Seeking Professional Help

I sent an email yesterday to a fellow who writes a column for The Talented Mr. Roto (entertaining site, not as useful as they think they are). He had kind of made a joke about Woody being put on the DL because of gout in his big toe. I sent him a nice note to say that I’ve had gout, and it is one of the nastiest, most painful maladies on earth. It may sound funny that a guy had a gout attack, but believe me, it’s serious business to the guy who is suffering.

He wrote me back today, a nice note thanking me for emailing him and for indicating that gout attacks weren’t all that funny. Now Sammy Sosa sneezing his way onto the DL is funny (though I’ve sometimes felt a twinge in my back on a sneeze too). Anyway it was a nice note and he offered to evaluate my team in our league race.

Realistically, we have such a deep league, with such experienced players, that I don’t think it would be easy to put into place any of the suggestions he might make. We’re in the end game now. Telling me to trade this guy or that guy probably wouldn’t be easy to do at this point, particularly with the trade deadline coming up. And the free agent pool is so sparse, it couldn’t help much. We’re reaching the point where the players you’ve got need to stay healthy and perform. At some point, it’s pretty much in their hands. Jason Schmidt has to pitch better than he did Tuesday night, or else we’re not going to win. And that’s really true, because since he’s on contract, we can’t even waive him.

I did tell him that our league, which has been around since the late ‘80’s has never seen a race this deep and close, and that it would make a good case study. In fact, I told him that this blog is essentially the chronicle that could be used as a case study. It doesn’t have all the details, but if I were a writer making my living writing about fantasy sports, I’d read this blog from beginning to end.

I like to think that my work here now qualifies me as a writer, though I’ll never make my living at it, so I went ahead and scanned through a lot of the blog today. To be honest, it made me pretty proud. There is a lot of good information here, a lot of thoughtful analysis, and some good humor. I only have 6 weeks to go to complete this project, and I know at this point that I’ll do it.

Even though they call it The Talented Mr. Roto, they don’t really help leagues that are deep keeper leagues like the original Rotisserie League. The information there is mostly for leagues with more free agents, oriented to weekly activations and deactivations. They don’t really get into values and dump deals because that’s not what the majority of leagues is out there. BABI is pretty pure in the original sense of Roto, but it’s also pretty rare. I’ll bet most of those writers have never been in a league like this with this kind of history. So what can they really offer?

This is not to put you down, Nando, if you’re out there looking at this. I enjoy what you do. And if you want to take a good look at the race, I’ll be happy to provide the details about the standings and the rosters. It’s a really amazing race. Believe me, the players in this league are playing their asses off. You’d have to be a hell of an analyst to help anyone in this league very much. Great case study, though.

On a final note, The Talented Mr. Roto himself, Matthew Berry, is auctioning himself off for charity on EBay to be your assistant general manager for your fantasy football team. Here is the link. But since PEFA is actually older than Matthew, he’d be welcome to join us for a drink, but he wouldn’t be of much help to anyone.