State Of The State

The State of the State is good.

Dusty Wagner has my Main Event team in first place in its league — though there’s still a ton of time left in the year. If I’m going to win one of them, I hope it’s this one obviously.

The other three teams are average, but all the owners are making moves each week and doing what they can. I still have my eye on them and would love to see them in fourth or third by early September to give us a shot to cash.

One thing Dusty did well was tank saves to shore up wins and strikeouts. Having two closers on the bench in a 15-team Main Event is hard to stomach, but for five points in saves, he got us 2-3x that in wins and Ks. It’ll likely keep us out of any real contention in the overall, but at the time he pulled the plug, we were largely drawing dead in the overall anyway.

In order to have had a shot in the overall, I would have needed to take Sonny Gray, say, instead of Luis Severino and someone other than Lance Lynn (though he’s been better of late.) I was actually set to pull the trigger on Clayton Kershaw when I get snaked by one pick and got Severino.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. In retrospect, going four hitters and not taking a starting pitcher until Round 7 was fine from where I drafted this year, I just didn’t catch perfect (far from it) on the pitchers. It’s easy to see in retrospect which ones I should have taken, but the framework was right — you have to nail those top five hitters (I mostly did, though Fernando Tatis is slumping) — and also get a couple of those key sleeper pitchers. We’re talking about winning the Main Event overall, so it’s not easy to thread that needle.

(I also could have taken Gerrit Cole instead of Tatis, but I was obsessed with getting Tatis in his bounceback season. There’s still time left for him to heat up.)