Week 14: He's Alive

 

Keith, shown here via Gemini as a Lawyer on Bourbon Street playing fantasy baseball, was balling like it was 2025 last week. 

• Keith is back on the chart, he's alive! After a 3 week hiatus from the visual, our Season Spoiling Era friend got up off the mat and put together his best week of the year.
• The top of this chart just keeps lowering. This is not uncommon, but often times one or two teams are able to keep some separation on the field through July. Not this year. The league is very pared up this year. The teams near or at the bottom of the power ranks have never been more competitive week-in and week-out as they are this year. The teams at the top of the power ranks have turned out to be inconsistent. It's hard to stay at the top of the power ranks without either an extended (2+ month) run of excellence or consistent production week in and week out, and this year the top teams just haven't had that. It leads to high week-to-week uncertainty and the whole league being competitive. Count me in.
• Dean and Robert ticked back up last week, more on Dean in a minute

• Dean had an enormous week last week with the highest EWW of the year, 11.40. If you weren't paying attention you may have missed it because offense was a bit down across the league; so his 15 HR week may have not raised eyebrows, but this is the beauty of Expected Week Wins. I track both a team's EWW vs the single week stats and vs the whole year to date stats. I've found that comparing in a YTD context is not very accurate nor interesting to analyze such a metric against stats from April. Some weeks, in the YTD EWW lens, we'll end up with EWWs of 10 but the team was only mid compared to the rest of the league, while other weeks the best YTD EWW team will have a value of 7 and they had by far the best stats of the league. This leads to confusing Wins Over Expected and not being able to compare EWW to the Yahoo Standings, which is a big reason why EWW is cool. We play a weekly game so its best to compare and analyze ourselves each week, and this week, Dean ran away from the field.
• While Dean's week was outstanding, he wasn't the story of the week. Keith put up his best week of the year against the number 1 power ranked team that had been surging up the leaderboards, Dave. Before this week, Keith's best EWW was 7.35 in that mini-week 1. A 9.99 is truly outstanding and I can't wait to see what happens next. Keith's team being good would upend a lot of the expectations we had about how the playoff race was shaping up.
• Paul cratered out here with a 3.7 EWW but he was able to scrape by with one of the highest Wins Over Expected of the year, 4.8. Paul has a very capable team, but it's overperformed in the standings and has struggled over the last 4 weeks. He's been trying to sell off his team for months, but sitting 5th in the standings and with a league that is very gettable this year, he hasn't quite pulled the trigger yet.

We're down to our final rotation through the league schedule, 9 weeks left. The trade deadline is August 6th. The top 5 teams in the standings have a bit of breathing room to the next 3 teams, but no one would call any of these leads safe. Robert needs to start moving upwards quickly, and he did just that last week, in team output anyway. The race to the finish continues.