The League of Extraordinary CryBabies

If I had Photoshop skills, I'd replace "Gentlemen" with "CryBabies" and put baby bonnets and pacifiers on everyone. Oh well.

Earlier I mentioned that I'm playing in the CryBabies League. Here's the rundown. It's head-to-head in the following categories:

• Offense/Defense (10 categories) - runs, hits, home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, assists, batting average, OPS, outfield assists 
• Pitching (7 categories) - wins, losses, saves, strikeouts, earned run average, WHIP, quality starts

Each week you're competing against one team. What has surprised me is that it's not like fantasy football, which is a "winner take all" matchup every week. But in this H2H league, you divvy up the categories that you win, lose, or tie. For example, during Week 1, the Mush Heads beat me in 12 categories, I won 4 categories, and we tied in 1 category. So after Week 1, my record was 4-12-1.

There are eight teams in the league, and the top six make the playoffs. So it's nice if you can get one of the top two playoff seeds and earn yourself a first round bye. Speaking of playoffs, after 3 weeks completed, if the playoffs started today I would barely make it:

1. Mush Heads                 29-16-6
2. Apple Sucks                 28-17-6
3. Hemroids                     23-22-6
4. Steroid to Heaven         24-24-3
5. NoMeat                       22-25-4 
6. Vindictive Separists      21-26-4
7. tballchamps                  20-25-6
8. ALL STARS!!!!!!!!!!!  18-30-3

And here's my roster:

C - Miguel Olivo

1B - Pablo Sandoval

2B - Ben Zobrist

3B - Alex Rodriguez

SS - Rafael Furcal

OF - Matt Holliday

OF - Carlos Quentin

OF - Adam Dunn

Util - David Wright

Bench - Shane Victorino

Bench - Chris Coghlan

Bench - Carlos Pena

Bench - Kurt Suzuki

DL - Miguel Montero

DL - Carlos Beltran

SP - Dan Haren

SP - Josh Johnson

RP - Jonathan Broxton

RP - Joakim Soria

P - Carlos Marmol

P - John Lackey

P - Matt Capps

Bench - Stephen Strasburg

In terms of pitching, you need to have your pitchers go at least 20 innings for the week in order to have pitching stats count for your team. Also, you're only allowed 5 transactions per week, so that limits streaming to some degree.

I'm still trying to get a better feel for the math side of this league. One thing I've noticed is that outfield assists (OFA) seems to be a category that teams usually get zero for the week. So I suppose that if you can add an outfielder or two who hits well AND tends to get many outfield assists, that might get you an advantage.

However, you might be better off trying to chase assists (infield assists). And actually, my team might be in a good position to do that. Both Zobrist and Dunn play the infield, but they have outfield eligibility. So if I play both those guys in my outfield, I might be able to gain an advantage in assists compared to a team that's playing 3 regular outfielders.

We'll see how things go. Right now I've circled Week 8 on the calendar. That's when I can get my revenge against the Mush Heads.