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. I have noticed a lot of RCL talk in the comments and on the message boards of my many, many, many RCLs so I thought this would be a great place to do some crowdsourcing, do a venting and maybe make the RCL experience better for everyone. The move to FanTrax has had a few bumps, but overall I think it’s gone well. If we can provide everyone with some answers and maybe chase down FanTrax with a couple gripes, I think everyone will benefit. I’ve got a list of complaints I’ve seen as well as some answers, feel free to add your complaints and frustrations to the comments and we’ll work through them together. Grab your complaining shoes and let’s go for a stroll.
1) My team page only shows me Year-To-Date stats, why can’t I see today’s stats without changing it every, single time?
This one is pretty easy and brings us to a very handy spot on the FanTrax page that I think will answer a lot of questions for people. If you go hover over “TEAM” you’ll see a “MY ALERTS & PREFERENCES” section, click on that and you’ll see a ton of options…maybe too many. The preference we’re interested in here is under “Team Roster Screen”. 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.
Further still you’ll arrive at the Email Preferences. 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 remember to hit “SAVE”.
2) Are waiver claims different than they were on ESPN?
Kinda. We actually caught a settings issue during day 1. We had the leagues set up to lock a player for 24 hours after they were dropped. This meant you couldn’t even put in a waiver claim on them. That has since been fixed. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.
3) What about add/drops during the day?
This one is absolutely different. ESPN had your entire lineup lock at the start of the FIRST game of the day. That was always fun on Patriot’s Day when the Sawx play at 11 AM and everyone on the West Coast wakes up at the crack of noon to see their lineups locked for the day. Well, those days are gone on FanTrax, for better or worse. In one regard, it was kinda nice to knock out all the next day’s add/drops right when lineups locked. Now, each individual player locks one minute before their games. So, if you have a player going at 10 pm and they aren’t in the lineup, you can drop them and maybe pick up the player that is in for them, thus not losing your ABs. This is great for those Joc Pederson types that may be in a platoon situation and can easily be added and dropped to waivers. Speaking of waivers again, a players goes to waivers if they are on your team for one lineup period. Gone now is the 24 hour loophole of ESPN. You can add and drop a player to your heart’s content up until they are locked and they will go back to the Free Agent pool. As soon as they are locked in for a lineup period though, they hit waivers.
4) Where do I find how many moves I’ve made?
Team -> Team Info will provide you with a list of all the teams in your league and how many remaining moves each team has.
5) Where can I see how many Innings Pitched each team has so far?
OK, so this one stinks. The only place I know to find this is by going to each team’s team page and clicking the Min/Max section. It would be nice if we could find this somewhere more easily accessible and I will mention this to FanTrax.
Those are the biggest complaints I’ve heard and seen, if you have more, let me hear them! There’s a chance myself, or another friendly commenter, or Cram will know the answer and help you out. If not, I’ll run it up the flagpole at FanTrax and try to get you an answer.
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 could be because I had to autodraft my team thanks to Grey changing the draft time 2 days before the draft. (#notbitter) Or it could be because I just couldn’t fit it in anywhere else. 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:
| GREY: | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | W | SV | ERA | WHIP | K |
| Smoke | 1065 | 316 | 951 | 144 | 0.2697 | 76 | 86 | 3.474 | 1.166 | 1193 |
| malamoney | 1154 | 292 | 1051 | 147 | 0.281 | 82 | 19 | 3.532 | 1.23 | 1240 |
| Cram It | 927 | 273 | 883 | 118 | 0.2731 | 89 | 101 | 3.326 | 1.135 | 1317 |
| Rudy Gamble | 1172 | 300 | 1133 | 110 | 0.2787 | 78 | 110 | 3.362 | 1.175 | 1298 |
| Son | 986 | 305 | 976 | 150 | 0.2673 | 82 | 108 | 3.646 | 1.2 | 1337 |
| Viz | 1065 | 344 | 1131 | 131 | 0.2711 | 79 | 114 | 3.556 | 1.206 | 1218 |
| Lance | 1114 | 307 | 995 | 156 | 0.2714 | 87 | 64 | 3.316 | 1.155 | 1357 |
| MB | 1102 | 336 | 1209 | 122 | 0.2693 | 82 | 79 | 3.343 | 1.152 | 1248 |
| Ralph Lifshitz | 1123 | 328 | 1127 | 136 | 0.2737 | 77 | 135 | 3.299 | 1.142 | 1187 |
| MattTruss | 1142 | 312 | 1076 | 179 | 0.2766 | 100 | 0 | 3.455 | 1.156 | 1356 |
| Tehol | 944 | 315 | 978 | 114 | 0.2607 | 84 | 116 | 3.672 | 1.254 | 1411 |
| Team Albright | 910 | 263 | 903 | 136 | 0.2678 | 82 | 112 | 3.561 | 1.215 | 1316 |
| GREY: | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | W | SV | ERA | WHIP | K | TOTAL |
| MattTruss | 10 | 7 | 8 | 12 | 10 | 12 | 1 | 7 | 8 | 10 | 85 |
| Lance | 8 | 6 | 6 | 11 | 7 | 10 | 3 | 11 | 9 | 11 | 82 |
| Ralph Lifshitz | 9 | 10 | 9 | 6.5 | 9 | 2 | 12 | 12 | 11 | 1 | 81.5 |
| MB | 7 | 11 | 12 | 4 | 4 | 6.5 | 4 | 9 | 10 | 5 | 72.5 |
| Rudy Gamble | 12 | 4 | 11 | 1 | 11 | 3 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 6 | 70 |
| Viz | 5.5 | 12 | 10 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 10 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 63.5 |
| Cram It | 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 8 | 11 | 6 | 10 | 12 | 8 | 63 |
| malamoney | 11 | 3 | 7 | 9 | 12 | 6.5 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 4 | 61.5 |
| Son | 4 | 5 | 4 | 10 | 2 | 6.5 | 7 | 2 | 5 | 9 | 54.5 |
| Tehol | 3 | 8 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 9 | 11 | 1 | 1 | 12 | 53 |
| Smoke | 5.5 | 9 | 3 | 8 | 5 | 1 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 2 | 51.5 |
| Team Albright | 1 | 1 | 2 | 6.5 | 3 | 6.5 | 9 | 3 | 3 | 7 | 42 |
| RUDY: | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | W | SV | ERA | WHIP | K |
| Smoke | 29.4 | 29 | 25.1 | 35.3 | 28.2 | 15.1 | 9.4 | 16.8 | 15.2 | 13.8 |
| malamoney | 42.8 | 21.2 | 24.6 | 32.5 | 56.5 | 3.1 | 5 | 18 | 14.3 | 3.7 |
| Cram It | 18.5 | 25.9 | 22.4 | 34.5 | 38.3 | 19.1 | 9.4 | 21 | 22.5 | 15.1 |
| Rudy Gamble | 49.5 | 33.7 | 45.5 | 18.7 | 69.1 | 16.2 | 23.3 | 20.9 | 27.4 | 20.7 |
| Son | 27.2 | 35.4 | 28.9 | 47.5 | 22 | 16.2 | 15 | 8.9 | 11 | 12.2 |
| Viz | 20.8 | 41.8 | 39.2 | 33.6 | 31.5 | 17.9 | 26 | 11.3 | 10.2 | 17.8 |
| Lance | 29.3 | 27.8 | 22.5 | 33.5 | 34.7 | 16 | 5.3 | 17.1 | 19.7 | 18.8 |
| MB | 18.4 | 31.5 | 29 | 19.4 | 40.9 | 14.7 | 4.8 | 15.7 | 15.4 | 12.4 |
| Ralph Lifshitz | 10.8 | 18.2 | 9 | 24.2 | 34.9 | 17.1 | 21.4 | 18.2 | 11.2 | 12.4 |
| MattTruss | 13.4 | 22.5 | 12.6 | 43.3 | 51.2 | 17 | 0 | 20.8 | 20.4 | 13.6 |
| Tehol | 15.8 | 31.3 | 21 | 19.5 | 20.4 | 3.9 | 20.1 | 7.6 | 3.2 | 7.4 |
| Team Albright | 14.6 | 20.2 | 16.7 | 32.5 | 30.3 | 0.4 | 20.5 | 14.8 | 8.4 | 0.5 |
| RUDY: | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | W | SV | ERA | WHIP | K | TOTAL |
| Rudy Gamble | 12 | 10 | 12 | 1 | 12 | 8 | 11 | 11 | 12 | 12 | 101 |
| Cram It | 6 | 5 | 5 | 9 | 8 | 12 | 6 | 12 | 11 | 9 | 83 |
| Viz | 7 | 12 | 11 | 8 | 5 | 11 | 12 | 3 | 3 | 10 | 82 |
| Lance | 9 | 6 | 6 | 7 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 7 | 9 | 11 | 71 |
| Smoke | 10 | 7 | 8 | 10 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 69 |
| MattTruss | 2 | 4 | 2 | 11 | 10 | 9 | 1 | 10 | 10 | 7 | 66 |
| Son | 8 | 11 | 9 | 12 | 2 | 7 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 66 |
| MB | 5 | 9 | 10 | 2 | 9 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 8 | 6 | 60 |
| malamoney | 11 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 11 | 2 | 3 | 8 | 6 | 2 | 59 |
| Ralph Lifshitz | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 7 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 53 |
| Tehol | 4 | 8 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 8 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 36 |
| Team Albright | 3 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 9 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 34 |
Somehow Grey managed to draft the worst team using his own projections as well as Rudy’s, the rare dip of dread! I’m not sure how that happened, but I will say, this obviously doesn’t take into account any in-season moves at all, of which, Grey is great.
Rudy, naturally, drafted the best team according to Point Shares. Rudy obviously knows how to follow his own rankings
I’m pretty happy to have come out on top when using Grey’s projections. My pre-draft rankings were a combination of Grey, Rudy, RCL ADP data with my own guys getting a bit of a boost (Albies, Acuna, Devers, etc, none of which I got thanks to an aggressive draft room) My autodraft was pretty goofy going eight straight offensive players and then basically seven straight pitchers, but no closers. I’ve been trying to buy any I can but not even Tanaka for Ziegler is getting any takers. Tough crowd. I’ve got my work cut out for me, but I don’t think I’m dead in the water here.
I usually look for teams that wind up in the five in both projections as strong contenders coming out of the draft. Lance checks in at 2nd and 4th. With a couple of RCL seasons under his belt I’d look for Lance to be pushing for a top spot at the end of the year.
Ralph and Cram will be right in the mix as well, they always are. The three of us seem to have the same team issues, being a little short on power. That’s not a spot I love being in in these leagues.
Check back all season for updates on the ‘Perts. You should also be able to snoop on the transactions for the league HERE. That may come in handy for your other leagues!
TRADES
All the trades that have gone down in the past week. Public ridicule is not only allowed, but encouraged.
| DATE | LEAGUE | DETAILS |
| 3/26/2018 | FCL |
Kid Unger traded Zack Greinke to Backdoor Sliders for Matt Carpenter & Willie Calhoun
|
| 3/27/2018 | Crab Army |
Bricks traded A.J. Pollock to Blue Waffle Crabs for Zack Greinke
|
No love for Zack Greinke it seems as he was traded away twice this past week. I like the Pollock return. Time will tell on the Calhoun trade, but it almost paid instant dividends with Delino’s injury.
Finally, if you’re leading your RCL after four days, pat yourself on the back. It’s going to be a long road though, so don’t celebrate too long or you’ll miss out on the next Keynan Middleton.
Want to be Matt’s Twitter pal? That’s kinda creepy, but you can follow him here: @MattTruss
