Welcome back! Sunday night’s incredible series finale between the Padres and Dodgers closed an exciting second week of competition in our new fantasy baseball league.
Six of our eight teams once again topped 100 points. Alex Mayo and Sean Kennedy were the only two to fall below that mark and that was at least partly because both of them used just four of their seven allotted pitcher starts. They each received 25.1 innings of work from their pitching staff in Week 2 while every other manager got at least 40 innings of work.
Playing in a daily league is a lot of fun but it’s also proved to be quite a bit of work to make sure you track scheduled starts for your pitchers and remember to switch players out, especially when you only get four bench spots to work with.
Cory Puffett had a strong first week but his second was even better as he set a new scoring record in the AOA with 154.75 points. His squad led the league with a .291 batting average and a 2.14 ERA over the course of the week as he won his first career Rickey Henderson Award.
Cory Frontin, meanwhile, finished second in scoring for the second week in a row but he’s now 2-0 with two Manny Ramirez Awards, given weekly to the winner of the league’s game of the week. This week’s victim was Week 1’s leading scorer, Eric Meyer, who fell to fifth in scoring in Week 2.
Cory’s team led the AOA with 13 home runs for the week, including five from Fernando Tatis Jr. who had a monster series in Los Angeles over the weekend.
Sam Martin has had a rough start to the season. In Week 1 he finished seventh in scoring but lost his matchup by less than a point. Then, in Week 2, he had to face the highest scorer in the league and so wasted a Top 4 score for the week. His guys had a good pitching week but he’s searching for a combo of position players to boost his .202 batting average and league-low 4 home runs over the past seven days.
As I mentioned last week, my write-ups for this league won’t be as detailed as those I write for my fantasy football league. One thing to mention going into this week’s recap, though, is that I’ve reworked our power rankings since last week to add a roster score metric, based on each team’s optimum scorers, and a coaching rank, which is based on how many of those optimum points each manager actually collects over the course of the season.
I mention that because under this new calculation, it actually flipped Andrew Perez and Evan Ash’s spots on last week’s power rankings and it also means that the power score changes from last week are not based on those published in last week’s article.
So, with that let’s get into the Week 2 recap and this week’s power rankings:
Cory Frontin rode a 40-point advantage over the week’s final two days to a second straight Game of the Week victory, this one over the league’s leading scorer from Week 1. Fernando Tatis Jr. led the way with 22.25 points on the strength of 5 home runs, contributing to Cory’s league-leading 13 long balls on the week.
-Cory Puffett