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2009 ELITE FANTASY BASEBALL TOP 20

Breakfast of Champions

Discuss this on the Elite Forum

By Tarrell Graham

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

16 ounce Pounders

NJ Dingleberries

Montezuma's Revenge

Nutz On Clark

Montreal Expos

Chicos Bail Bond's

Team giordano

Fun go

THE P3RCUL8OR

Stop the Bleeding

Team Casey

Motor City Kitties

Mansfield Ballpark

Chicago Homer

The Pretenders

Team Newsome

Alicia Lynn Pieri

Red Monster

Team Bartolo's Colon

The Perkalators

Florida State

Frontier

Eastern

Centennial

Pacific Coast

Appalachian

Ohio Valley

Florida State

International

Frontier

NY-Penn

Gulf Coast

Pacific Coast

International

Florida State

Eastern

Elite

International

Elite

Northwest

2734

2652

2565

2499

2440

2392

2376

2363

2357

2350

2347

2342

2339

2338

2323

2311

2298

2284

2283

Sunday August 16, 2009

Ok, guys I am not going to be nice tonight. For the rest of this BOC please feel free to imagine me yelling, cursing, spitting and basically doing my best Gordon Ramsey impersonation. Look, you chose to be part of this system. You came to a website, filled out a form and joined a league under our terms and conditions. I know that John Thornton is going to be much more diplomatic about this issue but I am more Dick Cheney than Jimmy Carter. This is really simple - answer your freaking trade offers! There is no excuse - none – for taking three days to respond to a trade offer. Unless there is a dire emergency or you have been checking box scores in the Fallujah Times it is complete and utter garbage not to be timely. I am extreme, I know that. I normally respond to a trade offers within an hour and to expect that from others is an unreasonable standard, but I view promptness as a sign of respect. When you make a point of being active it means you respect your league and your league mates, conversely not responding is incredibly disrespectful. If you are going to be M.I.A then let your league mates know. I am not Demi Moore and trying to make moves with a ghost is not at the top of my list of fun things to do. This season there have been a few teams in my leagues that are less responsive then Time Warner tech support and I will never compete against them again – ever. So, tonight’s column is dedicated exclusively to discussing activity and why it makes you a bad person if you are not active…so onto some baseball...

MAKING UP STATS TO RANK YOUR LEAGUEMATES

Ever year about mid-season I take a close look at my leagues transaction counts and start to profile my league mates. There are some very obvious things to look for and some that I have made up, but in general the transaction counts are really overlooked and they shouldn’t be.

1)How many IR players does a manager have and why? If you look at my Elite league team you will see that I always have all three DL spots filled. There is no reason to ever have an empty DL spot because it is valuable roster space. Even if a player is coming off the DL you should pick up someone else to take his place. Making sure you are using the DL space allows you to work two for ones while not tying up your active roster. It also allows you to stash valuable backups and hold them even once they are activated. If you see a guy with a ton of IR players it normally means he is really paying close attention. Not maxing out the DL doesn’t necessarily mean anything negative but seeing that sort of attention to detail is encouraging from a trading standpoint. The IR can also help you to zero in on teams with some injury issues which in turn allows you to sent out some good Samaritan offers.

2)Pick Up to Drop Ratio – I am not sure if anyone else looks at this stat or not , but for me it is vital part of targeting certain managers. If you have dropped more players then you have picked up it’s a sure sign that you have been on the wrong end of some 2:1s. and that means we need to talk trade. If you see a player with more pickups than drops then it typically means he will be much less likely to go for the B+ Bat/MR for A Bat type trade. You have to remember to take IR pickups into account and I normally use (# Pick Ups – 3)/Drops as the formula.

3)Activate –Typically this is a quick way to assess a players daily activity level. If a guy has sub 250 at this point in the season it is unlikely that he is really active. A quick check of the team’s transactions will probably show that the guy isn’t setting his lineup more than twice a week. Now, it is not a bad thing to set your lineup twice a week but it does normally mean that there is going to be a wait for response and when it does come odds are it will be pretty sparse.

4) Trades – this one is pretty obvious. The more deals a guy has the more likely he will be to pull the trigger. Don’t just stop here though; it is vital that you do some research on the type of trades the manager has completed. Did he send the offer or accept it? Are there any trends in his trade worth noting? Some guys always insist on a throw in MR and maybe you can use that to put them over the edge. One the most common trade tricks is to include a complete garbage player or MR to disguise a 2:1 as a even 2:2 swap. Zeroing in on heavy traders tendencies will make it much more likely that you pull off a successful exchange.

THINGS I THOUGHT WERE COOL

-Johnny Gomes hit 3 HR thursday night. I am going to BODOG and put money on another multi HR game within the next week. Absolutely no reason other than just gut instinct and a need to say something interesting. Don’t forget that Gomes has demonstrate 25+ power and a solid BB rate in the past. His strike outs are way too high for him to hit for average but he is a great fill in type.

-The most underrated MI play for Elite leagues right now has to be Everth Cabrera. He isn’t a masher by any stretch of the imagination but he has solid speed and a terrific walk rate.

-This just in – Neftali Feliz is sick. Today he struck out 5 in 2 IP. If by some miracle he is still floating around out there go grab him.

-I love going back through by trade offers and seeing that people declined Verlander for MR’s early in the year. Pretty hilarious how quickly things change.