The FSTA draft took place Tuesday afternoon in Minneapolis. It’s a 14-team, full PPR, 1-QB, 2-RB, 3-WR, 1-FLX, 1-TE, 1-K and 1-D. I drew the ninth pick. Here are the results:
My FSTA Draft
With the MLB Draft complete, many high school and collegiate players are off to play professional baseball for the first time. However, there is one major amateur event still going on: the College World Series. Some of the top talent from this year’s draft will take part in the grand finale of the NCAA Tournament. Here are some names to look out for during this weekend’s event.
For a team that has a lot of fantasy-worthy players, I’m missing out on a lot Nats. Bryce Harper didn’t make it on to any of my teams, though I wasn’t necessarily avoiding him. I’ve lamented the lack of Adam Eaton on my rosters earlier this season, when he was tearing up the Reds to begin the season. I actively avoided Daniel Murphy because of his knee injury and my fear that it would take longer to return than expected, and that he’d be compromised once he did return. But the player I want to discuss today is someone who I’m certain I gave no thought, let alone consideration, this year or even last, and that’s reliever Justin Miller.
In a never quite fulfilled quest to write more often, I’ve been turning to blogging more regularly, but it still hasn’t been enough. I need a little structure, so I’m going to try something new here, and identify a player on each team that (a) is fairly prominent in fantasy circles and (b) isn’t on any of my teams. I’m hoping to learn more about the player pool in the process, perhaps guiding me to better draft and/or free agent decisions. Occasionally I’ll dig deep into the player, other times it’ll probably be just a surface level look. Often that will depend on how much time I have. For instance, Sunday can be a little challenging given all the live events going on, plus all of my FAAB deadlines. Also, I think working on a deadline will force me to be a little more productive, rather than agonizing over every word, thus ending up with nothing, as I’m occasionally culpable of doing.
We’re just about to go over the finish line for the final qualifying round of the six-round RotoWire/Fanduel Baseball Championship.
The contest includes the six qualifying rounds, and only you’re best three scores count for the final leaderboard. The top 25 scores on the overall leaderboard will compete for $2,000 and RotoWire subscriptions in the Championship Round on June 27.
Meanwhile, the experts here at RotoWire are competing in our own parallel contest. Isaac Buttke (ibuttke) won the contest two weeks ago with a score of 169.70, led by the Cy Young favorite in the NL in Max Scherzer who gave him a whopping 70 points. Despite registering goose eggs with Colorado’s Geraldo Parra and Seattle’s Ryon Healy, Isaac had consistent bats with the lowest ebb of Mets’ Jay Bruce with 12.2 points to Miami’s Starlin Castro’s 22.2 points.
In the overall standings Erik Halterman (ehalt) has taken over the top spot with 1238 points, but there are five other players who are less than 40 points behind Erik so anything can happen this week where one of them can move up to first place. Brian Pelowski (brianp) and James Anderson (realjranderson) are the closest to first place with 1,219.70 and 1,218.10 respectively for the season. Adam Wolf (rotosomething) who was in first place overall a couple weeks ago has dropped to fourth (1,200), but still can take over the top spot with a good week.
The Format
If you are unfamiliar with a Calcutta, it is essentially an auction in which players bid on teams and get paid out a percentage of the total pool based on success in a tournament. This is a very popular format for NCAA March Madness and golf pools. In this case, we adopted it for the 2018 World Cup with the following payout structure (after some minor tweaking).
I recently had a three-day weekend at my disposal. Naturally, I used this as an opportunity to catch a minor-league ballgame. I’m currently stationed in Charleston, West Virginia, so the nearest team with home games that weekend was the Columbus Clippers, the Triple-A affiliate of the Cleveland Indians.