Fantasy Baseball Manager of the Year

A MOTY user comes through in the clutch — The “James Method,” Part 2

NOTE: If you didn’t read Part 1 of this “How To” MOTY Talk, you might want to so you fully understand how to create your own roster of “free agents in your leauge” — and how easy it is to do. From here on, we’re calling it the “James Method” after the MOTY subscriber who came up wtih it.

May 8, 2008 — Before we unveil the type of “quick find” results you can expect using the “James Method,” you need a little background on the roster parameters of the The Writer’s Radio Invitational League (“WRIL”), the one used as our resident guinea pig (a competitive league run by Brian Wilmer of The Writer’s Radio — a fun sportscast, one we highly recommend).

WRIL league set up (Yahoo!):

• 5x5 MLB Roto … with an “obp twist” — obp instead of avg
• 10 team, live-draft
• 9 active batters: c, 1b, 2b, 3b, ss, of, of, of, util
• 7 active pitchers: sp, sp, rp, rp, p, p, p
• 5 bench slots, 1 DL slot
• 220 total “owned” players in the league

So that’s a snapshot of the league. Now, the team on the operating table is obviously mine — Dirtbag City, a squad desperately in need of tweaking — 8th place at the time — despite being so early in the season … April 25th to be exact, when I started setting up the “WRIL league roster” on my My Rosters page.

A little backstory: I had the #7 pick in the draft. No fan of the 7 slot, I still felt pretty good about my draft. Mind you, with only 3 outfielders and no 2b/ss or 1b/3b roster spots, and only 7 active pitcher spots (as is typical with Yahoo! leagues) a lot of talent gets left on the table. And teams tend to be more stacked than in traditional roto roster set ups. Plus, this is a league full of guys who know their stuff. So, of course, I made a few moves here and there to shore up my team after the draft — picked up Accardo, Bourn, Keppinger, Saunders and Cliff Lee; dropped Weathers, Cust, Cameron and Pettite.

“Blah blah-blah-blah blah.”

Okay, okay. Here was the state of my 8th place team before employing the “James Method” to quickly find the best available players, who could help me specifically:

Pitching was my great deficit, ranking close to if not dead last in wins and K’s. And with definite room for improvement in whip and era. In saves, though, I was fine.

Hitting, I had some strong players … who hadn’t played very strongly. Papi, Holliday, Markakis, Renteria, Konerko. None had hit their stride, though Papi was coming around. Chipper, my 3rd-round, eyebrow-raising pick came out of the gates with his hair on fire — dome folliage, facial hair, arm pits, it was all ablaze and still is. Bourn was stealing bases like they were stuffed with diamonds. JHam was looking like a huge breakout player (and continues to). And Reynolds was one of the hottest sleepers early on.

Knowing I needed a lock-down SP (or at least a solid #2 with K potential) — and had some good base-stealing threats in Kinsler, Markakis, Renteria and Martin — I dealt Bourn for Tim Hudson (ATL) on April 25th, with the plan of picking up another cheap speedster from the wire … as you’ll see, it worked.

Then I started adding WRIL players to my new “leauge roster” and warming up my “ ! ” key.

Thar’s gold on that there waiver wire!

I didn’t need the “James Method” to know Willy Taveras (COL) — my target to replace Bourn’s sb’s — was on the wire. The Week 3 MOTY rankings told me that easily enough. So I nabbed him. Then dropped Mark Reynolds, Konerko and the demoted Francisco Liriano for the surging Conor Jackson (ARI) and successive spot starts out of John Lannan (WAS), Scott Olsen (FLA) and Jonathan Sanchez (SF). Things were already looking brighter.

When the Week 4 MOTY Rankings came out, I filtered them by my “WRIL” roster filter, added the “ ! ” to my roster number and filtered my resulting free agent choices by clicking the “Last Week” tab. I then had a list of available free agents ranked by their Last Week MOTY#s.

Knowing I had to make up miles of ground in Wins and K’s, I planned to stream sp’s for a while, so I filtered the rankings using the "sp" basic filter and applied the following MOTY Scope™ advanced filters:

Adv. Filter 1:  “K/bb greater than 2.99”

Adv. Filter 2:  “era less than 3.00”

Adv. Filter 3:  “whip less than 1.2”

Looky what leapt off the screen at me:

I picked up and streamed Pineiro, G. Smith, The Big Unit and Mark Hendrickson … to go with previous pick ups J. Sanchez, Olsen and Hudson.

Since April 27th, the collective line for the sp's I picked up:  3 wins, 0 saves, 43 K's, 1.13 whip 3.31 era and 1.95 K/bb in 45.2 ip.

The collective line for my entire staff over the same time frame:  5 wins, 2 saves, 28 K's, 1.05 whip 3.35 era and 1.87 K/bb in 70.2 ip.

I also ran all available batters through several advanced filter combos to see if there weren't some guys on the wire who could help Dirtbag City. Of course, there were. I nabbed these 3:

Keep in mind, WRIL uses obp instead of avg, so that weighed in on my thinking. I used Cedeno to spell Renteria for a few games, then dropped him for another streamed sp … Paul Maholm (PIT) — it didn’t work, he just got rocked by the Nationals. Chipper was dinged up for a few games, so Rolen serves as a nice backup at 3b. And there’s no way to ignore what Carlos Quentin has been doing.

If you missed it in the headers of my “before” and “after” rosters, my team picked up 18 pts and skyrocketed from 8th to 3rd place. Sure there’s been some waffling day-to-day, I was as high as 2nd one day and as low as 6th another. But right now, I’m sitting in 3rd. Well, not “sitting” really. I’ve got Uncle Mo on my side and I’m eyeballin’ the top slot — knowing I’ve got one helluva great new way to find the free agents who can get me there.

You can do the same — with the “James Method” working overtime for you. Give it a shot. Then write us and let us know how it’s working out for you.

We'll go ahead and thank James in advance for you.

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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