Technically the first “week” of the Razzball Commenter Leagues was from Opening Day, March 29th to Sunday, April 1st, 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. How has the first week plus gone for you? Are you an Ohtani owner jumping for joy and retweeting every Ohtani GIF, stat and record broken so far?  Or maybe you are a Joey Votto owner, quietly crying and gently rocking in the corner. Either way, you can all use the same mantra, “It’s still early”. Everyone wants to start the first week leading their league, but only one team can.  I always dream of going wire to wire, but it’s a long season, plenty of time to win these things. Jose Ramirez won’t hit .061 all season. Just in case, let’s form a prayer decagon, shall we?

Already the RCL battle has been waged on the waiver wire as the race to grab that sweet SAGNOF started early.  Mark Melancon made a surprise DL appearance and Hunter Strickland was the first add of the year for those seeking cheap saves.  Corey Knebel collapsed in a heap and the race was on for the next Brewer fireman. This, of course was followed by the great “Jacob Barnes lockout” of 2018.  More on that below, but maybe FanTrax was trying to tell us something. Let’s take a look at that as well as which RCL teams are getting an early jump on their league standings:

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 (and most of them half days at that) it’s really not worth diving into.  Our RCL bots are not up and running yet either, so there’s not much to look at just yet. I have noticed a lot of RCL talk in the comments and on the message boards of my many, many, many RCLs so I thought this would be a great place to do some crowdsourcing, do a venting and maybe make the RCL experience better for everyone.  The move to FanTrax has had a few bumps, but overall I think it’s gone well. If we can provide everyone with some answers and maybe chase down FanTrax with a couple gripes, I think everyone will benefit. I’ve got a list of complaints I’ve seen as well as some answers, feel free to add your complaints and frustrations to the comments and we’ll work through them together.  Grab your complaining shoes and let’s go for a stroll.

We’re really winding down on draft season now, with official games starting on Thursday.  This is the last Tuesday without baseball for some time and I’m giddy about it. We’re sitting at 61 Razzball Commenter Leagues right now and 59 of those have drafted.  Only two of our legacy leagues remain undrafted with Cougs R Us drafting late last night and ECFBL drafting this evening. We’re down a little bit from the past few seasons, but with a major change in the mix I’d say it’s not too shabby.  A lot of people were likely nervous of making a switch and adding yet another fantasy site to the daily check-in routine. I get it, I was that way with the four letter website before I took the plunge. Hopefully, the move to FanTrax won’t keep people away for long, especially when they see how much fun we’re all having!  Speaking of fun, I had fun going over the new and improved ADP data by taking a look at the ADPs of all Grey’s Sleepers. Even though the ADP Sheet is Razzball-centric it can still give you some interesting tidbits of information.  So, let’s do some last minute cramming for those final drafts and see what we can see.

Twelve fantasy writers in one league and you thought we weren’t going to take this opportunity to hear ourselves talk (type)?  Well, then you thought wrong! We’re all loaded with hot fiyah taeks! This isn’t the ‘Perts League that Grey hosts, this is just anyone that writes for Razzball and wanted to join an RCL.  Way back on Saturday, March 3rd at 9:30pm EST, we all (well, most) settled in for an early season draft. You can check out all the draft results HERE to follow along.  This season’s participants in RCL draft order are:

Dokken – Writer of Team Previews and FanTrax Tips

Jimothy – Writing all about the sleepers you need to know

Yost – The H2H guru

Kerry Klug – The local ambulance chaser

MattTruss – DFS and RCLs are my game

Victoria B – DFS Writer/Editor extraordinaire

MB – Two sport star covering NFL and MLB like a boss

Viz – Our resident Hockey enthusiast

SON – Another two sport star, running the basketball side of Razzball and writing Team Previews for MLB

Laura Holt – Deep and Only leagues are her jam

Smokey – Our soccer wizard and baseball SAGNOF expert

Phil B. – OPS is his bag

Now you know who is in the league, next we’ll hear what they had to say about it.  I interviewed each writer with some questions; some personal and some generic and here’s what they had to say:

We have another week’s worth of draft data to work with and only one week left of the Razzball Commenter Leagues draft season.  All public drafts wrap up on Sunday, March 25th, so if you’ve been waiting to join a league, wait no more! We learned a valuable lesson this past weekend, Razzballers start their St. Paddy’s day binging pretty early!  All but one of the early St. Patrick’s day drafts were mostly empty. Noted for next year. Also, if you were in one of the buy-in leagues that didn’t fill, everyone has been refunded to your FanTrax account. You can join another league or you can simply withdraw the funds.  We’d, of course, prefer you join another league. For all the votes these money leagues got, they aren’t filling up very fast. There’s a $20 league drafting tonight that only needs three more managers. Go get that money! The sign-up sheet is linked at the end of this article, but first, let’s dive into our RCL ADP and see what Razzball Commenters are drafting so far.

The fantasy baseball season has officially kicked off and we have real, live draft data to sift through.  Numbers nerds, assemble! We have spreadsheets, charts and ADP, oh my! It was a busy first week here at Razzball Commenter Leagues HQ, but I’ve gone through each league that has drafted and added their drafts to a master spreadsheet in order to calculate RCL ADP.  We’ve had sixteen leagues draft already, so there’s plenty of numbers to look at. The first week wasn’t always smooth with a few RCLs not filling to the required twelve managers, but drafting anyway. We even had one draft start with ten managers and finish with eleven!  The managers, they’re multiplying! As with any changes in life, bumps and hiccups are to be expected. If you are in one of the leagues with too few managers, you are welcome to play the league out, that’s your call, however the stats unfortunately will not count towards to the RCL Master Standings.  In the future, if you notice your league is close to drafting but someone has dropped out, leaving you short a manager hit us up on Twitter: @Razzball or @MattTruss and let us know. You can also leave a comment in Grey’s most recent post and/or invite a friend to join. I know, sacrilege to tell your fantasy baseball friends you read Razzball, but sharing is caring.  Speaking of sharing, jump below and I’ll share with you a fancy RCL ADP spreadsheet for your perusing pleasure…

With the season starting early this year, it seems like everything is a bit crunched.  This includes preparing for the Razzball Commenter Leagues drafts.  March is already upon us and it’s time to get drafting!  Hopefully, you’re not caught unprepared.  This week I just wanted to drop some additional strategy notes I couldn’t cram into last weeks posts.  This time next week we’ll have an assortment of draft data to wade through, which will be much more exciting and make it seem like real fantasy baseball season!  As of now one league has drafted, the Writers League jumped in first with a draft this past Saturday evening.  There were a few autodrafters (raises hand in shame), but an overall good looking draft (just don’t look at my lack of pitching staff, wow, that’s ugly).  There will be a Q&A style recap of that in the coming weeks.  Keep an eye out for that if you’re interested but in the meantime, let’s cover the last few tips you need before tackling your own drafts in the weeks to come.

Once again, you spoke and we listened.  Razzball really is the fantasy baseball site of the people, for the people.  Thanks to commenter “howtathor” who said he would much rather join a league called “Tehol is a Sexual Panther” than one titled, “RCL #27”, or something along those lines.  We’ve now added a “Play With” column to the Razzball Commenter Leagues sign-up sheet.  Now, when perusing for an RCL to join, you can scan for your favorite writer (Dreamy Lance perhaps?) or your favorite easy target (Tehol perhaps?) or maybe your favorite angry commenter (Cram It).  Either way, hopefully it drives you to sign up for another league or two.  Go ahead and skip to the end of this post to check it out, pitching strategy will be here when you get back.

Last week we covered why you should join a Razzball Commenter League, so this week let’s start covering what to do once you’re in there.  To be honest, most all of this has been covered somewhere on the site over the years, most often by Rudy. If you haven’t been playing in Razzball Commenter Leagues though, I could see how some of this has been glossed over, so I’ll try to consolidate some info for the newbies.  Even with the recent rule changes, I don’t think the strategy is going to change a ton.  We’ll all be learning and adapting to the new format together though, so even RCL rookies will be on an even playing field to start.  If you disagree, or think my strategy is whack, let’s talk about it in the comments.  Like I said, we’ll all be trying out the new format for the first year together, so let’s see what we dig up.

Pitchers and catchers have reported and the Razzball Commenter Leagues are open, it’s beginning to feel a lot like baseball!  I can’t wait to be half as productive at work and start losing countless hours of sleep staying up to watch the end of the Marlins@Padres game, just in case there is a closer injury.  Football was a fine diversion, but I always feel a little empty without baseball.  I’m happy to be back for another season as your RCL tour guide.  I love these things.  Really, they play to my strengths and offer ample opportunity to test strategy and ideas.  Weekly lineups/moves have their place, I just don’t find them as fun.  The daily moves, the League Competitive Index competition, battling hundreds of other managers for the top of the overall standings and of course, the non stop action make this a unique and fun challenge.  It’s kind of like pounding a pot of coffee every hour, on the hour for six straight months.  Even with the changes this season (IP vs. GS and a 500 move limit) I still think it will be the fantasy baseball equivalent of snorting Red Bull.  I’m also a huge nerd for all the numbers and data that gets collected from running so many leagues under the Razzball umbrella.  The move to FanTrax should make data collection much better which means it I will be even easier to share these numbers with you along the way and try to glean some info from all that data.  In order to make the data pool even larger though, we need you, and you, and you too.  You see, what makes RCLs great is all of you.  Man that sounds mushy, but it’s true.  In an ideal world, every Razzball reader would head on over to the RCL sign-ups, pick a league and all would be right with the world.  It’s funny to see how many frequent commenters have never played an RCL.  What’s wrong with you?  I was there once upon a time, so for those of you that aren’t so eager, let’s sit down and chat it out.