Amateur Summer Baseball…And Dean78904
Every summer, warm weather makes its way up to Cape Cod, and along with this weather comes a couple hundred amateur baseball players. For a few months, these players – the best of the best among undrafted collegiate arms and bats – compete against one another in front of locals, vacationers, and Major League scouts at small ballparks in small towns where the games are free and the fans will one day be able to say, “I saw ______ way back when he played in the Cape Cod League.”
Who fills in that blank?
Well, at 30 MLB teams and 25 players on each active roster, that gives us 750 Major Leaguers at any given time. Of those 750 grown men currently plying their trade on the biggest stage of baseball, over 250 once passed through the Cape Cod League.
The list goes on.
A couple weeks back, I visited my parents on the Cape, and we made our way to a game one night – which was, incredibly, the first time I had ever attended a Cape Cod League game, in spite of having spent chunks of at least 20 summers in New England. I kept the program from the game I attended. I made notations next to the players who started, so I can know years from now who I saw play “way back when.” I added a little “HR” notation next to the couple guys who sent the ball out of the park with that wooden bat they’re probably still not quite used to using.
Five years from now, one or two of the guys I saw that night will be superstars. A couple others will probably be in the Majors as well. But you know what? – watching that game, I would have been completely incapable of telling you which guys will make it. I kept that program, in part, because I’ll have no clue without that program who I saw. When I look at that program five years from now and realize I witnessed the early stages of superstardom, it will only be in my imagination that I am able to say, “I remember that guy; I knew he had something special about him!” Nope – I know nothing of the sort.
That’s kind of what we dealt with all these years with Dean78904 handing out free advice on GrindersLive. None of us would have been able to say with absolute certainty that Dean was a superstar in the making, but apparently, that’s exactly what he was…
…that’s exactly what he is.
Dean has led the FanDuel accuracy rankings the entire season.
Dean has also led the DraftKings accuracy rankings the entire season. (Edit: Dean has led DraftKings rankings almost the entire season. STLCardinals84 led at one stopping point, and I just realized that we must have had an error that left him off the rankings list altogether, as he’s not listed anywhere amongst any of our rankers. As soon as I find out where the great STLCards slots in, the list below will be updated! Edit 2: Fixed!)
Forget “a superstar in the making.” Dean has made it to the show. He’s Kris Bryant, and the rest of us are tagging along in his cold, dark shadow…
UPDATED FANDUEL ACCURACY RANKINGS
These are the updated FanDuel Accuracy Rankings for our daily Consensus Value Rankings in RG Premium:
1. Dean78904
2. JMToWin
3. CheeseIsGood
4. STLCardinals84
5. Naapstermaan
6. BigT44
7. Pepsi7
8. Boggslite
9. PrimeTime
10. a25smith
UPDATED DRAFTKINGS ACCURACY RANKINGS
These are the updated DraftKings Accuracy Rankings for our daily Consensus Value Rankings in RG Premium:
1. Dean78904
2. STLCardinals84
3. CheeseIsGood
4. Pepsi7
5. Naapstermaan
6. JMToWin
7. BigT44
8. Notorious
9. jmbwngfn
10. Boggslite
Every day, in the RG Premium section, a rotating selection of eight of our Experts rank their favorite point-per-dollar options at each position. Our Accuracy Rankings are based on a weighted scale in which each ranker is set against the other seven rankers on that day, and is then rewarded according to the accuracy with which they rank the best point-per-dollar performers – with more weight given to those they ranked higher.