The Sportsballers

We’re officially halfway through the season if you include our 2-week playoff! We’ll be taking a week off for the All-Star Break after  next  week’s matchups but the competition is heating up more than ever in the leadup to that break. style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> We didn’t quite set a new scoring record as a league this week, coming up exactly 10 points shy of our Week 6 total, but we did set a new record for the average losing score as our four losing managers averaged 127.00 points!   For the first time in league history, six teams reached 130 points for the week so even though Evan Ash’s 134 points would normally be considered outstanding, he gets credited with a lucky win in his victory against Sean Kennedy’s 1-10 Baltimore Canaries. Amazingly, his squad is badly underperforming compared to their namesake’s final season in 1874 when they went 9-38.   We had our second consecutive week with a matchup featuring the league’s two top scorers and ...

We have reached the midpoint of the 2021 AOA season! We will once again check our league’s statistical leaders as we did at the quarter mark of the year, but first let’s take a look at this past week. style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> Cory Puffett lost his second straight game following the remarkable 8-0 start he recorded. This one was an excruciatingly unlucky loss for him. Not only was he the number two scorer for the week in the AOA, but he recorded his third highest point total of the season!   Unfortunately for him, his squad had to face Eric Meyer, who has been red hot lately, the winner of now three straight Rickey Henderson Awards, given weekly to the league’s top scorer. He now owns five of these trophies in the first 10 weeks of our league’s history, one for each of his team’s five victories.   Cory had the pitching advantage in the matchup, with five more innings of work and slightly better ERA and FIP numbers for the week. His offense also posted t...

We’re finally back on schedule with the earlier publication of our weekly write-up this week! style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> The biggest story of the week is certainly Cory Puffett’s first loss of the season. After opening the year 8-0, with wins against every single other manager in the AOA, he finally fell this week in his game of the week matchup against Andrew Perez.   When you look at the weekly stats near the end of today’s writeup, you’ll see that every stat we look at on a weekly basis favored Cory in this matchup, other than a miniscule advantage for Andrew in plate appearances. So how exactly did Andrew pull off the upset to claim the Manny Ramirez Award?   The difference didn’t come on offense. While Cory’s team grounded into two more double plays than Andrew’s did, they had a stolen base advantage that made up for half of that difference.   It appears the difference came from the pitching. While Cory had advantages in innings, ERA, and FIP, h...

It seems every week I’m getting this out later and later and now I’m an entire day late. Turns out wrapping up a school year, traveling, and organizing cross country workouts and practices gets in the way of fantasy sports administrative work. style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> Anyway, let’s briefly run through this past week in the AOA. Eric Meyer got back on top of things and claimed the Rickey Henderson Award for the week as our high scorer. It’s now his third time this season with a 7-0 breakdown. It’s also the third time this season he has won a game. So now he knows he just needs to outscore everybody else and he’ll win. It’s a strategy that works for anybody but apparently everybody but him has found at least one other strategy that results in a win.   Speaking of everybody else, Sean Kennedy finally won a game! Turned out getting married was all it took, so please join him every Sunday as he and Julia renew their vows in an attempt to get a winning strea...