Week 20, the Contender Gets Off the Mat

 

Robert chose to get soaked in the middle of nowhere, I mean, watch a baseball game at a Racetrack, a few weeks ago when he went to Bristol to watch a baseball game. At least he had the right jersey on.

• Paul took a big Power Ranks dive this week ending what had been a very solid run for about 8 weeks
• Dave’s Year to Date Power Rank surged this week, but we’ll see in the EWW data that this is indicative of why that can be misleading. Similarly, but with the opposite impact, Keith shows here that he didn’t move this YTD Power Rank at all, not so fast my friend.

·      Huge numbers this week by Keith, Dean, and Kevin. Any week above 9 is a Monster week. Though this is in no small part due to….

·        Max, Paul, and Arthur really not having it this week. Max missed 30IP by one out, and he’s officially on notice to get his lineup set because this week he played Arthur with no playoff implications, but he finishes the year with three matchups against teams fighting for playoff spots. Max last missed 30 IP the week he played Michael, but Michael won all of the pitching categories outright. There’s been no recent miss of 30IP against a playoff contending team. OK but back to the interesting stuff…

• The 4-week running totals continue to show an interesting story. Dave’s pullback is real. He is not a high-end team right now…emphasizing right now. Ebbs and flows happen, and he’s built up enough margin to be able to scuffle here in time to figure it out with three weeks to the playoffs.

The Matchups this week were rather impactful, so let’s recap:

Heading into the week, there was still an outside chance that Michael, despite having sold his talent, could have made a move to the playoffs. His team played great. The pieces he sold off were even outperformed by the replacements Michael found for them. Alas, Keith had other plans. Keith put up his best EWW since week 8 and squished Michael like the annoying fly he was being back into the Bourbon Street Championship. Keith had been toiling with three of his last four weeks having an EWW less than 8.00, but this week, when his season needed it, his team came through. This was all the more important because his closest competitor had an equally impactful week.

Kevin, who had a GREAT week, ran into an even bigger week from our Yahoo-Standings-first-place team, Dean. After a brief summer swoon, Dean has really put the pedal down lately having been the best team in the league over the last four weeks. Kevin now falls back to 7 games behind Keith with three weeks to go. Kevin does benefit from getting to play two non-playoff teams (and maybe three if you count Dave right now) down the stretch: Michael and Max.

The final playoff contender still standing was Cory who took advantage of a weakened Dave team to get a much-needed win. Cory’s 8.67 was a great EWW number and he needed it, because yes while Dave’s team might not be as strong as it was during the month-of-Kurtz, he still put up a 7+ EWW. Cory gets to play Max and Arthur the next two weeks before finishing the season against Keith for what Cory hopes can be a playoff play-in game.

Robert pounced on a Paul team who had its worst week of the year by almost a full EWW point. The wall can come quickly and it sure did for Paul here who had been the best team in the league for the trailing four weeks heading into this week. All the players he picked up at the trade deadline chose the same week to take one off, so now the difficulty becomes…who will bounce back and who is toast? Props to Robert for sticking with it and for putting up his second-best week since week 10.

Arthur beat Max, it would have been a tie if not for Max handing over two pitching categories due to not hitting 30 IP. Neither team had an EWW over 4.01. Their eyes are on the BSC and 2026.

The final item to cover is the trade deadline-ending capital values.

Michael got back out from under water but it will be Arthur heading into 2026 with the equivalent of an extra 3^rd round pick ($20) on Max who has the same lead on Robert who had an even larger gap on the field. Paul kept on buying and will have even less capital than Keith. Comparing these values to what we had coming into this year:

 

Keith and Paul will have even less to work with next year than Max did this year. What a year that will be for them.

We needed to get through the deadline and I had sent a note out that we would deal with this later, but later is arriving quickly. A number of teams ended up with ‘illegal’ draft pick totals to finish the deadline out.

We’ll need to fix this before the year ends to avoid a TON of admin work from me in the offseason. We’ll do some even-value round-swapping trades to get these values back into compliance with our rules. If anyone wants to raise their hand that may have below the limit of top-5 round picks or picks in rounds 6-10, please let me know, otherwise I’ll just work with the people who were a part of the rules-shirking trades to work through them. You may see the trade window open back up in Yahoo but it will only be to execute these trades and not to allow any player swapping. I’ll be using this round-by-round value chart: