peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

KVETCH: All Star Stats is Horrible!

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It is 9 am on Thursday morning. My coffee is gone and my preworkday ritual of checking my fantasy baseball teams has been disrupted because All Star Stats hasn’t updated yesterday’s stats. Instead I see this (click to expand):

This is the third day this week ASS (as we mockingly call them) has failed to do what every other stat service seems able to do; that is, update the standings before midmorning. Yesterday they didn’t update until after 11 am!

This is absurd because ASS is an expensive service. The book rate to run a league for the season is more than $500. We complained a few years ago and they cut the price by a couple hundred dollars, but we still pay a premium. (I should note that the screen capture is from the XFL, which is comped by ASS because we’re a longtime “industry” league. I can’t complain about that. It is the American Dream League that is being bled by the service thieves at All Star Stats.)

If this was the first time there were service problems, so be it, but I was just searching through my email and discovered that we were complaining about this exact same issue in 2007! There have been many days with the same problem every year! Many days. Yes, we are idiots.

What has kept us at ASS all these years is what kept us at USA Stats in the years before that company was bought by All Start stats. (Before that we were with the venerated and brilliant Heath Data Services, perhaps the game’s first stat service, which has not ever been matched, but was sold to USA Stats in the mid-90s.) That is inertia. A league full of older guys fears having to learn a new system. The discomfort zone is high, even when the company delivering the goods now is doing a terrible job of it, costing 350 percent more for fewer features and less reliability.

I can promise you, we will not be with ASS next year. Even the most frightened of our cohort is realizing that this level of indifference is degrading, insulting, cannot be tolerated by reasonable people. Not being able to get our stats for a few hours from time to time isn’t the biggest deal in the world, for sure, but why should we pay extra for this? I should note that the ASS support people write apologetically very well, what with all the practice they’ve had.

ASS is owned by NBC, which is owned by Comcast, neither of which has any organic connection to the fantasy baseball world. They are playing us for fools, and it is well past time we all move on.

What we know…

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Some member of the vast ESPN network, bigger than Disneyland, reported that a dude (not a star) will be promoted to the majors. This was based on anonymous sources. I’m not making any decisions about anything based on this nonsense.

Are we out of our freakin’ minds? Anonymous sources for player transactions involving fodder? Yeesh.

Measuring Up to the Rules: Mea Culpa

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“A rule is a rule.” –Common Sense

“It’s not a rule if you can’t break it.” –Schoolyard Sense

“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.” –Henry David Thoreau

Fantasy baseball is a game, and games have rules. Rules are the way we limit behavior in the game play, to shape the competition in some foreordained way that makes the game fair. And fun. The funny thing is that not everyone agrees on what the rules mean, or when the rules should be followed, or when common sense says a rule should be ignored. Sorting out these ambiguities can be a pain, but they’re also part of the game. A good constitution can help settle most disputes, but you’ll be surprised how often your rules will be subverted by good intentions and misunderstandings.

Some examples of the rules coming into play from some recent drafts I was involved in.

1. Tout Wars AL

I was running the live blog of the Tout Wars AL auction, which at this point in the story was into the endgame. An owner nominated: “Peacock, ah, $3.” There was a titter.

Almost immediately the nominating owner said: “Oops. I mean Trout. (laughter). Um, 3.”

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Tout Wars NL Draft: The Askrotoman Team

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Ah, the best laid plans.

I really thought I had a shot at buying the team. No problem on Posey, Aramis Ramirez, Stephen Strasburg and the young and blooming starting pitchers, but either I didn’t play the auction right on Ian Stewart, Aaron Hill, Willie Bloomquist, and Jordan Schafer, or the dynamics of this particular auction doomed me.

What I know for sure is that Nate Ravitz spent a lot of money early and then repeatedly tried to pick off guys off the lower auction tiers by surprise, and thus I lost Jesus Guzman.

I thought I had Loney at my price for him, but then Phil Hertz blurted $17 and I let him go. Phil didn’t love the purchase. I would have been happy at $16.

And that was the point of this exercise. To try to identify soft spots and get players who play at prices below par. The problem was that I lost Hunter Pence to Lenny Melnick, who adopted a My Guys at Any Price approach. So I ended up with Drew Stubbs and Jason Heyward rather than Pence and Jose Tabata.

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Getting Ready for Tout Wars: What I’m Going to Do.

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I am participating in Tout Wars NL auction this Sunday. I think it’s my 13th NL draft and I’m sorry to say that I’ve never won. I’ve finished second once, fourth once and fifth five times. I’ve had a few very bad years, too, usually because of injuries, though it is fair to say that the good years were at least in part because of lack of injuries.

Tout Wars drafts are the toughest. The pace is unrelenting. Keeping up on the live blog, which you’ll find during the auctions on Saturday and Sunday at toutwars.com, is tough. But the pace actually makes the auction fun. It is go, go, go, time only for action, when your moment comes. And then you are brushed aside, like a newspaper in a strong wind, and the room is onto something new, and maybe you are, too.

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