Week 3, A New Team at the Top

 

Paul can be seen here smiling before his fantasy team had a rough week last week. Loxahatchee Club is a beautiful place to play, though

Cory made a huge jump up this week with a big 8.69 EWW to take over the top overall year to date power rank. He is the team to beat right now. Check out that Keith EWW number though, 9.68 is the second highest number for the year. Michael’s hot start cooled off with a flop of a 5.16 EWW while he was only outdone by Paul’s 5.01, the father and son play each other this week.

There were some fun matchup results this week so let’s do some recaps.

The upset of the week was Standings-Last-Place Kevin taking down Standings-and-Power-Ranks-First-Place Michael, resoundingly. Kevin flirted with not getting to 30 IP but with some late week adds not only did he get to 30 IP but he stole NW from Michael. Kevin's offense was very strong last week with 15 home runs and a .262 average (that average is a 74% number now, better than 74% of the rest of the league any given week). Michael came back to earth after what was a blistering start to the year. Despite putting very little draft capital into pitching and all the injuries, his pitching is what has carried him so far and he was able to get by with low volume last week.

The high powered matchup of the week saw Keith take down Dave. Keith had 14 home runs and a .290?! average (96%, for reference) with only 50 hitting Ks. Keith threw 100 innings and kept the ERA under 4. It was a very very good week. Dave did just fine for himself also having 14 home runs but he ran into a buzzsaw this week. The -3.70 wins over expected helps offset the week 1 positive 4.39 WOE he had against Max. What goes around comes around. These two teams are very strong right now and should keep the momentum going.

Cory would have taken down just about anybody this week, but Max was the victim in this one. Max’s pitching really needed some attention but luckily Max attacked this on Saturday morning. Not only did this help Max to get to 30IP for the week but it set him up to actually have a starting pitching staff for the foreseeable future. Welcome to 2025, sir. The headline number from Cory’s week is actually his walk total of 37, it’s the second highest output of the year, second only to Dean’s week 1 total (even adjusting it to be a week and a half worth of days, 43). Cory’s rise to the top of the Power Ranks has been led by Aaron Judge and the rest of Cory’s potent offense, if he can find a few more pitchers this team will be tough to keep up with. 

Robert just held off Arthur despite having hit only 6 home runs. It was his pitching that showed out with a 2.79 ERA over 80 innings with 5 NW and 11 SVH, huge pitching week. Arthur had a good offensive week but couldn’t keep up with Robert’s pitching staff. Each of these teams has already had a fair share of up and down weeks, they’ll look to find some consistency to figure things out moving forward.

In the battle of preseason favorites, Dean took down Paul but neither did much to write home about. Dean’s 14 home runs and .271 average floated him here, but his pitching is really struggling right now. Paul was unable to get much going with only 8 HR and a .211 AVG, but he kept the pitching volume low to let Dean’s bad pitching take over and it worked. The discrepancy of the year right now has Dean in first place in the standings but in 9^th place in the power ranks. As I mentioned previously, the power ranks are relatively tight right now so sitting in 9^th isn’t saying much, all of us are very much still jockeying for position for the year.

That got me thinking, who ARE the early lucky and unlucky standings points managers so far this year? This is what Wins Over Expected was made for:

Pour one out for Kevin. Dean gets the April luck award.