Fantasy Baseball Manager of the Year

A MOTY user comes through in the clutch — The “James Method,” Part 1

NOTE: This “How To” MOTY Talk explains an interesting way one 2008 MOTY subscriber, James L., uses the site. His approach is pretty straight-forward, but to make it as understandable as possible — ’cause you’re really going to want to try this — we take the time to explain it in full. So this Talk is fairly long. In fact, it’s a two-parter: Part 1 explains the “James Method;” Part 2 is a specific example, a test of sorts, of how it’s helped a team … namely, one of mine. Despite the length, give it a read — the pay off should be huge.

May 7, 2008 — By now, you should be tearing through the MOTY rankings every week — hopping back and forth between YTD, Last Week results and our 2008 Projections (just wait till next week when the first MTD rankings are available) — running oodles of multiple MOTY Scope™ filters and building all kinds of rosters and watch lists to help you manage your team throughout the season.

More than that, we hope you’re inventing your own cool combinations of the tools to help you find players for your team. Either in free agency or through trade.

Which if you haven’t figured out is what the MOTY site is all about. We’re not here too to manage your team for you, writing a “script” for you to follow. No, we’re in the business of giving you tools — powerful, unique tools — to write your own script, preferably titled “Cruising to a Fantasy Baseball Championship.”

Oh, we’ll give you suggestions, showing you different ways/combos to use the MOTY tools and the types of players you’ll find using them. But the point is for you to take those suggestions, tinker with them, customize them and experiment like a mad fantasy baseball scientist.

Which is exactly what one MOTY Subscriber has done.

"Check out the big brain on Brad!"

In this case Pulp Fiction fans, Brad’s name is actually “James,” a MOTY user who combined the My Rosters tool with that little trick we shared with you in our March 22nd MOTY Talk entry: “Secret Feature: Best on the Board” to invent a whole new way to use the MOTY rankings.

Pretty ingenious of James, here’s what he did:

• Created a roster list for his entire league … for the sake of our example, let’s call it “James’ Big Brain League”
• Saved every player from every team in his league to his new, “James’ Big Brain League” roster
• Ran a MOTY Scope™ search for “All Positions” on “James’ Big Brain League” to generate a rankings list of every “owned” player in his league
• Applied the “Secret Feature” to create a list of all the “unowned” players in his league (the secret feature creates an “anti-list” of the one you apply it to), which he can filter and sort any old way he wants — knowing, no matter what he does, the resulting players are all available in his league as free agents!

How brilliant is that?! In a word — very.

In fact, you should do it right now. Seriously. Stop reading this, click over to the Weekly MOTY Rankings, open your league’s page in another browser window and start saving every team’s players (including yours) to a New Roster entitled “Players I’m going pick up to kick everyone in my league’s butt.”

Okay, so name it something shorter. But you get the idea. Except … you’re thinking that entering every player in your league would take a lot of time, right? And this Secret Feature trick thingy, surely it’s complicated.

“Not really.” And, "“No.”

I actually followed James’ example the other day and it only took about 30 minutes to enter every player from every team in The Writer’s Radio Invitational League, a competitive league run by Brian Wilmer of The Writer’s Radio (my team is “Dirtbag City”). I’m here to tell you, 30 minutes is barely a drop in the bucket compared to how much time we all spend from March to September on our teams. Plus, once you’re done, it makes searching the free agent pool soooooo much quicker for the rest of the season.

Step 1: Quick tips for building your league roster

Through my trial-and-error process, I found a few short cuts for you to use in compiling your league roster. Give these a shot:

• 1) It’s much quicker to search for players by name, rather than hunting and pecking through the lists. And, remember, you can enter multiple last names — as many as you want, no need for commas, no need to type in entire names … just enough for the MOTY Scope to find them (i.e. type in “papel” and it’ll find “papelbon” for you)
• 2) Search one team at a time, using a filter for batters first (use the basic filter “All Batters” in the MOTY Scope), then pitchers … helps reduce the number of resulting guys with common last names, like “Jones”
• 3) Open your New Roster page in a second browser window — let’s you cross reference between the Weekly Rankings page and your resulting roster page to make sure you’re not leaving any players out (don’t worry, you can have multiple MOTY pages open at once). Or if you mistakenly add an “unowned” player to your list, you can easily remove him from it on the roster page
• 4) Every time you save players to your league roster, you’ll get a green message bar at the top of the rankings telling you how many guys you added to the roster — cross reference the green message bar number with the number of players you intended to find/save to make sure you got them all

Once you’ve entered your entire league, you just have to periodically add and remove players as teams in your league add and drop guys — including yourself … no need considering players you already own. It’ll just take a minute or two every week, tops.

Step 2: Applying the “Secret Feature”

Now, to make this a killer way to find the best free agents in your league and improve your team, you simply have to apply the “Secret Feature.” If you haven’t reread that MOTY Talk, you might want to. But this is really easy and a lot quicker than Step 1 — if you know where the “ ! ” key is on your keyboard … “shift-1” [cough, cough] “shift-1.”

In a nutshell, here’s what you do:

• In any MOTY Rankings list (even projections), use the “All Teams and Saved Rosters” drop-down to filter by your new “league roster”
• Find your new roster number in your browser’s address bar — you’ll see a long URL that ends something like: “ … /moty/weeklies/ytd/2008mlb/983/all … ” Yours will be slightly different, notably the number “983” — that’s the roster number — yours will be different.
• In the browser address bar, type an exclamation point (“ ! ”) before your league roster&rsquo number. So in the example above it’d look like this: “ … /moty/weeklies/ytd/2008mlb/!983/all … ” Hit return and …
• … you’ll get your league’s “anti-roster” or EVERY available player in your league. Note too, that the “All Teams and Saved Rosters” drop-down, now says “Custom” — you’ve customized your custom roster.

At this point, the MOTY Scope is still at your command in full effect, allowing you to filter, sort and search every player not currently on a team in your league.

Pretty cool, if we do say so ourselves — “Everybody, give it up for James!”

Still not sold on spending 30 minutes, or less, to try it yourself? Check out Part 2 of this “How To” MOTY Talk to see how I've used James' idea to improve my Dirtbag City squad in the The Writer’s Radio Invitational League. Let's just say the impact was somewhat immediate.

Questions, thoughts, cool stories of how the MOTY System has helped your fantasy baseball team? Drop us an email. Your comments might show up here in a future MOTY Talk.

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