Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Cutting out this middle-man Articles
Posted by Paul Singman at 6:09amPeople hate wasting time, and most people hate reading articles because often times reading articles means wasting your ever-valuable time. In fact, you might feel that I am doing that exact thing at this very moment. If that is true, I apologize.
Alright, now that we have lost 50 percent of the people who initially began to read this article, let me share with you a possibly more efficient way of finding out who to add or drop than reading boring articles.
You see, certain people in this world decide to write articles trying to help other people do better in fantasy baseball. Some are more qualified to do so and others are better at it, but I won't get into that at the moment. These same people also tend to compete in fantasy leagues themselves, some public and some private.
Wouldn't it be of value then, to check who these experts are adding and dropping in their own leagues instead of reading articles written by them about who you should be adding and dropping? If you find an experts league similar to your own, I feel the answer is yes. And even if you do have the time to read fantasy baseball articles, checking the recent moves in an expert's league—or even any other league you are in—can provide a straightforward answer of who are good candidates to add.
Below I've compiled a small list of leagues that anyone can view for your convenience.
The leagues
Yahoo F&F League —This is a 14-team mixed league that has active owners. Daily add/drops makes it ideal for snooping and, most importantly, I'm in it.
Card Runners League—This is a 10 team AL-only league from which the Quants vs. Quaints debate began that I know everyone wants to hear more about. It doesn't post specific FAAB adds (Derek posts his own, though) but the rosters by period are listed on the site.
THT Fantasy Twitter feed—Speaking of how Derek posts his specific player claims in the CR League, he also posts that information for two other leagues he is in: Tout Wars mixed league and LABR NL. Make sure to thank him for that.
The Tout Wars website is incredibly detailed and has information about every transaction in the 15-team mixed, 12-team AL, and 13-team NL leagues. The transaction log page is honestly incredible but is only updated weekly.
Finally there are the LABR NL (13 team) an AL (12 team) pages that give you everyone's rosters but do not tell you who was recently added or dropped by certain teams.
Final thoughts
If there are any leagues that are public that I have missed, feel free to share them in the comments. Also as a final yet important note, I don't think Waiver Wire-type articles are useless, especially the weekly ones published by Josh and Jeffrey every Friday right here. Staying on top of many players' situations by reading those articles is definitely of value. My purpose was simply to highlight a potentially overlooked way of accomplishing the same task of finding players.
Paul has been managing fantasy baseball teams for many seasons and writing for THT Fantasy over the past three years. He is currently a student at UPenn welcomes readers' thoughts at his email here or in the comments below.
If people are interested in the specific add/drops in the CR league, please let me know. I’d be happy to share them.