Early Draft Day Dividends for Hard Ball

The Hard Ball Lords (LoD) have started to prove that they made the most out of the FAR Draft capital. Sequentially, Hard Ball selected Grayson Rodriguez, Shota Imanaga, AJ Puk, Reese Olson, Jung Hoo Lee, Robert Gasser, Carlos Correa, Connor Phillips, Luis Campusano, Drew Rasmussen, Jared Jones, Salvador Perez, and David Festa. Through Week One, this group leads all other teams in Fantasy Points.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto was the top prize of the 2024 FAR Class and went 1st overall to the Lone Star Drillers.  After that, somehow the Lords of Destruction GM procured the 2nd overall pick, from his brother no less, without giving up his already-assigned 3rd overall pick. What a great draft class for that to happen with – Grayson Rodriguez and Shota Imanaga were easy picks there at two and three.  Rodriguez is averaging 27 FPts per outing through his first 12-1/3 inning and Shota won over all of Wrigleyville with his 6-innings, 9-strikeout, 30 FPts debut.

Hard Ball’s best draft pick, arguably, came all the way down in the seventh round.  Jared Jones, at the time, was lighting up Spring Training and showing all the promise of a breakout season, but he hadn’t been guaranteed a spot-on Pittsburgh’s MLB roster yet. Fast forward a couple weeks and Jones is drawing comparisons to the breakout Spencer Strider thanks to his 42.6 FPTs from two outings.

Take all of these big wins into account, and you can live with the Sal Perez managerial move Hard Ball made on March 31^st.  Salvador Perez was Hard Ball’s 8^th Round pick, but after collecting one-half of a negative point from him Hard Ball sent him to the Waiver Wire.  Perez has since worked his way up the FAR Draft Top Performers List to twelfth best (45.5 FPts in Week One) – mostly to the benefit of the Perth Platypi who picked him up on April 3^rd.  In a vacuum, that sucks, but Hard Ball countered with Luis Campusano and his nineteenth best 42 FPts to date in the catcher position.

Year two of this GM’s three-year contact with HumBabe Dynasty is showing a lot of early promise.  Fun stuff to watch!

Seoul Unfair

The Seoul Series threw a little bit of a curveball at the start of the 2024 HumBabe season. The annual FAR Draft is always held off as long as possible, so Spring Training can show some results, so injuries can break the news before draft capital is spent, and ultimately so HumBabe ramps up just as the MLB season does. Well, take the late start to FAR Draft, and add on the Seoul Series that started MLB’s Regular Season a week earlier than normal, things felt a bit rushed.

The entire HumBabe League felt the impact of that, but if you were the LeBronto Blue James, you were dealt the additional curveball of facing the Brooklyn Robins in Week One. That was an additional curveball because the Robins are owners of mostly Los Angeles Dodgers players, who would play two additional games more than the rest of the playing field thanks to the Seoul Series. And if you know the three-time champ, in LeBronto’s GM, you know he took this opportunity to voice some high-quality banter in the League Group Chat. When the word “unfair” surfaced however, whether it was jokingly or not, Brooklyn’s GM had to chime in:

“The Brooklyn Robins have recently been made aware of rumblings about the regular season starting in Seoul, South Korea being ‘unfair.’
As a club, we have always appreciated playing by the rules, and last time we checked, regular season points still count just the same, regardless of what country they are earned in.
We get it, playing against the top hitting team in all of HumBabe can be daunting, but we stand by our statement, that the notion of an ‘unfair start’ to the season is as misguided and simplistic of a viewpoint as Fantrax’s preseason ‘Power Rankings.’
As a club we shift our focus to the Florida Squeeze, and to moving our record to 2-0, on our way to the first Championship banner of many for the Brooklyn Robins.”

Brooklyn Robins GM | April 7, 2024

The Preseason Power Rankings predicted that the Brooklyn Robins would be the fifth worst team in the League … shocking results frankly, and worth reiterating that they were strictly formulated based on Fantrax projected point totals for each roster. If Week One told us anything, Brooklyn’s 740 points (2nd Best in the League), they will be much better than 12th of 16 by the time the 2024 season wraps up. Plan on seeing some adjustments to the next round of Power Rankings as Fantrax starts to replace projections with actual results.

Celebration in Orlando

It’s been a big week in Orlando, Florida – both for the Splitters Franchise and personally for their General Manager (the HumBabe Commissioner), who welcomed his baby daughter into the world! Match-Up of the Week Winner, early success from key draft picks, new strategies showing promise, and now, best of all, “hashtag Girl Dad” status achieved.

Match-Up of the Week Winner over the strong Say Hey Kids performance – in large part thanks to Aaron Civale, Garrett Crochet, and the rest of the 2024 Splitters FAR Draft Picks producing high-end results.  Both Civale and Crochet have averaged more than 20 FPts through their first two starts, while Erick Fedde and Ryan Weathers have supplemented with their own 18-2/3 innings of quality performance, between the both of them.

The new strategy, that was previously mentioned as showing promise, became a naturally induced pivot when all of the HumBabe Dynasty Managers arrived to the 2024 Draft seemingly all as adopters of the long-standing Orlando Splitters’ strategy: build a starting pitcher-heavy roster.  This pivot put Clay Holmes, Ryan Helsley, and Robert Suarez all in Splitter Blue.  Previously you would have found zero MLB relief pitchers in Orlando’s lineup, fielding SP/RPs instead (quantity over quality due to HumBabe’s Points Scoring Format), but the 2024 Splitters chose otherwise and mainly as a case of,

“Letting the game come to you, taking what it gives you, instead of forcing something to happen, just like everything else in Baseball,”

Orlando Splitters GM | April 5, 2024

For the first time ever, the entire first round of the FAR Draft was Starting Pitchers, and as that approach has grown contagious, high-end relievers have gotten cheaper.  Orlando now stands atop the Saves League Leaderboard with ten (10), while second place trails at half of that (five saves) through Week One.

Joy & Change.  Lots of both in Orlando right now.  New #GirlDad, New High-Octane Bullpen.  Excellent distractions from Gerrit Cole’s IL stint, Shane Bieber’s Tommy John surgery, Spencer Strider’s elbow MRI results trending towards Tommy John surgery, and Josh Lowe’s oblique, among even more injuries … not worried about those things at all … #SPLT

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