RCL Update: The Week That Was Week 3, 2018

Week three sure was eventful in the Razzball Commenter Leagues.  In fact, it brought about an entirely new rule to the RCLs. In fairness, this is a rule we had back when the leagues were on ESPN, but I thought it was nice to not carry it over.  Unfortunately, as with all privileges, the few spoil it for the masses. If you have made a trade in the RCLs yet, you would have noticed that your trade went through immediately. There was no waiting period, no vetoing, nothing.  You clicked “Accept” and poof, the players were swapped. Well, several very lopsided trades later and we decided enough was enough. Now when you make a trade, there will be a two day waiting period where the league can veto your trade.  It takes four managers vetoing to cancel a trade. This is especially helpful in the money leagues where apparently even $10 is enough to turn people in colluding cheaters. We’re better than this RCLers! Just in case though, hopefully this new rule helps leagues police themselves so Rudy and myself aren’t in the business of judging trades.  More trade talk and the rest of the week that was, week three below:

‘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.

My ‘Perts league lead went away along with my pitcher’s ratios.  A 5.35 ERA will do that to you. While I stumbled a slew of teams were ready to charge forward, led by Ralph Lifshitz looking to avenge last year’s loss to Grey.  Ralph led the league in Games Played, Runs and Wins. That along with lovely ratios (2.51 ERA / 0.984 WHIP) in 61 IP was enough to boost Ralph 7.5 points and three places in the standings.

The biggest gain of the week belongs to Team Albright who gained 14 points and three places in the standings to keep pace with Ralph.  Grey led the league in IP and Saves while also accumulating some sweet ratios (2.28 ERA / 1.028 WHIP) in 71 IP.

I dropped the most places in the standings, falling from first to fifth this week while Malamoney lost the most points, dropping 12.

TOP 10

For those too lazy to check the MASTER STANDINGS, I present to you, the current top 10

Last week I had two teams in the top ten with one sitting in eleventh.  This week, that eleventh place team hit the number one spot and the others are nowhere in sight.  In other words, it’s still early. Still, Rube Waddell’s Shiny Objects has the most points of any RCL team and is doing it in what is the toughest RCL so far, the Frequent Commenters League.  That feels good.

The Florida Illini jump from 35th last week to 2nd this week.  Not too shabby.

Last week’s number one team, Moneyball, falls to fifth, but just staying in the top 10 at this point is impressive considering no other top ten team from last week survived.

The legacy leagues are well represented, which is always nice to see.  Cougs R Us and DFSers Anonymous should push for top LCI honors at the end of the season so Frost and Vottoman Empire are out to good starts there.

TRADES

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

Only one trade this week that didn’t have to get reversed due to lopsidedness and boy was it a doozy.  Vottoman Empire also traded Ozzie Albies away last week, talk about liquidating your shares. I get it, he’s a sell high for sure, but I’d have to get a good amount for him I think.  I find it hard to judge massive trades like this and usually prefer to keep it simple myself. In order to evaluate, I turned to the Razzball Trade Analyzer.  If you haven’t checked this bad boy out yet, you should!  This leverages Rudy’s ROS Player Rater values based on your league size to give you dollar values for each side of a trade.  Pretty cool huh? So this trade works out to Vottoman Empire trading away $55.60 worth of value and getting back $57.90 worth of value.  So, it’s a win for Vottoman, but not a landslide by any means. Give it a try and look for me to use more of that when analyzing RCL trades in the future.

WEEKLY LEADERS

The best of the best from the week that was.

R – 66 – Cram It (RCL 2018 (#62))

HR –22 – Headless Hitmen (RCL 2018 (#20))

RBIs – 71 – The F-ing Lizard King (RCL 2018 (#16))

SB – 13 – MattTruss223 (DFSers Anonymous)

AVG – .329 – In a Pickle (RCL 2018 (#56))

K – 148 – Clobber Clan (RCL 2018 (#59))

W – 11 – Clobber Clan (RCL 2018 (#59))

SV –  9 – Team kelion (RCL 2018 (#39))

ERA (Min. 40 IP) – 0.93 – Team hsclegend (RCL 2018 (#39)) (in 48.1 IP)

WHIP (Min. 40 IP) – 0.728 – Sheridan (Cougs R Us) (in 57.2 IP)

I said I’d bring you weekly leaders and Team of the Week last week and I’m a man of my word.  These come with a big but however. The system I’m using isn’t perfect. It’s not going to capture team name changes.  Since we have IP added to the standings page now, I was able to calculate for ERA and WHIP, however, with no ABs, Batting Average is left to languish. So, for this week, I took the teams that improved their batting average the most and manually looked through a bunch of them to see who had the highest average.  If you had a higher batting average this week than “In a Pickle”, let me know in the comments.  If you navigate to your league standings page, you can choose the date(s) to show stats for. I used April 16th-22nd for this update. I’m going to try and get FanTrax to add ABs to our standings page so Batting Average is less of a guessing game, but it’s better than nothing for right now.

TEAM OF THE WEEK

Our weekly shout out to the team that killed it the previous week.

Team: Clobber Clan

League: RCL 2018 (#59)

Stats:   AVG: .299, R: 48, HR: 9, RBI: 43, SB: 4

IP: 152.2, ERA: 3.12, WHIP: 1.199, K: 148, W: 11, SV: 2

Summary:  Sometimes a team just pounds the innings so hard, that it skews the TOW numbers.  I prefer it when a more balanced team comes out of the numbers, but when you throw up 11 wins and 148 Ks, that’s tough to beat.  The Clobber Clan dominated the pitching landscape this week. The hitting side of the team held their own, but was definitely overshadowed.  Clobber Clan leads the RCLs in Innings Pitched with 361, which has them on pace for 2,832 IP, or being maxed by the All-Star Break. They are running another five starters out there on Monday so the pace shows no sign of slowing.  I’ll be curious to watch and see if this is the first team to hit the 1400 IP limit and how they play that strategy.

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