Welcome my good and decent Razzball Commenter League managers. How were your first four days of fun? Oh, you drafted a team full of Nationals and Mets did you? Ouch, Adalberto Mondesi and Trevor Rosenthal too? 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 it’s really not worth diving into. Our RCL bots are not up and running yet, so there’s not much to look at just yet. I have gone through each league and I can report on the teams with the highest total scores so far. That should wet our appetite for next week. Also this week, I’ll be giving you a couple of FanTrax tips I’ve found helpful for setting up your team page, go over a few trades from the past week, give you the final draft numbers 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 you 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.
Next, we can adjust our notification settings. Once again, maneuver up to “TEAM” and right under “My Team Settings” you’ll see “My Notification Settings”. 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.
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:
- 46 Razzball Commenter Leagues were created this year for a total of 552 teams
- RCLers drafted 469 (nice) different players this fantasy baseball season
- 193 players were drafted in every, single RCL
- Eloy Jimenez and Framber Valdez had the highest pick differentials (Eloy was darn near a first rounder in one league, pick 13 and then went undrafted after the injury. That’s such a bad beat. I am so curious how this Framber injury plays out.)
- Ronald Acuna Jr. had the smallest, he either went 1st or 2nd in every league.
- There were 22 different first round picks.
- Mookie Betts went as late as pick 7, Fernando Tatis went as late as pick 6
- There were 6 consensus first rounders (Acuna, Tatis, Soto, Betts, Trout and Turner)
- Jacob deGrom was not one of them. He had a pick spread of anywhere from #1 overall to #16 overall.
TOP TEN
| TEAM | LEAGUE | PTS |
|---|---|---|
| Bad River | RCL 33 | 100.5 |
| Joliet BroStars 2 | RCL 6 | 99 |
| Coolwhip | WRITERS LEAGUE | 99 |
| Rube Waddell’s Shiny Objects | FREQUENT COMMENTERS LEAGUE | 98 |
| Vin Security | RCL 29 | 97.5 |
| Dock Ellis Alternate Reality | RCL 26 | 96.5 |
| Team chronosaurus | RCL 14 | 95.5 |
| DoubleHeaders | RCL 15 | 95.5 |
| Taylor Gooch | CRAB ARMY | 95.5 |
| Brad Hands Down – Worst Team (Name) | RCL 32 | 95.5 |
Bad River is the only team to break the hundo mark in the first four days of action, congrats!
Congratulations also to the rest of our early top 10. Coolwhip is already putting a whoopin’ on the ‘Perts League and I’m currently atop the FCL. You’ve probably seen Vin around the comments section, the former RCL writer and data collector is currently leading RCL 29.
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. We drafted late in the draft season and this is the first chance I have to recap it. Right after the draft I took the draft results of the 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MattTruss | 972 | 347 | 1026 | 82 | 0.2678 | 78 | 65 | 3.571 | 1.182 | 1265 |
| Laura Holt | 1101 | 353 | 1111 | 112 | 0.2675 | 46 | 52 | 3.96 | 1.275 | 963 |
| Son | 931 | 235 | 787 | 141 | 0.2761 | 76 | 110 | 3.402 | 1.121 | 1400 |
| JKJ | 957 | 263 | 926 | 115 | 0.2667 | 93 | 57 | 3.484 | 1.141 | 1587 |
| B_Don | 1129 | 364 | 1140 | 137 | 0.2592 | 62 | 17 | 3.837 | 1.211 | 1020 |
| Itch | 884 | 233 | 836 | 105 | 0.2728 | 79 | 36 | 3.537 | 1.177 | 1296 |
| Blair | 952 | 290 | 972 | 142 | 0.2602 | 99 | 37 | 3.409 | 1.133 | 1737 |
| Cram It | 1153 | 369 | 1161 | 110 | 0.275 | 57 | 77 | 3.491 | 1.202 | 1012 |
| Ralph | 1044 | 323 | 1058 | 144 | 0.262 | 69 | 101 | 3.768 | 1.185 | 1293 |
| Grey | 951 | 303 | 977 | 116 | 0.2711 | 77 | 75 | 3.524 | 1.151 | 1339 |
| Donkey Teeth | 939 | 288 | 970 | 96 | 0.2667 | 76 | 109 | 3.438 | 1.117 | 1360 |
| Coolwhip | 959 | 325 | 970 | 81 | 0.2686 | 80 | 68 | 3.428 | 1.146 | 1358 |
| GREY: | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | W | SV | ERA | WHIP | K | TOTAL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Son | 2 | 2 | 1 | 10 | 12 | 6 | 12 | 12 | 11 | 10 | 78 |
| Blair | 5 | 5 | 6 | 11 | 2 | 12 | 3 | 11 | 10 | 12 | 77 |
| Cram It | 12 | 12 | 12 | 5 | 11 | 2 | 9 | 7 | 3 | 2 | 75 |
| Coolwhip | 7 | 8 | 5 | 1 | 8 | 10 | 7 | 10 | 8 | 8 | 72 |
| Grey | 4 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 7 | 8 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 69 |
| JKJ | 6 | 3 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 11 | 5 | 8 | 9 | 11 | 67 |
| Ralph | 9 | 7 | 9 | 12 | 3 | 4 | 10 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 66 |
| Donkey Teeth | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 11 | 9 | 12 | 9 | 65 |
| MattTruss | 8 | 9 | 8 | 2 | 7 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 61 |
| B_Don | 11 | 11 | 11 | 9 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 54 |
| Laura Holt | 10 | 10 | 10 | 6 | 6 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 50 |
| Itch | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 10 | 9 | 2 | 5 | 6 | 6 | 46 |
| RUDY: | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | W | SV | ERA | WHIP | K |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MattTruss | 28.6 | 48.5 | 48.4 | 23 | 33.1 | 21.8 | 9 | 23.4 | 16.1 | 8.8 |
| Laura Holt | 35.6 | 36.6 | 38.3 | 22.4 | 19.6 | 9.8 | 0.5 | 8 | 8 | 8.1 |
| Son | 26.3 | 16.8 | 16.1 | 49 | 40.6 | 20.4 | 16.8 | 16.5 | 18.4 | 23.4 |
| JKJ | 29.7 | 22.6 | 27.6 | 24.6 | 36.3 | 14.9 | 10.8 | 30 | 31.5 | 23.4 |
| B_Don | 44.5 | 47.3 | 44.4 | 42.9 | 18.1 | 4 | 0.6 | 6.3 | -1.8 | -8.2 |
| Itch | 14.2 | 9 | 1.1 | 31 | 30.8 | 18.7 | 10.6 | 20 | 14.9 | 16 |
| Blair | 17 | 23.3 | 20.5 | 41.4 | 21.1 | 24.4 | 5.8 | 21.5 | 21.3 | 33.3 |
| Cram It | 35.4 | 38.1 | 31.5 | 32.3 | 35.2 | 15 | 12.9 | 7.9 | 4.4 | 9.2 |
| Ralph | 28.4 | 30.1 | 19.7 | 40.1 | 22.6 | 5.5 | 24.1 | 12.9 | 11.1 | 3.4 |
| Grey | 15.6 | 24.4 | 21.5 | 35.8 | 18.8 | 9.8 | 5.5 | 14 | 6.8 | 12.1 |
| Donkey Teeth | 16.5 | 25.3 | 27.8 | 30 | 27.8 | 19.4 | 23.7 | 22 | 25.4 | 22.2 |
| Coolwhip | 25.9 | 36.8 | 42.8 | 17.9 | 26.8 | 15 | 10.6 | 22 | 24.2 | 13.1 |
| RUDY: | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | W | SV | ERA | WHIP | K | TOTAL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MattTruss | 8 | 12 | 12 | 3 | 9 | 11 | 5 | 11 | 7 | 4 | 82 |
| JKJ | 9 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 11 | 5 | 8 | 12 | 12 | 10 | 80 |
| Son | 6 | 2 | 2 | 12 | 12 | 10 | 10 | 6 | 8 | 11 | 79 |
| Donkey Teeth | 3 | 6 | 7 | 5 | 7 | 9 | 11 | 10 | 11 | 9 | 78 |
| Blair | 4 | 4 | 4 | 10 | 4 | 12 | 4 | 8 | 9 | 12 | 71 |
| Coolwhip | 5 | 9 | 10 | 1 | 6 | 7 | 6 | 9 | 10 | 7 | 70 |
| Cram It | 10 | 10 | 8 | 7 | 10 | 6 | 9 | 2 | 2 | 5 | 69 |
| Ralph | 7 | 7 | 3 | 9 | 5 | 2 | 12 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 56 |
| Itch | 1 | 1 | 1 | 6 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 8 | 53 |
| B_Don | 12 | 11 | 11 | 11 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 52 |
| Laura Holt | 11 | 8 | 9 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 48 |
| Grey | 2 | 5 | 5 | 8 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 6 | 42 |
Grain of salt time! Obviously, these numbers don’t take a lot of factors into account. RCLs are all about in-season management, this exercise is just for fun. If someone drafted 3 bench hitters, these numbers will have inflated offensive values. Again, this is all for S’s and G’s. That said, it looks like the numbers favor Son, he checks in first with Grey’s numbers and third with Rudy’s numbers. Meanwhile, Grey’s numbers hate my team, but Rudy’s love it. In both cases, I need some speed. I kind of love that Rudy’s numbers pegged Grey in last place. Laura drafted Max Scherzer, Dinelson Lamet and Tyler Mahle, hence why her pitching numbers are low. You can bet your buns, she’ll be streaming like a madwoman. It will be fun to check back in at the end of the season and see how these numbers did in predicting our eventual league winner.
TRADES
All the trades that have gone down in the past week. Public ridicule is not only allowed, but encouraged.
| DATE | LEAGUE | DETAILS |
|---|---|---|
| 3/31/2021 | RCL #25 | J&G traded Max Muncy to Home Free Bogaerts for Dylan Carlson |
| 3/31/2021 | RCL #9 | Rebar traded Jazz Chisholm to Primanti Bros for Frankie Montas |
| 4/2/2021 | RCL #35 | Team PhilliesPhinest traded Max Fried to maeda mistakes for Jose Urquidy & Trey Mancini |
| 4/5/2021 | RCL #26 | NCPhilly Fanatics traded Kolten Wong to AL KOHOLiC for Willi Castro |
There were four trades this past week and nothing to really write home about. All trades seem fair. I think we’re all pulling for Trey Mancini though.
Want to be Matt’s Twitter pal? That’s kinda creepy, but you can follow him here: @MattTruss
