Welcome my good and decent Razzball Commenter League managers. How were your first days of fantasy baseball fun? Oh, you drafted Bailey Ober? Well, pack it up, the season’s over. 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 and we have top teams for the mini week. 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 into 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 469 different players this fantasy baseball season
- 206 players were drafted in every, single RCL.
- Gerrit Cole (290) had the highest pick differential thanks to his injury. J.D. Martinez was second thanks to someone drafting him 28th overall randomly. Victor Scott saw a late surge that pushed him as high as pick 112 earning him a pick differential of 188. Junior Caminero’s demotion earned him honors in the opposite direction with a 176 pick differential. Wyatt Langford also saw a big ADP jump as we got closer to the season.
- Ronald Acuna Jr. and Julio Rodriguez had the smallest differential with neither making it past pick four.
- There were 22 different first round picks.
- There were 8 consensus first-rounders (Acuna, Julio Rodriguez, Bobby Witt Jr., Mookie Betts, Corbin Carroll, Kyle Tucker, Juan Soto, and Tatis Jr.)
- Judge, Strider, Freddie Freeman, and Ohtani were the next highest first rounders with 33, 32, 32, and 30 leagues drafting them in the first.
- Trea Turner and Yordan Alvarez were drafted in the first in 18 and 12 leagues, respectively. No other player hit double digits for first round appearances.
- Strider was the highest ADP pitcher going in the first round 32 times and falling as low as pick 20.
- 52 players were drafted in only one league.
- These players were all somehow missed in only one league: Kodai Senga, Eduardo Rodriguez, Salvador Perez, Carlos Estevez, Jung Hoo Lee, Jeremy Pena, Sal Frelick, Brayan Bello, Ryan McMahon, and Brandon Drury.
- Average draft time: 2 hours 8 minutes
- Fastest: PERTS: 1 hour, 24 minutes
- Slowest: The 2 $100 drafts (NOTLZ & Laura Holt Challenge) each reached the 3 hour mark.
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
We’ll be doing the RCL standings a little differently this season. FanTrax upgraded all their pages, but in doing so broke our ability to automatically pull data from the standings pages. Therefore, we’ll (and by “we”, I mean Vin) be pulling data manually once a month and running the RCL standings then. However, Vin is a saint and is still pulling data and providing Team of the Week stats for me. This week, we have the top scoring teams from our little bit of action:
Rowers (RCL 11) 107.5
Razzkai (Mookie Monsters) (RCL 35) 105
TheBallBusters (RCL 23) 104.5
Great Scott (RCL 14) 103
I’ll Steer, You De La Cruz (RCL 10) 101
Row Cubbies Row (RCL 8) 100.5
It’s always nice to get out to a hot start, but don’t victory lap just yet, the season is long. These are the only six teams over the 100 points mark so far, so, congrats on the hot starts!
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.
Knoche and Coolwhip are off to hot starts, ie: their ratios didn’t get completely clobbered week one. B_Don and I are bringing up the rear. My ratios were crushed by Framber, Bibee, a Carlos Carrasco stream against OAK, and Ryan Weathers doing Ryan Weathers things. Fun start!
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.
Look at the big brains on Blair and B_Don!! Way to hold it down week 1 for the Razzball gang!
TRADES
All the trades that have gone down in the past week. Public ridicule is not only allowed, but encouraged.
| DATE | LEAGUE | DETAILS |
|---|---|---|
| 3/9/2024 | RCL 9 |
MightyNikolai traded Will Smith to The Losers Club for Adbert Alzolay
|
| 3/15/2024 | RCL 15 |
Valhalla Hammers traded Will Smith (RP) & Lane Thomas to DaleEarnhardtAngel69 for Tyler Glasnow
|
| 3/15/2024 | RCL 7 |
Casper Cobras traded Evan Carter to TheFantasyGOAT for Logan Webb
|
| 3/21/2024 | RCL 12 |
PlatanoPowers traded Paul Goldschmidt & Colt Keith to Phoenix Senators for Bobby Miller & Jordan Lawlar
|
| 3/26/2024 | RCL 9 |
MightyNikolai traded Alex Bregman to ChangeOfPace for Spencer Steer
|
| 3/28/2024 | RCL 26 |
DiamondDog64 traded Christopher Morel to Hoboknives 26 for Carlos Estevez
|
| 3/31/2024 | RCL 15 |
Driftees traded Alex Kirilloff to DaleEarnhardtAngel69 for Dylan Cease
|
We have had seven trades so far in the RCLs, two of which have been made by Keelin’s autodrafted all starters and catchers team. I don’t have a lot of analysis for the other trades, everything seems pretty even. I’d want the Goldy/Keith side of that trade though.
WEEKLY LEADERS
The best of the best from the week that was.
R – 48 – VinO (Original Recipe)
HR –18 – cubeee (RCL 22)
RBIs –51 – Vin Friday (RCL 27)
SB – 12 – Blue Squadron 22 (RCL 22)
AVG – .362 – DJ_Thuggy (RCL 30)
K – 68 – Ernbots (RCL 20)
W – 9 – Ducks In A Row (RCL 18)
SV – 6 – 5 Teams Tied
ERA (Min. 40 IP) – 1.47 – kelion (RCL 21) (in 43 IP)
WHIP (Min. 40 IP) – 0.806 – Creative Chaos (ECFBL) (in 44.2 IP)
RCL 22 showed out in week 1 with two teams topping the charts. Vin also double-dipped this week. Nice work everyone! Six saves seems like a minor miracle given all the blown saves week 1.
TEAM OF THE WEEK
Our weekly shout out to the team that killed it the previous week.
Team: Ducks Eat Free at Subway
League: Original Recipe
Stats: AVG: .316, R: 45, HR: 12, RBI: 43, SB: 7
IP: 32, ERA: 1.97, WHIP: 1.125, K: 37, W: 4, SV: 1
Summary: Week 1 can be tough, but DEF@S made the most of it! This kind of offense would be good on a normal 7 day week! Ducks fell a little short in IP, but got away unscathed anyway in the ratios department. Nice work, Ducks!
Want to be my internet pal? That’s kinda creepy, but you can follow me here: @MattTruss or here: @matttruss.bsky.social
