New Fantasy Baseball League

The playoffs begin today. Good luck to all, but just a little less luck to my opponents.

 

Losses last two weeks knocked me to seventh. Drat

 

2019 Semifinals:

No. 1 Sterling Silver vs. No. 5 Tampico Stogies

No. 2 Oregano Forever vs. No. 3 Washington Wombats

 

I hadn't actually looked at anybody's roster but my own in a while. Damn, his lineup is good.

I've got some mashers, too, but I'm every bit the underdog a No. 5 seed should be against No. 1.

 

Congrats to Sterling Silver and Oregano Forever making the finals. They were the best teams all season, so it does seem fitting.

Guy got me, 5-4, with a tie in strikeouts. He beat me by 0.07 in ERA and by one home run. Not my best sports day.

 

You gave him a good run up until the final pitch of Semifinal Sunday.

Wombats did what they had to do to stay in contention thru Sunday before the scales balanced back and we pulled thru 7-2.

Excited to play for the title again, second time ever, first time in this league. Looking for my first fantasy baseball title in 20 years.

Oregano Forever is named in the memory Gretta, who died of cancer a week before this league's draft. Gretta was 14. She pitched 3 years for me in the local young women's softball league and performed like a superstar during our 2017 title run. On Championship Sunday she faced 60 batters. She walked the first 2 in the semifinals then didn't walk any of the next 58 batters ... 0 in the title game which we won 15-13. In a wild and crazy bottom of the 6th, she fielded a comebacker for the final out ... couldn't have written that script any better for so many reasons. Gretta's nickname -- one of them, anyway -- was Oregano; our third baseman's nickname was Basil and "Oregano and Basil" were good friends.

Gretta played the entire season with a sore back but doctors couldn't figure out what caused the pain. She played through the pain, which didn't hamper her in the circle but did limit her at the plate. She hit lefty and couldn't pull the ball, always had to slap it toward left, didn't have a single hit to right field. It was a month after we won the title when Gretta found out she had stage 4 spine cancer. Surgery didn't work. Chemo didn't work. They tried a few experimental drugs. They tried everything. Gretta was a trooper the entire time and fought it for 18 months. She gained a ton of weight because of the steroids. Then her legs quit. She was bedridden the final 6 months. She always smiled when I visited. One day we sang Champagne Supernova by Oasis and then Santa Monica by Everclear.

Gretta played guitar and loved music -- she came out of the womb listening to Green Day. She loved politics and Bernie Sanders. And nobody ate more Nutella. We had a thing where if she struck out a batter on 3 pitches I had to buy her a small jar of Nutella. Many times she'd start the count 0 and 2 and I'd say Nutella! and she'd flash a tiny smile because she wanted a jar of Nutella but what she really wanted was a 3-pitch strikeout even though 9 times out of 10 the next pitch was a ball and she'd look at me and sigh and I'd respond Oh Well, Gretta Lee, maybe next time. She did Nutella 6 or 7 batters so I bought her a tub of it at the end of the season. Gretta was a fantastic girl who loved and lived life to the fullest. I think about her every day and miss her and that's why I'm excited to play for the title with this team.

Oregano Forever beat Sterling Silver twice during the season (7-3, 5-4) but @Guy_Incognito really does have the best team top to bottom, hitters and pitchers. He did a marvelous job curating his team and climbing the ladder to win the regular season title with a 116-78-8 record. Oregano Forever was second at 110-79-11. I like my team. Not a day has passed in 23 weeks where I haven't tried to put my best lineup on the field. I again led the league in moves with 151. Sterling Silver was fourth with 103 though that's a bit deceiving ... the Wombats streamed 30 pitchers during the semifinals. It was a good strategy because it was the ONLY chance he had to beat me. I locked up all 5 hitting categories. His only chance was to sweep the 5 pitching categories to force a tiebreak which he would have won based on a sweep during the regular season. It was a bit iffy yesterday but a few of his Sunday morning pickups shit the bed in a big way and then my boy Trevor Bauer went 8 strong and that pretty much sealed the deal. Props to the Wombats for playing till his last breath. That's what I mean by "Play to win, Hate to lose, and Everything in between" ... if you're going to play fantasy sports, fucking play or don't ask to be in a league.

2 years ago I made it to Championship Week in the NIAFL but lost to @Machine Head in a tie-break. That sucked.

Good luck, Guy. There's no one I'd rather play for the title. Jar of Nutella to the winner?

 

One other softball story about Oregano ... we were the only team in the league in 2017 that bunted. You'd be surprised how much offense you can create by bunting against teams that don't expect the bunt and don't know how to defend it. My team bought into bunting from Day 1 ... except Gretta. She hated it. Refused to bunt. Begged me not to bunt. "Songbird, please don't make me bunt" was a common refrain and my reply was something to the effect "What do you think makes you so special, Gretta Lee?" and we'd go back and forth till I acquiesced to her, uh, demand lol not to bunt. But she had to agree to do other things and I don't even remember what those other things were but one of them was that at some point during the season I was going to call on her to bunt and she could not argue with me. She begrudged me that deal. Sometimes I'd call on her to bunt just to ruffle her feathers. She'd look at me in the batter's box like she wanted to take out my knees with the bat. I waited till the right time to make her bunt ... the semifinals. As expected she looked at me all pissed off but I said Hey we made a deal and you're putting down a bunt right now ... and she did and it knocked in the run that invoked the mercy rule.

This is Gretta's only bunt of the season. It counted when we needed it to.

 

Welp, here we are on Championship Week Sunday. Been relatively close all week. Good luck, Guy.

 

The reigning champion Janitors of Anarchy are prepared to hand over the championship trophy to this season's winner!

 

Congrats on the title, Guy!

 

Thanks. Was tight straight through. Seems I left all my good luck here; not much left for football.

 

Great job, Guy! You are one tough customer!

I’ve forgotten, are you in our hockey league?