Week 11: To Expand, or Not to Expand…the Graph

Michael joined Brian and Josh at the Atlanta airport while the Beej was on their way to Costa Rica for a surf trip. Josh swears he didn’t get ZIKA on his trip, his pregnant wife can only hope so.

Year to Date Power Ranks through this week
TOTAL			HITTING			PITCHING				Manager	Team
1	Michael	2.93	1	Paul	2.88	1	Brian/Josh	2.17		Cory	Hebrew Nationals
2	Paul	3.57	2	Dean	2.88	2	Dave	2.50		Arthur	PURE DOMINATION
3	Cory	4.64	3	Michael	3.13	3	Michael	2.67		Dave	I Hate Fantasy
4	Dave	4.93	4	Cory	4.75	4	Cory	4.50		Brian/Josh	Smoak That Ish
5	Dean	5.14	5	Arthur	5.38	5	Paul	4.50		Paul	CWS champion Gators
6	Arthur	5.21	6	Matt	5.38	6	Arthur	5.00		Dean	First Future father
7	Brian/Josh	5.29	7	Dave	6.75	7	Keith	7.50		Matt	615 for the win
8	Matt	6.64	8	Keith	7.25	8	Dean	8.17		Max	Don't Demote  Me
9	Keith	7.36	9	Brian/Josh	7.63	9	Matt	8.33		Keith	Bourbon Street Blues
10	Max	8.14	10	Max	8.00	10	Max	8.33		Michael	The Flooded Farm

We now have twooooo people off the graph. Michael has reached the upper tier of the 2.0 realm while Max is still stuck in the 8.0s. We suddenly have a totally meaningless, entirely unimportant, yet universal decision on our hands. With all this discussion about expansion in MLB, I figured we had our own expansion topic at hand, what do we do with the graph? I want the people’s answer.

Question: Do we expand the graph?

Response	Reason
1	No, don’t give Michael the satisfaction
2	No, make Max be better
3	Yes, I want to see how much better than Max I am, pictorally
4	Yes, I want Max to feel better
5	Graph, huh? (and Michael sheds a single tear)

The tiers of the power rankings stayed pretty flat last week. Dean and BJ took a bit of a turn for the negative and things could be about to get away from them in the Yahoo Standings too. They need to turn it around, plenty of time to do so. Paul is super injured right now but managed to stay flat in the Power Rankings despite Cory knocking him down a peg in the standings. Paul is managing aggressively despite his top end power ranking by cutting his hurt and replacement level guys and always trying to find the next best hitter, good on him. Cory and Dave each had big weeks including Dave having a Monstrous pitching week. Dave is going to make you pry 3^rd place away from him. Arthur had a good win over a struggling Dean team who had been on a pretty good run coming into the week.

The other league topic is the keeper trading deadline. For a refresher, the keeper trade deadline is set up to prevent or at least divert people from sellling their good and non-keepable players for potential future keepers, even though Max is an overachiever and tried to start last week. The concept was that there would be so much time left in the seaon they can make a run at the playoffs…and player value will flucturate so much between now and March that no one has a CLUE who next year’s keepers will be…ok at least that part is still true.

As an example, Paul tried to make a keeper trade last year. The trade had some logic behind it when made the trade around July 1^st last year. The player he acquired to be a potential keeper was worthless by March and the player who the other party threw in to ‘keep Paul competitive’ the rest of the year turned out to be the only keeper worthy player Paul had on his end of season roster.

Point is, I hate keeper trades. I hate players being worthless on their team so they will give them away for pennies on the dollar. But we have a keeper league and anyone can manage their team however they want…within our rules, of course.

Remember, even those teams that don’t make the playoffs still have something to play for in September. The Bourbon Street Championship will determine who gets the first draft pick slot and everyone who doesn’t make the playoffs is in it automatically. So you’ll want to have a competitive team in September.

Anyway, the keeper deadline will be arbitrarily set at July 17^th, this is a week after Michael gets back from his big summer vacation so you jerks can’t ruin vacation with Arthur and Dave trades.

Monster of the Week: Max, when things were looking pretty bleak on Thursday with Max losing 14-0 to Michael and none of the categories were particularly close, Max made the move to add a ton of pitchers to ensure he at least won the pitching Ks category. It worked. Good on Max.

Max of the Week: it was almost BJ for leaving town and losing to Matt…but then they edged out a win with a few late week moves.