – 7 MarmosDad (RCL 15) & 7 Tomateros (Crab Army)
SAVES – 6 Kitten Mittens (RCL 1)
STRIKEOUTS 67 tkdc (RCL 29) in 49.67 IP
ERA (20 IP Min) – 0.64 Boh (RCL 25) in 28.33 IP
WHIP (20 IP Min) – 0.593 Highland Homers (RCL 15) in 30.33 IP
Eleven teams with nine steals in four games…we are going to crush the stolen base records this season and it’s going to be so much fun.
Want to be Matt’s Twitter pal? That’s kinda creepy, but you can follow him here: @MattTruss
