Welcome to a new fantasy league with all three hosts of The Sportsballers participating along with several friends of the show.
It’s been a long time since we’ve given fantasy baseball a go but we’re excited to branch out from football to add a second fantasy league for all of us to compete in.
We did not use the first week and a half of the baseball season this year because we wanted to keep every matchup to 7 days, though are likely going to change that for next year. In any case, we just wrapped up our first week of competition and it was an exciting one.
All eight teams reached triple digits and it will be fun to watch this season progress to find out just how significant that milestone is. Eric Meyer led us with 147 points to claim our first Rickey Henderson Award, given weekly to the league’s highest scorer.
As we do in A Football Life, we also designate one game each week as the Game of the Week.
For our inaugural week of competition, we used the projections at the start of the week to determine which game to designate, even though projections will likely mean even less in this league than they do in fantasy football. Cory Frontin won that game against Alex Mayo to win our first Manny Ramirez Award.
Our closest game of the week featured a differential of less than a point! Craig Kimbrel appeared in the 9th inning of the final MLB game of the week and gave Andrew Perez 0.75 points, breaking a tie with Sam Martin to clinch the win in the lowest-scoring game of the week.
My recaps will be pretty short this year, given it’s our first year of competition so there isn’t any history to discuss. Unlike fantasy football, we won’t be tracking individual player stats over time. There are simply too many players and too many games to easily track. But team stats will absolutely be tracked and it will be fun to see how each team does weekly and over the course of the season.
So, with that I’ll leave you with the recap of Week 1 and this season’s opening power rankings:
Game of the Week: Cory Frontin at Alex Mayo
Aaron Nola led the scoring for Cory F. this week despite only scoring 4 points in his first outing of the week thanks to a complete game shutout against the Cardinals on Sunday. In addition to a strong week of pitching, his batters put in work and a strong finish to the week held off a late-week push by Alex.
-Cory Puffett