Troy, NY: So I attended my first
Arizona First Pitch with a couple of friends back in November. After meeting a number of great writers for Baseball HQ and other cool people, watching some great Arizona Fall League baseball games and generally enjoying the heck out of myself, even meet and able to hang out with
Scoresheet Baseball creator and all around good guy, Jeff Barton; I came to realize something I subconsciously already knew in the first place. A good amount of the fantasy baseball analysis does not correlate well to my two favorite fantasy baseball games,
Strat-o-matic and Scoresheet baseball.
Why is that? That's much more of a difficult question. I have always been more of a fan of a simulation type fantasy game which Strat and scoresheet excel at, while a large majority or the other types of leagues count stats. As a fantasy football player, I do understand the draw of watching your players build their values on a day to day basis instead of a weekly basis, but it just doesn't do it for me for baseball. The biggest thing to me is that any player ranking list that does not include Clayton Kershaw in the top 5 overall players (and some where he would not even be drafted in the first round of a league), does not only not make sense, it just doesn't seem realistic.
But enough about the "other" types of fantasy baseball, why do I like strat and scoresheet? Strat-o-matic baseball is an amazing game that I learned as child rolling dice and looking up results on some cards, and it wasn't until I was a teenager when I began to realize the mathematical way that someone could analyze the cards (or results) and figure out the best players to pick and use. Then, as I was introduced to scoresheet baseball, I realized the fun in trying to predict how the players were going to do and try to pick and use those players that would give the best result. That, the prediction process I mean, in itself is so much fun to try to figure out and completely maddening at the same time. Continuing Strat leagues have this great value, but drop off because once the season is complete you are then able to calculate each possible result mathematically. Is that worse than trying to predict how each of your players are going to to on a week to week or yearly basis? No, it's just different.
I could go on, but I'm starting to ramble and get away from what I wanted to do with this post. I don't know how much anyone in the league reads books like Baseball Forecaster, Baseball Prospectus or my personal favorite John Sickels Baseball Prospect Book; but I thought it would be fun to try my hand at writing up a few players. So here you go; some write ups and predictions of a few players on my team:
Madison Bumgarner: A former top prospect with already 3 and a half years under his belt who over the past three years has seen his H/9 go from 8.9, 7.9 then 6.5. At 23, primed for a big breakout in 2014, or something in between 2012 and 2013. Either way that's pretty good. Expectation: 18 wins, 2.80 ERA, 1.000 WHIP
B.J. Upton: The most over-rated player in the history of baseball, and has been on a steady decline since his one great season in 2007. Has good speed but it doesn't do any good when you do not get on-base. At what point do teams finally just give up an move on from this guy? The Haymakers picked him up cheap looking for some future value...I expect them to be disappointed. Expectation: .235-20 homers-30 stolen bases, with an under .300 on-base average.
