Tuesday, October 1, 2013

2013 Baseball Fantasy League Final Tally

Sorry so blurry...
With the baseball fantasy season now over, I thought I'd give everybody who didn't participate a recap and hopefully entice a few more of you to come out next year. For those that need a refresher, I setup a Yahoo Fantasy League at the beginning of the season with a $15 buy-in. The prize pool included seven different 2013 blasters split among for the top 3 placers and for the team with the best record at the end of the regular season. The blasters were distributed as follows:

1st Place - Pick One
1st Place - Pick One
2nd Place - Pick One
3rd Place - Pick One
1st Place - Pick One
2nd place - Pick One
Best Regular Season Record - Gets what's left!

The blasters included Topps Series 1, Topps Series 2, A&G, Bowman, Heritage, Gypsy Queen & Archives. The season long winners of each of the ten statistical categories will also be taking home a repack ($5 value).

But before I get to the prizes, I'm going to set the scene a little bit because there were some pretty exciting matchups once the playoffs rolled around. Participation was pretty good among fellow bloggers but a couple of offline friends/coworkers signed up to help me fill a few spots and their lineup changes were a little more sporadic. That showed up in the standings though as all six playoff spots were filled by bloggers.

At the end of the "regular season", Larry (unclemoe) from My 2008 Topps Set Blog entered the playoffs as the top seed. This earned him a first round bye and guaranteed him one of the seven blasters no matter how he finished.

Second seed went to Roy-Z of plain gray swatch fame (among other blogs), who also earned a first round bye. Tom from Waiting 'Til Next Year wrapped up the third seed and took on sixth seed, Ty from League Leader in Italics. I qualified as the fourth seed and Brian from Play at the Plate won 9 of his last 10 matchups to be my first round competition as the fifth seed.

No offense to Ty, but Tom took him out pretty easily in the first round, winning 8 categories to Ty's 2. Brian on the other hand, took me all the way to the tie breaker after splitting the 10 categories with 5 apiece. Unfortunately for him, the tiebreaker was who had the better record head to head over the course of the season. During our three weekly matchups, I went 17-12-1, winning the tiebreaker and advancing to the next round.

Roy dominated the offensive categories this season winning 4 of the 5 over the course of the season. But Tom, who is taking home three repacks for pitching categories, put up another dominating week, earning a finals birth with an 8-1-1 victory over Roy in the semifinals.

My matchup against unclemoe was just as tight as my first round matchup. The final score was 5-2-3. With those three ties, that could have been losses and knotted us up at 5-5, I would have lost the tiebreaker as unclemoe beat me 7-22-1 in three regular season meetings. Yikes! But with a guaranteed blaster for the season's top record and three repacks coming his way for category wins, I don't feel too bad!

So if you've been doing the math (4 repacks for Roy, 3 for Tom and 3 for Larry), you'll see the top three seeds wrapped up all the category wins. There's probably some correlation there...

If you thought these matchups were close, wait until the finals and consolation finals!

With the top two seeds knocked out, they still had a shot at third place, which also means a blaster.


The pitching categories were pretty clear cut but check out the offensive ones! One run difference, tied in home runs, one RBI. Luckily for unclemoe, he would have won a tiebreaker, too had things gone a little differently. And don't feel too bad for Roy because he'll end up with more cards than anyone with 4 repacks for his category wins. Granted they're repacks, but still, he gets his buy-in back plus a little more.

And now the finals. Two Cubs fans battling it out for the Fantasy League title. Maybe Tom and I can get a meeting with Theo and let him know which direction the Cubs should go?

This matchup was like any good playoff series, it went down to the wire. Unfortunately for me though, the final score was Tom 6, Me 4.


To Tom's credit, he led the whole week and the final score probably shouldn't have even been this close. I started four pitchers on Sunday, netting 0 Wins. I was hoping I could catch him in Wins and ERA or WHIP but I didn't foresee a Henderson Alvarez no hitter when it came to adding/dropping players for Sunday's games. D'oh!

Thanks to everybody who participated this season. Packages will go out sometime this week. Hopefully, with enough interest we can do it again next year and even add a few more players which could mean bigger, better prize packages. While I already know what boxes the winners have selected as their prizes, I can't wait to see what they get for cards!

Final Prize Summary:

1st Place (Tom) - 3 Blasters
2nd Place (Matt) - 2 Blasters
3rd Place (Larry) - 1 Blaster
Regular Season Best Record (Larry) - 1 Blaster

Runs - Roy
Home Runs - Roy
RBIs - Roy
Stolen Bases - Roy
Batting Avg. - Larry
Wins - Larry
Saves - Tom
Strikeouts - Larry
ERA - Tom
WHIP - Tom

3 comments:

  1. Man, my team fell apart during the playoffs. I was lucky to win the third place game. Thanks again for setting this up.

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  2. I echo Moe's statement: thanks a bunch for being the commissioner and handling all the $$ and blasters. Nice write-up by the way!

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  3. It was a fun league. I was sure I had it wrapped up, just Texas Rangered the playoffs. Let's do it again next year!

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