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.
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 our third such matchup of the season. Cory Puffett has now won two of those three matchups, this week’s coming against Sam Martin’s Airsick Lowlanders. Sam’s squad was flying high early in the week, especially after Cory used up his final three pitcher starts on Friday and trailed by 13 points.
Maybe they got a little airsick, though, because either they came crashing back down to Earth or Cory’s Mandalorians finally got their jet packs because his offense alone accounted for nearly 40 points in the matchup’s final two days.
Cory not only led the league in scoring to win his fifth Rickey Henderson Award of the season, he did so in the Game of the Week, joining Evan as the only managers to win both that and the Manny Ramirez Award in the same week.
Cory Frontin, meanwhile, trailed Eric Meyer by around 43 points entering Thursday. He did have three more pitcher starts remaining than Eric at the time, but he wound up only using one of those extra three. Even so, he came roaring back on Thursday and Friday and Eric had to sweat through a good portion of Sunday Night Baseball before his game was finally in hand.
Andrew Perez’s poor team performances of late finally resulted in a loss. In his previous four weeks, he’d finished in the top half of the league in scoring once and that was the only week in that span where he lost.
The man to finally take advantage of one of those several bad weeks was Alex Mayo, whose District Dingers tied for the week lead with 13 home runs. It’s been a tough season for Alex who, outside of three truly rotten weeks, has been putting together competitive scores week in and week out and, even after this week, only has two wins to show for it.
Check out our Week 11 recap below followed by this week’s power rankings:
Game of the Week: Cory Puffett at Sam Martin
Cory entered the weekend trailing Sam by 13 points with no pitcher starts remaining while Sam still had Max Scherzer set to go Sunday afternoon. It looked like a sure thing that his squad would drop its third straight game but the offense came alive in a big way down the stretch. Though Sam’s team outpitched Cory’s by a significant margin and, in fact, had a much higher batting average, Cory had a huge advantage in slugging and runs scored to make up the gap.
-Cory Puffett