The Baseball Diaries May 17
Hello everyone and welcome to my Baseball Diaries. This article is going to recap the previous night’s performance of my team as well as one of my competitors. The goal is to give a bit of insight as to why the players were selected and maybe some roster configuration tactics. No matter how good of a fantasy player someone thinks they are, no one can predict the future. All we can do is use our best judgment and sound strategy to be successful. So in lieu of handing out player picks, I present to you my Baseball Diaries.
My Strategy
This will be one of the easiest recaps ever. It seems like 90% of the entire industry had the same mindset last night. My strategy was simple; Force in the Rockies stack, even though I knew that everyone was on them, but change a few things to see if I could hit. In this case it was playing Pacheco and LeMahieu instead of Tulo and Cargo. My night was very simple to surmise. The Rockies failed so I failed. It just goes to show you there is no such entity as a sure thing in baseball.
I felt pretty good about the Puig, Van Slyke picks, but they were super high owned so no separation there for me either.
Lance Lynn with 3 K’s is a joke against the Braves, so I’ll be avoiding him from this point on until he starts pitching better.
I had 5 guys that were 21.6% owned or more and that’s just not a great way to win in this type of game. The sad part is that I knew what was coming with the ownership percentages, but still couldn’t stop myself from chasing Colorado players. They are a sick disease right now.
His Strategy
Mirage was one of the smart players who decided to fade Rockies. It paid off. As the Rockies were limited to 3 runs, he was ahead of half the field by fading them. Then, as the White Sox were putting up a nice offensive game, he was separating from another large chunk of the field. And by the time the Dodgers put up their nice total, he was all but locked in to a very high finish.
Sonny Gray was a nice, off the radar, pick. He’s a stud with K potential that was only 7% owned because of the matchup. Like I have said before though, matchups don’t matter with these stud pitchers. It’s a good idea not to risk the bad matchup in cash games, but in GPP’s you have to take chances and there’s not a better chance to take than a high strikeout stud pitcher who you know will not be highly owned.
However let’s not end this article without a point that I need to make. Some will look at this winning team and say it was easy to 4×4 stack and all that jazz. Here’s the fact though- Although it seems easy to stack the Dodgers and the White Sox and win all the money, the best offensive player on either of those teams is Jose Abreu. When mini stacking, it’s tough to fade the best players from a team. He did and played Dunn instead. Let’s just say he could evenly swap Abreu for Dunn, then he actually would have finished in 30th place for $125. In theory mini stacking is easy, but you’ve got to nail the right combos and that’s tough.