Official T-Nation Baseball Thread

This will be THE place to talk trash, bitch-slap, pimp-slap, and cry about The T-Nation Baseball League.

Below is a consolidated list of T-Nation usernames and the corresponding team names.

If you don’t see you team name listed - either I missed it, or you haven’t posted it like the rest of us have. Post it!

In no particular order:

atmosphere_____ T-Ball

Joe Weider_____ The Bowlturners

slimjim _____ Islanders

boonville410 _____ Boonville What!

Kuz _____ P&W Screaming Eagles

Bobcat _____ Texas Bobcats

vroom _____ Vroom’s Sluggers

Darrell Licke _____ Tecumseh Tornados

BostonBarrister _____ Battlin’ Barristers

JNG _____ Jon’s Jehovahs

rainjack _____ Shoshone Arrowheads

FlawlessCowboy_____ Flawless Cowboys

LA _____ Flying Monkeys

mica617_____ ISWEARITSFLAXSEEDOIL (should win a prize for the oddest team name)

uniko _____ Montreal Ex-expos

deanec______ 62’ Vette

alwyn96_____ Fighting Amish

concreteguy_____ N.Y. Knights

I’d like to hold the draft as soon as we can, so I can take advantage…er…Make some trades as needed before opening day. Let me know what you guys want to do.

Since you are all the lambs at my slaughter, pick any day that works. lol I say we pick Monday so that everyone has the weekend to look at the rankings, get their houses in order, etc. This league is going to be especially tricky (in a way I dig) because of the large amount of stats, including defense.

Play T-ball!

Kuz

  • Return with honor (and hopefully with $300 of T-schwag)

Do 'er up. Will the draft be live, or automated?

-FC

as best I can figure, we choose the players we’d like to have and also the players we can’t stand…and then the computer tries to get them for us but takes the best available if our picks aren’t available, right?

What’s this about stats, Kuz?

The draft will be AUTOMATED.

You don’t have to be anywhere near a computer. But you do need to go to your team, and at the top, there’s a link that says - “Edit Pre-draft Player Rankings”.

You are given a default ranking of players. If you don’t like that order, you need to edit the list.

You will have until Monday Morning to finalize your player rankings.

I will have hold the draft MONDAY MORNING MARCH 28th

I’m not sure of the exact time, as I do have a job and, although this is way funner, the job actually pays.

If you have any questions - ask them here, or PM me. I’ve said it a couple of times already, but let’s try to keep all of the league trash talk, bitch-slaps, pimp-slaps, and other whining and crying right here in this thread.

[quote]Joe Weider wrote:
as best I can figure, we choose the players we’d like to have and also the players we can’t stand…and then the computer tries to get them for us but takes the best available if our picks aren’t available, right?

What’s this about stats, Kuz?[/quote]

Each stat category counts as one point in head to head leagues (ie your team bats .300 and my team bats .301, then I’m up 1-0). You compete on a weekly schedule against another T-member.
As for the draft, go to the ‘My Team’ link from the league home page. Click on ‘edit pre-draft rankings’. The Yahoo! default rankings will be shown. You can choose to exclude players from your draft by highlighting said player and clicking the arrows to the left. Or, you can create your own pre-draft ranking by highlightin the player and clicking to the right to move them up in the draft.

Good luck! It’s a shame that I’ll have to wait till October to get my free supps…

Rainjack,

As Commish, you just change the draft status to “Ready”. Yahoo! drafts 24-48 hours AFTER the change, so you won’t neccessarily be able to have the draft Monday Morning. I would suggest changing the status to ready on Sunday night (possibly the computers will update and draft at midnight, as that’s usually when that takes place- it was the case in the other leagues that I’m in with college buddies). Most of the drafts happen around midnight in Yahoo!.

Hey fellas, Im the Montreal Ex-expos, since there’s no baseball here anymore i will live through my fantasy team.

Thanks mica.

at this rate I’m just glad it’s not MY $300.

So like this: I go to the list. I pick out a bunch of players I like. The computer doing the draft looks at my list, tries to get me those players.
If it can’t get those players, it then gets the next highest ranked player at that position, is this right?
And so should I have 2 or three players for each position? Or does it really matter?

[quote]Joe Weider wrote:
as best I can figure, we choose the players we’d like to have and also the players we can’t stand…and then the computer tries to get them for us but takes the best available if our picks aren’t available, right?

What’s this about stats, Kuz?[/quote]

Well, your traditional fantasy baseball leagues tend to be 5X5 leagues (and if you know this already, my apologies for all that is to follow in way of explanation). So you have 5 hitting and 5 pitching categories. Hitting: Batting AVG, HR, RBI, SB and Runs. Pitching: Wins, Saves, ERA, WHIP and K’s. This is the kind of format I’m used to and have been doing for the last 18 years (scary to think back on when I did this in high school).

Since we have A LOT more stat categories, it is going to be pretty interesting because all those fantasy baseball magazines are focused on 5X5 or 4X4 leagues, not ones that take into account defensive stats like assists and putouts, or offensive stats like K’s (obviously the less the better). That’s what makes this so interesting to me. For instance (and not to give away TOO much of my ranking strategy), but David Ortiz of the Red Sox. Fantastic hitter (and a big fave of mine), but since he might DH a lot, you will not collect as many of those defensive stats.

But mica’s description of how the stats will affect scoring is dead on. Our league is weekly head-to-head match-ups, which is also something I’ve never tried. What’s cool about it is that you do not need to tweak and re-tweak your line-up daily.

OK, I need to stop geeking out. Must admit I am a little giddy for baseball to start…

Kuz

[quote]Joe Weider wrote:
at this rate I’m just glad it’s not MY $300.

So like this: I go to the list. I pick out a bunch of players I like. The computer doing the draft looks at my list, tries to get me those players.
If it can’t get those players, it then gets the next highest ranked player at that position, is this right?
And so should I have 2 or three players for each position? Or does it really matter?

[/quote]

Good question, Joe. Yahoo has some kind of algorithm built into the draft selection for automated drafts so that it will go after your highest ranked players first, but it will not simply fill up your entire team with outfielders or first basemen (since you would then have a whole mess of open roster slots for pitcher, catcher, second base, etc.) I do not believe it does a position-by-position draft, but an overall draft. It will just keep taking your highest ranked player still available provided you have a slot for that player. That is the funky part of an automated draft versus doing it live and changing your strategy on the fly.

Kuz

don’t apologize. I’ve never done fantasy anything that didn’t involve a redhead with big boobs and a nice ass. You know, once we… (what? Huh? Oh…yeah, thanks…) …never mind. I’ve been reminded that that’s not why we’re here.

Anyway, no. I know nothing about this. RJ PM’d me and asked if I was interested and I figured why not.
Easy pickin’s for youse guys.

So you’re saying that a guy like Renteria would be a more valuable choice because he can hit but also is great in the field and steals bases.
Right?

I think at the end of the draft you get positions you don’t have filled, don’t you? I mean, if you just ranked all outfielders in your top 100 players, I don’t think the computer would give you a team full of outfielders, would it?

I could be wrong though – I’ve done so many different leagues (yahoo, sandlot, cbssportsline, espn) I sometimes get confused about how each works.

Sorry, Kuz already addressed that. D’oh!

Anyway, one more question: Does anyone want to explain the difference between the “O-Rank” and the “Rank” numbers?

[quote]Joe Weider wrote:
don’t apologize. I’ve never done fantasy anything that didn’t involve a redhead with big boobs and a nice ass. You know, once we… (what? Huh? Oh…yeah, thanks…) …never mind. I’ve been reminded that that’s not why we’re here.

Anyway, no. I know nothing about this. RJ PM’d me and asked if I was interested and I figured why not.
Easy pickin’s for youse guys.

So you’re saying that a guy like Renteria would be a more valuable choice because he can hit but also is great in the field and steals bases.
Right?
[/quote]

Bing-o. The more stats he gives you, the better. For instance, log into your team on Yahoo and there is a tab at the top marked “Players”. You can go there and look at last year’s stats cut 1,001 ways, including all of the stats we will be using for this league. Fiddle around with that for a bit and it will help.

I think once the league starts, you will get a much better handle on what you need to do to improve your team. While being a baseball fan helps a great deal, a lot of it has to do with research and getting a gut feel for who is hot and who is not. I mean, if someone was a good stock investor, they could be a very good fantasy baseball owner if they applied a similar approach.

Kuz

Sorry, I need to amend that last question: Is O-rank based on our league’s scoring system, so that the default ranking basically how valuable each player would have been in our league last year? I think that’s what it means, but it’s not super clear.

The other possibility is that O-rank is a default, 5x5 rank. This will obviously affect how much research I’m doing on Sunday night.

Kuz (or anyone)–so Manny Ramirez is ranked in the top ten overall (I think…or is it top 5 OF? I don’t remember…my head hurts…) but he might not be as good an OF pick as someone like Johnny Damon, who’s not going to go yard as much but can steal bases and isn’t a bad fielder?

Add me to the list:

deanec______ 62’ Vette

Ah, screw the rankings. I’ll win with whatever players I get.

I’m that damn smooth.

(I think?)

:stuck_out_tongue: