The Silly Season Grind

For the past week and a half, I've been engaged in a scorched earth battle for a championship in a head to head fantasy baseball league. I was in three leagues this year, and this is the only one where my team showed life, so it's kind of a big deal. If I can pull off the win, I'll be up for the year, and money's tight enough now that this matters.

The rules of the league are pretty traditional: 5 x 5 Yahoo (Runs, RBIs, HRs, SBs and OBA against Wins, Saves, ERA, WHIP and K/9). The tie-breaking category is ERA, which just drives me crazy, in that it basically double-rewards a ratio category, and allows your team to lose it all at the last possible moment from an exploding reliever. It also rewards inaction, rather than action, in that if you get up in the category, you should just sit on the lead.

But the tiebreaker really isn't the biggest turd in the punchbowl here. That's the fact that the league is daily moves, with a move cap of 150 for the year. And once the playoffs come, provided you are lucky enough to qualify for them and haven't used up your moves for the year, you use them. Over and over and over.

Since September 20, when the championship round started, I've made well over 40 moves to try to nail this thing down, or about half as many as I've made all year. Most of them were made around 3am, because Yahoo is set to midnight on California time, which means that if you are playing against some guy on the West Coast, you're hosed. (And yes, one more reason why I miss living in Cali.) And because there's no rule against it, and I've held a lead in ERA, I've grabbed any number of pitchers that I was never going to use, just to make sure that my opponent couldn't touch them.

Finally, it's the fact that in a head to head league, unlike roto, the last few at-bats of the year are the most important. It's worked out for me this year, in that the opponent is cursing his luck to have Chase Utley, and his perceived advantage at catcher (Pablo Sandoval versus a collection of waiver talent, mostly Kurt Suzuki and Ryan Doumit) hasn't worked out, thanks to a couple of big fluke games.

The real problem is that daily move leagues are just an invitation to nerdly abuse, and the final two weeks of the season in baseball (and also basketball, not like people play that very much) are silly, in terms of who gets playing time. You can either lock the rosters late, or limit transaction to one per day, or set the transaction date to East Coast time... but really, the secret to fantasy leagues is that you have to grind to win. And if people knew how much grinding was involved, they'd play less. A lot less.