Cheating Stats

Unless you are playing in a keeper league and you have an incredible keeper list, when the auction is over you are going to be short stats in some categories. Maybe you’ve got lots of power but not enough steals, or you’ve got plenty of saves but not enough starting pitching, or the starting pitching you’ve got isn’t very good. Something is going to be lacking.

Of course, you will have gotten more players you wanted that you expected. That is because you like some guys that others don’t so they go chepaer than you expect. And you’ll be happy, until your beloved Jim Bullinger goes out there and gets lit up like a nuclear reactor. But no matter how happy you are, your team is going to be missing some stuff that you will have to adjust for as you go along.

When Tom Gordon started to suck (I believe that is the technical phrase), we simply fell off the face of the earth in saves, and we never recovered. We even had made a point to purchase his likely replacement, Ryan Madson, but instead the Phillies came up with the brilliant and unexpected strategy of moving the really sucky Brett Myers to the bullpen. We had to punt saves, even though we had several guys who we hoped might garner a few. In 4x4, punting a category is virtually impossible.

Somewhere in the auction you’ve got to cheat. What I mean is that you have to pick areas that you simply don’t spend enough on, and use that extra money in some other area. We all do it, to some extent. That’s why a cheap closer is so valuable. The Bums had a $4 Valverde. They did purchase Saito for $28, giving them 12 saves points, but they could have used that $28 for more of the other things they might need, and then with the base of saves Valverde gave them, worked to pick up some more saves down the road. Since they ended up with plenty of everything, they are a bad example, but they sure had a great start on the saves category for almost no money.

Which gets me to the team I want to focus on, the one owned by the greatest BABI player ever, Mr. Leaguer. Year in, year out, he cheats on starting pitching. He usually has something like $11 for 7 players in the end game, and 6 of those players are pitching slots. The other is usually his backup catcher, though that was not true last season. And he seems to find some quality there, enough to fake it with his pitching categories at least for a while.

Mr. Leaguer went into the 2007 auction with 1 keeper at pitcher, Derek Lowe at $13. That’s it. No closers, no semi-closers, no #2. He bought the cheapest closer, the one everyone thought would be the first guy to lose his job, David Weathers. Weathers finished with 33 saves, an ERA for 3.59 and a WHIP of 1.21, way better than anyone had a right to hope. When he traded for Brad Lidge in mid-season, he was able get enough saves to finish with 6 points in the category.

He bought his other 8 pitchers (7 starters, 1 reliever at the start of the season) for $26. He had a total of $54 in his 10-man pitching staff. He had $226 to spend on hitting, though he only ended up spending $212, wasting $14 in an end game miscalculation. You can buy a lot of hitting for $226 (or even $212), particularly if you’ve got Hanley Ramirez kept at $11. Mr. Leaguer finished the season with 43 of a potential 48 points in hitting.

With his $54 pitching staff, he got 23.5 points. He finished in 3rd place with 66.5 points. Pretty impressive.

Of those 8 pitchers after the kept Lowe and his closer Weathers, only 1, Tom Gorzelanny, was actually any good. He got rid of all of the other 7 by July 24, via waiver or trade. When we traded Derek Lee and Cliff Floyd to him for Carlos Gomez and Tony Clark, he demanded that we give him Carlos Villenueva for a bum of his choice, John Suppan. We actually kept the $4 Suppan for a few weeks, but he was creating a bad odor in our ERA and WHIP and wasn’t actually getting any wins, so we waived him.

At the beginning of last season, do you remember how Matt Morris and Braden Looper started out hot as in “hot hot hot”? Mr. Leaguer was looking pretty brilliant at the end of April, but he ended up waiving Morris in June and Looper in July. He waived Livan in July as well, and found a sucker for Claudio Vargas. His only non-starter, Kevin Correia, was a call option on the Giants’ closer role for a buck. We had the same thought. Mr. Leaguer was right about Buttmondo, but Correia never got a chance. He traded him as a throw in to the Rips, who soon waived him. When he got into the Giants’ rotation in August, the Pecklers picked him up in a desperate attempt to chase wins. He pitched well, and now he’s a starter who would have been kept at a buck.

The point is for the most part, these guys all sucked, and yet he squeezed 23.5 points out of that staff. Pitching, unlike hitting, can be fixed, at least a little. But man, it takes some major league cajones to spend only $26 on 8 pitchers. Mr. Leaguer does it every year. And every year he’s got lots of hitting. He cheats his pitching, and works that side of his roster to make it good. And if he actually hits on a few of those guys, he’s in the race for first. Last year he didn’t do so well, so he only finished third.

That’s a shame.

He's got only 1 pitching keeper again for 2008, Gorzellany at $7. You watch, he'll do it again.