All nine wild and crazy weeks are in the books and they sure did feel like a year.  I’ve said it many times, but I never expected us to get to this point.  Call me a cynic, but I obviously underestimated the power of the almighty dollar.  Things looked pretty rocky when we didn’t even make it two weeks before the Marlins were on hiatus, and look at us now, the Marlins are a playoff team!  *Eyeroll*  As wonky as this season was, we still have a Razzball Commenter League champion to crown.  It’s not who you might think either…without further ado, I present to you, our 2020 Razzball Commenter Leagues Champion…Team DFresh!  I may have jinxed Team Tokyo last week, but I really thought they had this thing wrapped up.  I should have known, with this only being week nine, that huge swings could still happen and they did.  DFresh got hot at the right time, jumping from 21st to 2nd last week and taking the top spot this final week thanks to another five league points gained, bringing their total to 116.  That’s a hard total to top, especially combined with a LCI of 114.  With that, Team Tokyo ends up with a hard-luck second overall.  DFresh really rakes it in, winning themselves a $250 Best Buy gift card!  More importantly though, DFresh gets a Razzball T-Shirt and RCL glory.  Who can put a price on that?  Oh, it’s $25, well then, moving on.  DFresh comments around the site from time to time, so the next time you see a comment (likely in this post) be sure to heap on the praise and congratulations.  They fended off some very tough competitors this year to claim the RCL crown including last year’s top finishers, Backdoor Cutters and Fat Fuckin Babies.  This is DFresh’s moment though, so hopefully they pop in, 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:

We have just one week remaining in our Razzball Commenter League season now.  This funny little sprint of a season is winding down and this is the week when shizz gets whacky.  Every hot schmotato is in play and any big name missing any amount of time is hitting the waiver wire.  Top starters with no remaining starts, they’re out too.  Use those moves, max out those ABs this week and do what you can to max out your innings while holding onto those ratios.  The top ten overall had some shake-ups this week, but the top team remains the same.  We’ll dive into those shake-ups and we’ll also get historical this week.  Someone in the comments last week asked me about historical weekly records, which I didn’t have.  This question sent me down the rabbit hole of historical data and now I have the best RCL weekly records since I started collecting the data way back in 2016.  All that, plus the rest of the week that was, week eight is waiting for you below.

It’s pretty jarring to me that in two weeks from today our Razzball Commenter Leagues season will be over.  I expect to see a lot of movement in the overall standings during that time frame, despite the fact that the top spot has remained unchanged for three straight weeks.  Considering this is week seven, a time where, in a normal season, the league standings are just starting to level out, plenty of gains can still be made.  We’ve only had two teams hit the 525 IP limit so far, that alone will really shake up some league standings.  If you are not yet above 400 IP, what are you waiting for?  Make some noise on the waiver wire and get streaming!  We’ve also had two teams hit the max moves limit of 185 already.  Several more teams are into the single digits with two weeks to go.  I know we said to max out your moves, but yikes.  I feel like I’ve been extra active with late scratches and streaming like a mad man, and I’m pretty comfortable with moves in every league with around 50-60 remaining.  Next week will be a total bleep show with star players getting dropped left and right if they aren’t in the lineup.  These aren’t keeper leagues and you don’t get extra points for hanging onto Nolan Arenado if he’s out of the lineup for a rest day with three days left in the season.  Go ahead and make it a wacky finish to a wacky season!

The Razzball Commenter League trade deadline went out with a bang, we have nine trades to go over today and another few to cover next week that just squeaked in at the deadline Sunday.  With the Labor Day holiday, Rudy’s robots took the day off as well, so we have one extra day of data included in the weekly stats.  It’s crazy that we only have three weeks to go in this strange season.  Hopefully you made some trades that will make a difference down the stretch.  I don’t know about you, but it seemed weird to trade for a starter knowing they’d only have 4-5 more starts to come.  Everything about this season feels weird honestly, but we’re making due.  Things are still in so much flux in the league standings that big swings are still happening all over.  I kicked my teams in the rear this week and pounded the innings pitched, which had me gaining points in strikeouts and wins across my many leagues.  I don’t want to be caught that final week of the season needing to stream 100+ innings, because who knows what in the world that week will look like.  Keep an eye on your own IP and stream accordingly.

There you have it, we’ve passed the halfway point of our Razzball Commenter League season.  The next milestone is the trading deadline, which takes place this coming Sunday night at midnight EST.  The MLB trade deadline has been pretty awesome so far with major names all going to the Padres.  Between that and teams changing closers like underwear, there should be plenty to get you in the trading mood for the RCLs.  Normally, this is the time of season where you can understand some overpaying for players, but with the shortened season and so much still up in the air, I’m not sure things will be quite as crazy as previous seasons.  Still, take a look at the overall standings in your league and see where teams are bunched together.  If there’s an opportunity to leap over multiple teams by taking a category by storm, make your move now.  If you’re in second place right now, make that move for first, play to win, go out and make it happen.  Release your inner AJ Preller!  We managed seven trades this past week, which we’ll break down below, let’s see if we can top that this week.

By about the time you read this, we’ll be halfway through our interesting fantasy baseball season.  We’ll have completed four and a half weeks of Razzball Commenter League action and have four and a half weeks left to go.  That means, if you’re planning on maxing out your pitching innings, you should be sitting at about 260 IP right now, or be planning on streaming your buns off the final month of the season.  Our IP leader as of right now is Team WahooFan76 of RCL #47 with 342 IP.  Bringing up the rear is the Master Batters of RCL #1 with 40 IP (not including one of Park Barkley’s 20 teams that were drafted and abandoned, including one with an illegal roster which has zero IP).  That league drafted all the way back on march 1st, so chances are, the Batters have been abandoned as well.  In addition to innings, we need quality innings, including a high K/9.  Fortunately for you, and especially those that are bad at math, we’re tracking your K/9 for you on the Master Standings page.  There, you can see that among teams with at least 40 IP/week we have Team CobraKaiMeansNoMercy with an impressive 12.2 K/9.  The worst K/9 offender is Team SeniorBootyFace with 6.3 K/9 in 217 IP.  That’s almost impressively bad.  There’s still time to correct though, so fear not!  Just snag a high K/9 reliever here and there if your current roster allows it.  Something I like to do is sort players by K/9.  You can do this by hitting “Extra” on the player page when viewing pitchers.  Then just sort by K/9 and make sure you’re looking for players with a substantial amount of IP.  It’s also going to be important to monitor your innings usage.  You can click “MIN/MAX” on your team page to see your innings used and your pace.  I like to keep my pace pretty close to right on the money, but your mileage may vary.  Just don’t leave innings on the table if you can help it.  Let’s take a look at the rest of the week that was, week 4 in the RCLs:

Welcome to week three of the Razzball Commenter Leagues!  We are now one third of the way through our season.  That’s just wild and I have the feeling there isn’t enough time to correct the ERA hole some of my teams have dug.  Yikes.  A huge thank you goes out this week to Rudy and his FanTrax data-mining robots who were able to snag all our RCL data.  That means, we have real, live standings.  Week one and two I simply had to take whichever teams had the most roto points, but this week to get to factor in League Competitive Index or LCI.  This system rewards players who are in harder leagues for eeking out those extra points.  We also get to factor in the Master Points.  Master Points are basically like you’re playing in a 924 team roto league.  If you have the most HRs in the RCL-universe, you get 924 points, if you have the fewest, you get 1 point.  Pretty cool, huh?  For more info, you can scroll to the bottom of the MASTER STANDINGS page and read all about the secret sauce that is the Master Standings.  This also means, we’ll have weekly leaders starting next week.  Of course, there will only be five weeks worth of weekly data, but hey, it’s better than nothing.  Hmm, that sounds like it has potential to be the new MLB slogan!

I hope everyone had a fun second week in the Razzball Commenter Leagues.  There was some good, like Fernando Tatis Jr.  going bonkers with six homers in six games.  There was also some bad, like Giancarlo getting hurt yet again.  Juan Soto returned and immediately hit a bomb.  Maybe he can give Andrew Benintendi and J.D. Martinez a little pep talk.

It’s the silly season for our leagues at this point (who are we kidding this whole year is silly season), where we can have huge swings in the standings based on 2-3 good days of stats, or a week of Tatis-level production.  We had 23 leagues change leaders this week and I’m a little surprised it wasn’t more.  Four teams remain in the top 10 from last week and one of them just so happens to be the first place team.  Let’s take a look at the standings as well as some trades in the RCLs this week.

Technically the first “week” was from (Re)Opening Day, July 23rd  to Sunday, July 26th, but that was just too short, with too few games and just didn’t feel right.  Instead, I’m going to combine that short week with this week to form week 1.5 of the Razzball Commenter Leagues.  How has the first week plus gone for you?  Are you overloaded on Blue Jays and Phillies like I seem to be everywhere?  Did you draft Roberto Osuna, Nick Anderson, Wade Davis and Mychal Givens as your closers?  Perfect!  Unlike in past seasons at a similar point in the season we can’t really say, “It’s still early” this season, because it’s already getting late!  If you are sitting in last and haven’t been trying to maximize those empty roster spots left by Mike Trout, Lourdes Gurriel and Rhys Hoskins, then it’s time to drop a would-be closer and start working that waiver wire like a boss.  This is where the RCL battle is won and lost.  We’ve already had races for more closers than I care to remember, the latest being Jairo Diaz and Ryan Pressly and we’ve had races for prospect call-ups in Nick Madrigal and Jo Adell.  Again, there can be no resting on your laurels this season, so set those Twitter notifications and hit the wire.  Let’s take a look at which RCL teams are getting an early jump on their league standings in part to streaming and batty-calling their butts off:

With only four-ish days of games so far, the RCL overall standings don’t amount to a whole lot, we’ll get those running in full force for next week.  In the meantime, I thought we’d finally take a look at all the draft data we collected over the period known as the longest draft season of our lifetime.  Our very first draft of the season was way back on March 1st, in the before times.  Our final draft was July 22nd.  During those 143 days we drafted 77 Razzball Commenter Leagues (four more than last season!) and 463 different players.  It’s been a long time coming and it could be short lived, but we’ll be here for every bit of the MLB season that we can piece together.  If you didn’t get in on the fun, well, there’s always next year, we hope!  For now, let’s crunch some numbers on our RCL drafts.