2008 changes

Good to be back. I almost had to start playing Japaneese league fantasy to get my fix. I will try to hit most of JWest's questions in my ramblings.

I like 2 at every infield position. My question is stop there, or also have one IF, bringing total infielders to 11? ...but it goes to eleven...

After that I think I'm a little more prudent as far as line-up changes go. I think I prefer general OF as opposed to LF RF CF. I could be swayed on this, but maybe just 5 general OF. Same number of UTL as before. We only needed to nudge the number of starters a little so that not every starting line-up is basically equally jacked. I think the line-ups should do more to increase position scarcity (a la all those extra infield positions). More importantly, I don't think you want too many more SCORING players than we are dealing with. Larger groups hurt us in two ways: averages start to regress to a mean, and counting stats can get too spread out too fast. Both of these things can hurt the fun of the weekly scores and reduce the point of creating a really good team, as wierd as that sounds. I like the open P spots also, so lets's stick with 5 SP, 2 RP, and 3 P, unless you want to add a SP and/or RP to thin out the talent a little, as long as it doesn't hurt scoring.

On the flip side, I love the large bench idea. Why not? We keep the scoring fluid by increasing the number of scoring players by only a few (those extra IF's, maybe an OF or P here or there). We are sill waiver maniacs because we can speculate like crazy. And we are less frugal in trades, especially multi-player, lower-tier-player deals. JWest can hustle his brains out like we were a daily league, which i still do not want to be.

My only rule is that we figure it out in a way that JWest doesn't simply vaccum up every prospect possible taking the point out of all of this. Ah, it must be spring training, the smell of JWest paranoia is in the air. Anyway, the answer is finding the right size so that even he runs out of room and has to make tough choices.

As for scoring, we have to get rid of OPS, because it was redundant, but we should replace it, because the 8/7 scoring for hitters/pitches was money. Just pick a fun one. 2B's? I worry that hits or walks would again be redundant. Let me know.

Brian's pitchers stats are very different, and I think I like them. I subject W, L, SV, K, BAA, BB, ERA. Guys who give up HR's will still be punished with ERA, and ERA is a better fantasy stat than it is a real-world pitching tool. Everything else gets addressed with equal weight. I like whip, and K/BB, but they are covered without redundancy by K, BB, and BAA

So this year I say we experiment with the large bench idea. We were pretty close to perfect last year. I don't think drastic change is necessary anywhere else. Last year the waiver wire was not skimpy enough, and no one was worried about positionality. I think we have addresses this. Size of scoring lineup was not a problem, so let's only bump it up as much as necessary.

Let me know what you think about the IF, number of pitchers and OF's and the size of this big bench.