Saturday, December 02, 2006

Agenda

It's fortunate no one, except for John, has shown up yet. It's also fortunate that it's early December and not early February. In many ways, I feel like I'm a tree falling in the forest, or a pebble falling in the center of the ocean. On the other hand, these early posts will hopefully allow me to polish the corners of my cobwebbed mind, kick the tires on this blog, and have a decent "product" out there by the time spring training kicks into full gear.

Over the next few days, Toz and I are going to work on some team-by-team write ups. Nothing comprehensive. More likely we'll be looking at some of the players who will be on the border of your freeze list.

Another thing I'd like to do is look at what players earned in 2006, what they were expected to earn, and why the difference(s). This is a somewhat more ambitious project, but the winter is cold and long, and I should have something cobbled together by January, at the latest.

As visitors start crawling in, any suggestions will be more than welcome and greatly appreciated.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, my password isn't up yet, but we'll start here and can always move this into the blog section.

The Orioles have spent $42.4 million dollars this offseason, in fact in the last two weeks, building a formidable bullpen. Jaime Walker, Dannys Baez, Scott Williamson and Chad Bradford will certainly improve an erratic bullpen from last year (we'll leave the Jaret Wright-Chris Britton trade out of this discussions for the moment).

The question, however, is what does this mean for the Orioles and for your fantasy team? Adding these four guys to Chris Ray should result in no appreciable change to your fantasy strategy, despite the statistics that follow. Ray threw only 66 innings in 61 games, a respectable committment from Mazzone to limit Ray to 1IP per contest. He only blew 5 saves.

The Orioles pen, however, did blow 16 saves in addition to Ray. Baez blew 8 as a closer - he's out of that role this year. Walker, Bradford and Williamson combined to blow 1. Even factoring in Baez' blown saves, that's a plus 7 for the Orioles.

Who, then, are the beneficiaries? Ray, for one, should see a slight uptick of a few saves. Then again, you have a pretty good idea of what he is going to do anyway. After that, it really becomes a question of who knows? Bedard had decisions in 26 of his 33 starts - turn a loss or two into a win. The rest of the staff is too unpredictable, okay, too bad, to really see any affirmative impact. I suppose you would uptick Bedard a $1 or $2, but, after that, a flier is a flier. Perhaps you pick up a Hayden Penn instead of a different AL starter as a late round flier.

If Ray were to go down, Baez would clearly be the next guy in line. You cannot overspend for set-up men - I see this mistake made year after year. Having been a closer, however, Baez likely deserves a longer look than most. I would tick him up a $1.

There is no question that a good bullpen is a value adder for fantasy starters. Nonetheless, it is this writer's opinion that you also need some quality in your starters, else there is no appreciable change in value of those starters.

After Bedard, buyer beware.