Week 4: Where are we at, one month in?

Above is the year to date rankings. You can see the tier the Dave has placed himself in, unfortunately for the rest of us there is no big surprise there. What is interesting is the grouping that the other 9 of us are falling into. BJ fell back to the pack a little last week and Michael and Max both took steps forward to bring the bottom 9 teams in the league to rank between 4.4 and 6.5. What this tells us is that the league is primed for someone to breakout. It happens nearly every year. So let’s look at the hitting and pitching ranks to see who might be the one to do it.

 

Notable here is the crashing the Cory and Arthur appear to be doing offensively. Michael and Keith have been making strides the last few weeks. The top tier right now offensively though remains Dave, Marcley, Keith, and BJ.

The pitching rankings show us that there is fairly equal stratification across the league. Cory actually has had the dominant staff led by Noah Syndergaard and Jon Lester. Paul and Michael are showing moderate down trends in pitching, but that can partially be attributed to their matchup last week that entailed significant streaming. Streaming pitching in this league leads to high ER and likely high ERAs and WHIPs. This is not good for Pitching Rankings. Dean has been all over the place; after starting the year with elite numbers, he crashed down to the pack two weeks ago only to bounce back in a big fashion.

If I were to pick two teams to make a chase at an upper tier in the combined power rankings based on the hitting/pitching splits I would point out Keith and BJ. They already have the hitting stats and have shown short-spurt pitching performances to make them competitive. 

Monster of the Week: I don’t feel like giving it to Clayton Kershaw or Chris Sale, so Michael Conforto is a pretty good choice. He was ranked number 4 over the last week. It’s more notable for how he got here. I was high on him pre-draft but when it came out that he was going to get platooned I felt BJ took a bit of a reach in the 15^th round. So far this has paid off so I will salute the pick and his Monster week that led BJ to a win over a talented Hebrew Nationals (Cory).

Max of the Week: I’m hoping time will lead Dave to be the Max of the Week for dropping Kendrys Morales, but not quite yet. Dave did drop Marcel Ozuna this week who promptly hit 2 HRs…that was funny. No Max’s that I saw last week. As always, I am taking submissions.