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Well, that’s a wrap on the Razzball Commenter Leagues everyone.  Twenty-six weeks down and now we have twenty-six more until the start of next year’s fantasy baseball season.  It’s perfect symmetry, because fantasy baseball is the perfect fantasy sport.  Speaking of perfect, Returning Champ went near perfect on us in route to an overall Championship.  This ties for the second highest finish in RCL history with Rank Railheads of 2012 Championship fame.  Returning Champ really rakes it in, winning themselves a $250 Best Buy gift card!  More importantly though, Returning Champ gets a Razzball T-Shirt and RCL glory.  Who can put a price on that?  Oh, it’s $25, well then, moving on.  I don’t believe Returning Champ has checked in via comments at all this year, but now would be the time.  It’s time to heap on the praise and accept your congratulations.  Personally, I’ve been curious all year where the Champ has returned from.  Is this a previous RCL winner or were they just lost at sea?  I have questions!  Either way, Returning Champ fended off some very tough competitors this year to claim the RCL crown.  Cram It gave it a run, Grey was pushing for a top spot for awhile there and an army of RCL robots invaded the standings as well.  This is Returning Champ’s moment though, so hopefully they show up, take a bow and soak it up, they earned it.  Here’s what else what happened this year and this final week of the RCLs:

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It’s the second-last day of the regular season, and I feel like I’m back at Opening Day, there’s such a smorgasbord of pitchers to roll around in (so to speak): Kluber (vs. the White Sox, $12,000), Scherzer (vs. the Pirates, $10,800), Kershaw at—important couple of letters, those—the Rockies, $9,600), Archer (vs. the Orioles, $9,300). They’re all so famous we need use only their last names. Of the 4 listed here, Kluber will bankrupt you, and I’m leery of Kershaw in Colorado, and also of Archer, given his last outing versus the Orioles, so how about for our very last Saturday <sob> [Sidebar: Thanks for reading, all these weeks! It’s been a slice. Feel free to come hang with me on Twitter and we’ll get through the cold, dark hell of the off-season together], we go old-school with ol’ Blue-Green Eyes and run out Max Scherzer at home versus the Pirates? Let’s look at some more options for our final Fan(Duel)-tasy together.

New to FanDuel? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond? Well, be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot  for your daily baseball plays. Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

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This is it! The last article of the year, the end of the baseball season. I want to thank you, loyal readers for taking time out of your day to read this article every week and hopefully helping you win some contests. There are going to be a lot of players who wind up sitting and there’s going to be a lot of value opening up throughout the day so you must pay attention to all the released lineups. Additionally, many teams, both those with nothing to play for, and those who playoff-bound but are entirely set in terms of playoff positioning, will look to pull their players (both pitchers and position players) at the earliest opportunity. In short, there will be a lot of randomness and it won’t be easy to predict. Although I’m going to try my best to recommend some players and teams that I like today, one general piece of advice I can give is to focus on the teams that still have something to play for – the Red Sox, Brewers, Rockies, and arguably the Indians and Astros. The first three are the only teams we can be fully sure will play their guys as normal. To be honest – if someone showed me a cash lineup today that featured mostly players from the Brewers and Rockies (the Red Sox have a marginally tougher matchup than the other three teams), with only a value or punt play here or there from other teams, I wouldn’t talk that person out of that lineup. I’m not saying for sure it will be the way to go, but both the Brewers and the Rockies have good enough matchups (the Rockies are in Coors too), and both have something to play for, something you can’t say about pretty much every other team.

On to the picks as soon as we start the playoffs…

New to FanDuel? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond?  Well be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot for your daily baseball plays.  Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

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As the regular season draws to a close, it is with not a little melancholy that Dr. Easy and I bring you one last adventure with the Razzball Season-to-Date Player Rater (STD PR). Thanks for hanging with us for all these weeks! If you take one thing away from this series, it’s “next season, use the Razzball Player Rater” (pre-season and during). It’s free and it’s eye-opening. We thought that for our last post, we’d continue with our look back to the beginning of the season. This time, with the help of the Razzball Pre-Season Player Rater (PS PR), we wanted to check out some of the biggest surprises and biggest disappointments among hitters and pitchers who managed to stay healthy for most of the season (hitters who made it to 500 plate appearances or more; starting pitchers who hurled 100 innings or more). This means we can rank them by the good ol’ Player Rater $ (for previous posts, we’ve used the $/G rubric for players who have missed time due to injury). Where are the biggest differences between the pre-season and now, both positive and negative? Note: With all these players who have surprised big time, we expect a high variation on where they will be drafted next year. We don’t know about you, but we’re generally risk averse: we see big variation and let others take the flyer, unless it’s in the late rounds. Note 2: this is a bit of a selective list; we’ve talked about other big surprises and disappointments like Andrus, Judge, Villar, Cabrera, Upton, and Jose Ramirez, in previous posts.

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With their win last night, the Cubs clinched the NL Central division title. That means they’ll be rolling with the hangover lineup on Thursday, where almost no regular starters (if any) will be in the lineup. Cardinals starter Lance Lynn won’t have to worry about facing Rizzo or Bryant; instead, he’ll be going against guys like Mike Freeman. This is an outstanding situation to take advantage of, as Lynn will only cost you $7,100. There’s certainly some risk involved, considering Lynn gave up eight earned runs his last time out, but that start was likely just an outlier. As they say, scared money don’t make no money, so roll with Lynn as he takes on the barely-sober Cubs.

New to FanDuel? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond?  Well be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot for your daily baseball plays.  Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

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My fantasy baseball advice is kinda like a banana. Three-quarters of it are sweet, sweet deliciousness, while the end bit is the devil’s asshole. We’ve had a strong season together, but since this is our final week of DFS, what better way to go out with a whimper than by recommending Clayton Richard! You point and I’ll laugh at the idiot (me). Actually, y’know what, this may not be such a noodle scratcher after all. Did you know Richard has created a ground ball rate of 70% or more four times this season? That’s more than Corey Kluber and Chris Sale combined! Anyways, Richard faces Rich Hill in a lefty-lefty free-for-all in LA tonight. He’s a cheap option ($7,400) on a night where either Justin Verlander or Luis Severino will cost you the blood of your first born son. Here’s who else I like on our final fine Wednesday together:

New to FanDuel? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond?  Well be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot for your daily baseball plays.  Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

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It’s hard to believe there’s only one week to go in the Razzball Commenter Leagues.  This marathon of a season has seen us torture ourselves for 25 long weeks, agonizing over batty calls, dipping into the streamers with mixed results, cursing players and praising others.  We’ve ignored our families, our jobs and our personal hygiene and now it all comes down to the final week.  You may smell like stale Funyuns, but dagummit, that virtual fantasy trophy is all yours!  Speaking of trophies, Returning Champ all but sealed is overall championship this week.  When you’re already the #1 team in the Master Standings and then you go out and win Team of the Week honors in the second to last week of the season.  Well, that is just the clutchiest of the clutch moves right there.  Last week Returning Champ held a 2.9 point lead over Cram It, this week that lead is up to 5.7 points.  Those numbers don’t even take into account that as of Monday morning, Returning Champ hit 119 league points.  Last year saw the first perfect score in the RCLs when Team Levy hit 120.  Until that time the highest league score had been 119, set by the Rank Railheads back in 2012.  Both Team Levy and Rank Railheads were in leagues with an LCI of 98, so Returning Champ has his league’s 101 LCI working for him.  Unfortunately, Returning Champ will have no shot at a perfect score since one of the teams in The Giant and the Jew has hit all the home runs.  Hot Ham Water currently has 390 HRs to Returning Champ’s 329.  329 is good enough for 2nd in the category, but unless Giancarlo wallops 60 dingers this week, 119 will be the best Returning Champ can muster.  That should still be plenty good enough to take home the overall championship.  Come along, there’s plenty more about Returning Champ and the rest of the week that was, week 25:

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Wow!  Time really does fly when you’re having fun.  I honestly can’t believe that the 2017 fantasy baseball season is already over…well, almost.  Kudos to you who are still fighting the good fight all the way til the end.  Tip of the cap to you.  It’s been real fo sho and I hope you all have a great offseason but before you go, let’s talk about our two top arms tonight.  Yu Darvish at $24,00o is the top pitcher on the board tonight and I love the start against the Padres.  I know we’ve been picking on them all year and if my calculations are correct, it’s paid off, about 82% of the time.  Darvish had a rough time finding his groove in Dodger blue right out of the gate, but he’s thrown up two 23+ fantasy point starts in the last 2 weeks.  I’m crossing my fingers for a 30+ night, time to let the big dog eat.  Meanwhile, Aaron Nola at $15,600 is facing the Nationals tonight and the Streamonator loves this start right behind Darvish.  Frankly, Nola has been great all year and the Nats have been resting guys.  If Nola gets a light Washington lineup then all in on him in both cash and tourney play.  Now that are pitching is locked and loaded, let’s go see who we can pair with Stanton in Coors.

New to FantasyDraft? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond? Well be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot for your daily baseball plays. Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

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I’m tag teaming today’s post with FredWord who had to attend a quaint country wedding where wifi doesn’t exist.  Fred wrote up some pitchers, and I’ll fill in the rest.  Also of note, this is typically a day for FantasyDraft content, however, they have shuttered their baseball doors early to make way for fooseball.  Harumph!  The nerve!  No harm, no foul though, we’ll just pass the content over to FanDuel for the final week.  Now, onto Fred’s lede:

Please raise your hand if you were kicked out of the playoffs last week. Phew! I thought I was the only one. I’m still a bit numb from being kicked out the first week of the playoffs. I refuse to log into my app to salvage a 5th place finish. Instead I logged in early the first morning to scavenge any free agent rookies who might be a keeper next year. I have turned all my attention to DFS for the final week of baseball. An interesting pick for today is Jharel Cotton ($5,900). Cotton is coming off a groin injury and likely will be under owned. He gets a favorable matchup at home vs the Rangers who tend to strikeout a lot. In his last start against the Rangers he had 9 k’s in 6 innings. Probably the biggest factor to this equation is Cotton is from St. Thomas Virgin Islands who was recently devastated by hurricane Irma. Cotton is going to be pitching with a lot of emotion today. This would be more of a tournament play as there is always risk playing a guy coming off interest.

New to FanDuel? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond?  Well be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot for your daily baseball plays.  Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

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It’s actually really unfair that poor Stephen Strasburg still has the “Stressbird” moniker in these here Razzball parts, but old habits and nicknames die hard. [Sidebar: Plus I went to a music festival last week and wanted to use a title that keeps me in nostalgic, douchey concert-goer mode. (Side-sidebar: I saw Rodriguez, a musician I’ve loved for 30 years and never thought I’d get to see; I was one of that generation of kids in South Africa described in Searching for Sugarman, if anyone’s seen that. Think it’s on Netflix.)]. Strasburg has been lights-out for weeks, earning 1 run so far in September and 2 runs in August, after a whopping 4 in July. He’s facing the 25th-ranked, 3-game-losing streak Mets; the only Met who’s had real success against him is Yoenis Cespedes, who is out with an injury to one of his many legs, to boot (sorry). Of course Strasburg does cost a small fortune on FanDuel today: $11,300. If that’s too rich for your blood, I’ll explore some more reasonable pitching options below. Read on, MacDuffs!

New to FanDuel? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond? Well, be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot for your daily baseball plays. Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

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Over the last couple of weeks, Dr. Easy — my fantasy baseball partner-in-crime — and I having been playing the “Where Are They Now?” game, which has been pretty enlightening — for us, anyway. We’ve looked back to the beginning of the 2017, to compare the top 12 players on the Razzball Pre-Season Player Rater (PS PR) versus the top 12 as of right now per the Razzball Season-to-Date Player Rater (STD PR). With the regular season drawing to a close (<sob>), how have things changed? What can we glean for next season: Who’s steady; who isn’t? In week 1, we looked at Trout, Betts, Kershaw, Turner, Machado, Altuve, Scherzer, Goldschmidt and Arenado. In week 2, we went over Harper, Cabrera, Bryant, Blackmon, Stanton, Sale, Votto, Judge, Kluber and Andrus. This week, we’ll move into the next 6 according to the PS PR and the STD PR.

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“Big Maple” James Paxton takes the mound on Thursday in his second start off the disabled list, facing the Rangers at home. Paxton’s first start off of the DL was a disaster, but that’s often the case – it normally takes at least one start for a pitcher to regain form after missing more than a month. And plus, it was against the Astros, so it’s completely forgivable. Paxton’s full-season stats are drool-worthy, so to get him at just $8,400 on FanDuel is an opportunity to pounce on. As for the Rangers, they strike out 24.7% of the time against lefties. If he’s back to form, it will be a big night for Big Maple.

New to FanDuel? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond?  Well be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot for your daily baseball plays.  Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

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