2019 Week 1: New Rules, new Year, new Leaders

Michael and George went to Atlanta Braves Opening Day last week. George was way more interested in the beer than the baseball game.

Year to Date Power Ranks
TOTAL			HITTING			PITCHING				Manager	Team
1	Dean	3.86	1	Dean	2.00	1	Arthur	2.83		Dave	I Hate Fantasy
2	Matt	3.93	2	Matt	4.00	2	Keith	2.83		Arthur	PURE DOMINATION
3	Arthur	4.14	3	Cory	4.88	3	Dave	3.83		Dean	George's Favorite
4	Dave	4.86	4	Arthur	5.13	4	Matt	3.83		Brian/Josh	Smoak that Ish
5	Keith	4.93	5	Dave	5.63	5	Paul	4.50		Cory	Hebrew Nationals
6	Paul	5.79	6	Brian/Josh	6.13	6	Brian/Josh	5.67		Paul	Gators Ready to Play
7	Brian/Josh	5.93	7	Keith	6.50	7	Michael	6.00		Matt	Nashville Marketer
8	Cory	6.14	8	Michael	6.50	8	Dean	6.33		Keith	Bourbon Street Blues
9	Michael	6.29	9	Paul	6.75	9	Cory	7.83		Max	Fantasy Golf Anyone?
10	Max	7.71	10	Max	7.38	10	Max	8.17		Michael	One Mortgage Michael

We’re back for another year of Power Ranks analysis. A quick refresher for  what I’m trying to show you in this table. I rank all teams’ year to date stats against each other. Dean’s 19 HRs is good enough for 4^th place in the league, so he gets a 4 in that category. Matt’s 70 runs is good enough for 1^st in the league so he gets 1 point for the category. I run this calculation for everyone for all 14 categories and average it, that is your power rank. The lower the number the better. If you know what standard fantasy baseball rotisserie scoring is, that is what these numbers represent. Also each week I remind everyone what manger name corresponds to what team name. Yahoo also now lists your name all over the website, yet somehow you still ask me who Bourbon Street Blues is even though Keith hasn’t changed his team name in literally a decade. C’mon people.

One week in and we have two teams that are slightly ahead of the pack. Dean’s offense was on fire last week while Matt was a little more well-rounded. Most of the teams are in the middle ground but the most noteworthy item I could think of was that this is the lowest power ranking for Michael since week 2 of 2016, the last year he missed the playoffs. Not the best omen for the year.

Ok so we’re one week into this new rule system, what has changed? This year, in the elongated week 1 we had 704 innings pitched, last year only 681 were thrown during the same length of opening week. This year, we had 76 Saves plus Holds, last year we had 53 saves. At face value, these numbers don’t jump off the page at you. Sure, there were a few more IPs, but only about 4% more, and the change in the relief pitching category could be attributed to adding holds to the picture, so now there are more than a handful of players collecting points in that category, but if you look closer, that is the rub. With the change in rules to focus on starting pitchers more, the total innings pitched number should have gone up by more, however teams so far have chosen to emphasize relief pitching, driving up the SV+H category. Max was last in the league in innings pitched thrown last week at 55, because of this he trailed behind the league in the rest of the gross-total pitching categories (Wins, Strikeouts, Quality Starts). Max is currently rostering only 3 starting pitchers, with this strategy he will need to stream starters heavily to keep up in the gross-total categories and hope that his base load starting pitchers can prop him up. The other end of that spectrum is Arthur who threw 94 innings, and at least last week, 94 very good innings. Arthur only owns 6 SPs which is right within the band of where most of the league is, but his starters were all lined up to throw twice in the 8 or 9 game window and most had good games at that. Arthur currently leads the pitching category for the league.

On the hitting side, the analysis is a bit more complicated simply to compare it to last year. There are some MLB-wide changes happening with respect to strikeout and walk rate, as well as total number of Home Runs that were hit during the window. For comparison’s sake, 172 HRs were hit last week in the elongated fantasy matchup, last year in the same window there were only 142. If you normalize these numbers to a standard fantasy week by dividing by 1.5, the totals are 114.67 and 94.67. Last year there were an avegerage of 101.1 HRs hit per week. So you can see the big power boost that occurred last week and why I’m not willing to make any sweeping conclusions about how the fantasy league is playing out. I will say that seeing the league leader in Slugging Percentage being at .574 was higher than I was expecting.

I’m going to keep the recaps short this week:

Matt beat Michael as Matt rode his keepers Cody Bellinger, Javy Baez, and Trevor Story who had 14 Home Runs between them. Matt appears to have a great talent base to start the year, though he did miss an opportunity over the weekend to stream pitchers against Michael to steal some matchup points. Matt will need to learn how to play the fantasy matchup this year to lead his team to the next level. Michael is heading back to the drawing board.

Dean beat Keith in what was a closer matchup than the power rankings would lead you to believe. Dean’s offense Keith’s pitching crushed it this week.

Arthur put a hurtin to Max in their matchup as Max’s team really left him hanging. With great keepers on paper to start the year, Acuna, Rosario, and Vlad Jr totaled a whopping 7 hits. Lots of room for growth here. Arthur’s pitching as mentioned above had a great week. Apparently there was a bet on the matchup and Max has to salute Arthur. You kids have fun.

Dave beat Paul while Paul was distracted with taxes and bike riding. Somehow Paul mustered 0 stolen bases in the entire matchup. Both of these teams sit in the middle ground of the power ranks.

Brian and Josh took down the league champ as Cory’s team is off to an incredibly injured start. All the injuries Cory avoided last year caught up with him, one week in. Both of these teams are off to slow starts in the bottom half of the power ranks.

Monster of the Week: I’m giving it to Matt because Dean basically just rode Mike Trout’s coattails. Matt made some good decisions during the keeper trading season and some good draft picks, at least on the offensive side, that are paying dividends already. He was a monster last week.

Max of the Week: Arthur either forgot that the week lasted unitl yesterday or just didn’t plan it out properly, but he burned through all of his pickups way too fast and had no moves left when he needed them during the second half of the week. Based on his text messages to me this morning it appears to be the latter. Now when have we seen him burn all his pickups quickly during a high leverage week….