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

Trade with Plain Gray Swatch

A few weeks ago, Roy-Z from plain gray swatch left a comment offering up a 2013 Topps base Darwin Barney and its Target Red counterpart. In my quest for Cubs rainbows, I gladly accepted. 

Some of my regular readers will note that my older son is falling prey to the hype machine that is the Washington Nationals bandwagon. All I can say is that not even the Cubs have played so bad that they get back to back #1 overall draft picks.

I kid, I kid. The W-Nats' Single A affiliate Potomac Nationals are my local minor league team. I've written previously how I've taken my kids to games and gotten autographs. So I am kind of partial to some of the guys I've seen come up through the system. With that said, I have no problem keeping my son involved in the hobby by picking up some parallels of players we've seen make it to the show.

Roy-Z's blog was new to me so while checking out previous posts, I stumbled across some Washington Nationals TRU Purple parallels which he graciously included. 

Along with those requests, Roy also filled the rest of the package with various Cubs cards and I've scanned a few to showcase. The Ryne Sandberg card below was one I already had in my Sandberg player collection, but is nice to have an extra for the Cubs collection in addition to two other Cubs from the same set that I definitely did not have. These Pinnacle Zenith cards were from 1996, a hole in my hobby life.

Two serial numbered card also made their way into the package. The first, a dual Sammy Sosa/Corey Patterson card from Fleer in 2001 projects Patterson to be a "superstar in waiting." Huh. Also from a time where I didn't collect/follow the game as closely, I don't think that panned out but I am still happy to add this to my collection. The card is numbered on the back 1714/2000.

The other, a dual Alfonso Soriano/Hanley Ramirez card from 2009 Upper Deck, claims they are Cut from the Same Cloth. According to the back blurb, the assertion is based on a rare combination of speed and power and that both had put up most of their numbers from the leadoff spot. Fast forward to 2012, who would have thought that Soriano would be the one still among the league leaders in offensive production while Ramirez was subject to a team's salary dump first? This card is numbered 881/999.

Thanks Roy!