Fantasy Baseball

The baseball regular season is almost over, thus fantasy baseball is almost over. I had three teams this year, two on ESPN and one on Yahoo. All three were free, but ESPN's service is far superior to Yahoo's. With ESPN you get live scoring, so at any time you can login and see how your team is doing. That's enough reason right there to play ESPN over Yahoo. I found that Yahoo's player news was not nearly as good as ESPN's. There were numerous times that it didn't indicate that a pitcher was going to be starting until just hours before the game actually started. This info was always available 24-48 hours earlier on ESPN. I wound up relying on ESPN to figure out which of my pitchers on Yahoo were starting.

Of course maybe my opinions are horribly biased. My two ESPN teams are winning their leagues easily, but my Yahoo team is in 8th place. So maybe I think ESPN's game is superior just because I've had more success on there.

Anyways, the end of the season gives me a chance to reflect on players that I did a good job of predicting their performance as well as ones that I did not. I had several players that drafted in all of my leagues because I was sure that they would outperform expectations. I also had some that I was sure would under-perform. Here's the ones that I was especially high on.

Chase Utley
Matt Holliday
Mark Teahen
John Smoltz
C.C. Sabathia
Ben Sheets

Five of the six were pretty good, four of the six really good. Obviously Teahen was the big disappointment on the list, and the biggest reach. So it's ok that he bombed, since he was a very late round draft pick. Sheets was also fairly cheap. He may not have been a slam dunk, but his team yielded my best free agent pickup: Ryan Braun. I picked him up on all three teams, and he's been amazing.

I did have one huge screw-up though. That was Carlos Pena. I picked him up in May, and gave up on him because he wasn't playing everyday. This was especially bad for my Yahoo team that never had a good first basemen all season.

So what about predictions for next year... Eh, it's football season. Ask me again in January.