RCL Update: Four Days Of Fun

Welcome my good and/or decent Razzball Commenter League managers.  How were your first four days of fun? Oh, you drafted Giancarlo Stanton, Justin Upton and Daniel Murphy did you?  Welp, there’s always next year! I kid, I kid, the RCL format is actually one of the easier formats to recover from these types of things.  Just pony up to the Hitter-Tron and make due with batty calls for the next few weeks, you’ll be OK. This Razzball Commenter League update will be a little different than most.  Throughout the year I’ll be bringing you stats, trades, weekly leaders and overall standings. With only four days worth of data (and most of them half days at that) it’s really not worth diving into.  Our RCL bots are not up and running yet either, so there’s not much to look at just yet. Instead, this week, I’ll be giving you a couple of FanTrax tips I’ve found helpful along the way, go over a few trades from the past week and let you peak in on the ‘Perts League.  So, let’s get down to business, shall we? We shall!

FANTRAX TIPS

First things first, 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 “My Team Settings” section, click on that and you’ll see a ton of options…maybe too many.  Conversely, you can also click the little gear on your team page right beside the printer and download. Why you’re printing your team, I don’t know, that’s on you. The setting we’re interested in here is under “General” and then 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 less clicks.  For example, checking the box for “Automatically submit lineups” will make it so you don’t have to hit that little “SUBMIT” button after every lineup change.  I also unchecked the box 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 your scroll down to the “Players Screen” 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.  I also set the default to show hitters, that way my stats aren’t all mixed up.  It’s an extra click to go see the pitchers, but it’s easier for my brain to process them separately like how ESPN and Yahoo set it up.

Further still, you can check out the “Email” section of the settings.  This is nice if you do or don’t want to know about every trade, message board post or trade block change in the league.  Adjust to suit and everything should auto save.  Neat!

‘PERTY ‘PERTS

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.

I covered a lot of draft info in my last few pre-season RCL posts, but one thing I didn’t do was run the draft numbers for the ‘Perts League.  This is because we drafted the latest we possibly could, 10 PM ET on Opening Day Eve. Anyway, post-draft I took the draft results of the ‘Perts League and ran the projections for each team based on a) Grey’s projections and b) Rudy’s Pointshares.  The results and the corresponding roto standings can be seen below:

It looks like the defending champ is primed for a repeat!  Ralph is projected to just squeak by myself and Malamoney according to Grey’s projections and he’s projected to dominate according to Rudy’s projections.  Of course, none of this takes into account in-season moves or anything, but it’s still fun to see who “won” the draft. It’s no surprise Ralph is the one with the target on his back, I mean, have you seen the man’s Twitter timeline these days!?

TRADES

All the trades that have gone down in the past week.  Public ridicule is not only allowed, but encouraged.

Just a handful of trades this past week.  I love getting Jose Leclerc for Chris Archer.  Archer is barely RCL rosterable, nice work Joe!

Ugh, the news of Lindor visiting a foot and ankle specialist is so gross.  I have him in a couple of leagues and I’d probably make this deal right now as well.

Want to be Matt’s Twitter pal?  That’s kinda creepy, but you can follow him here: @MattTruss