Duplicate Players

I have finally figured out how to tell Excel to flag me when I have duplicate players on a roster. That problem should be fixed from here on. Thank you for your patience.

More on Games by Position

STATS finally got back to me on adding games played by position to their stats. They said that they are working on an email delivery system now and that games by position is next on the list. They expect to add it "this season". Great. Thanks for nailing it down.

I found a website from which I can download games by position and fairly easily create the table below. This is a table of all of the hitters in the Majors who are FNFT eligible at more than one field position.

At this point I don't have an easy way to incorporate this into our weekly boxscores, and I'm not going to go through the effort to do that because once I finish, STATS will have them. So here you are - I'll try to post this here in the blog every so often.

Name	Tm	ePOS
Amezaga, Alfredo	FLA	3O
Aurilia, Rich	SF	13
Baker, Jeff	COL	12
Barmes, Clint	COL	2S3
Blake, Casey	CLE	13
Botts, Jason	TEX	1O
Bowker, John	SF	1O
Cabrera, Asdrubal	CLE	2S
Cabrera, Miguel	DET	13
Callaspo, Alberto	KC	2S
Cantu, Jorge	FLA	13
Carroll, Jamey	CLE	23
Cedeno, Ronny	CHC	2S
Counsell, Craig	MIL	S3
Crabbe, Callix	SD	2O
DeRosa, Mark	CHC	23O
Easley, Damion	NYM	2S
Ensberg, Morgan	NYY	13
Erstad, Darin	HOU	1O
Figgins, Chone	ANA	23
Gomez, Chris	PIT	23
Gonzalez, Alberto	NYY	S3
Hinske, Eric	TB	13O
Inge, Brandon	DET	C3O
Inglett, Joe	TOR	3O
Izturis, Maicer	ANA	2S
Lopez, Felipe	WAS	2O
Loretta, Mark	HOU	23
McDonald, John	TOR	S3
Mientkiewicz, Doug	PIT	13
Miles, Aaron	STL	2S
Ortmeier, Dan	SF	1O
Ozuna, Pablo	CHW	23
Prado, Martin	ATL	23
Punto, Nick	MIN	S3
Raburn, Ryan	DET	2O
Ramirez, Alexei	CHW	2O
Rivas, Luis	PIT	2S
Swisher, Nick	CHW	1O
Thames, Marcus	DET	1O
Tolbert, Matt	MIN	2S3
Vazquez, Ramon	TEX	S3
Velez, Eugenio	SF	2O
Youkilis, Kevin	BOS	13

The Magic of Tiefnology

I believe - no, I KNOW - I set an all-time record this morning by having the Friday night FNFT stats posted by 5:35 a.m. STATS has been back on their early schedule. I have no way of knowing what time they actually post the stats, but this morning they were there at 5:00 a.m. because that's when I downloaded them.

Here's what you're probably thinking.

Still no word from them on games by position. I'm working on an alternative source for that. I'm also working on FNFT player stats, which once I have the format finished will be much improved over last year.

Stats and Eggs

So I just got out of the schvitz. I'm sitting here on a Saturday morning on my back patio, watching some ducks swim around on Tief Lake, drinking a cup of coffee, typing this blog entry on my ultra-cool Asus Eee PC mini wireless laptop computer. Life is good, right?

Well, it could be better. For the last few days, STATS has been posting the stats around 10:00 a.m. rather than before 6:00 a.m. like they had been up until now. I've got everything ready to go on my end, but no stats from them. As I've said, I'm on farmer time now that I'm old. By 10:00 a.m. on a weekend I'm sitting in Webb's in front of a plate of bacon and eggs. As much as I love running FNFT stats, I'm not going to sit around all morning waiting to do it.

UPDATE: The stats showed up at 8:45 a.m., just as I was about to leave. I thought I'd be a nice guy and put off breakfast for another 15 minutes.

In-Between Hops

Time for some shameless self-promotion and gloating. My Brewers blog, In-Between Hops, had a record 150 unique visitors yesterday. It had been averaging about 20-25 per day. Five other blogs and Sports Bubbler, a new and growing Wisconsin Sports News website, all linked to an article I wrote about Prince Fielder's lack of home runs this year. The article was very tongue-in cheek, but everyone took it seriously. Hilarious.

From Brew Crew Ball:

I read about 190 baseball blogs and sites daily, and this is why I do it: Sometimes there's only one person saying something everyone should hear. Today, that one voice is Scott over at In-Between Hops. He notes that Prince Fielder didn't hit his second home run until his 16th game last year. So let's give him another week or two before we condemn the "vegetarian lifestyle." Also, Scott has a really nice chart to illustrate Prince's HR progress in 2007 and 2008.

Games Played by Position

I have been informed by Mark Mulder at STATS that they will soon be adding games played by position to the hitter's stats that I download every morning. This is great news as it will allow me to post eligible positions for players as I did last year. So just sit tight.

In other news, I've developed a new tool I use for posting lineups. I'm going to try to figure out a way to port it online so everyone can use it. It's a simple Excel file. The screen shot looks like this: (click on image for larger view)


You simply enter the ID numbers of your players in the first column and everything else fills in automatically. The chart on the left is your previous lineup which you can use for reference. It's not the Holy Grail I've always wanted, but if what we do now is analogous to drinking out of your cupped hands, this would at least be a paper cup. Maybe next week I'll post an Excel version for everyone (who has Excel) to try out.

Coutlangus Now A Snake

http://mlb-rumors.blogspot.com/2008/04/diamondbacks-acquire-coutlangus.html

Pitchers Duel

Saturday, April 12, 2008

2008 Statistics

Team	Pitcher	W-L	ERA	IP	K
MLW	Ben Sheets (R)	1-0	0.00	15.1	15
@NYM	Johan Santana (L)	1-1	1.93	14.0	11

Loophole

Now matter how hard I try to button up all of the loopholes in the rules, it seems like every year something comes up that's not covered.

Here's what happened - this morning I announced a pickup of Jeremy Accardo (RP-TOR) and I cut Kevin Gregg (RP-FLA). About two hours latter, John, the vulture that he is, picked up Gregg and cut Jack Wilson (SS-PIT). The problem is that Joe has now informed me that he has Jeremy Accardo on his roster. My bad. Normally I memorize everyone's roster and would not make this mistake, but it's too early in the season and I'm running two leagues.

As an aside, the timing of John's pickup of Gregg falls under the 24-hour waiver rule that we added last year. Since John picked up a player within 24 hours of him being cut, a team with a lower record could swoop in and claim Gregg if they wanted to. Since John has the worst record in the league, the point is moot.

A second aside - it was another shitty relief pitcher, B.J. Ryan, who caused the waiver rule. He was cut by Dennis and three or four other teams wanted to claim him. I guess I now have something in common with Dennis.

Shut up.

Back to the main issue - what to do. Whenever stuff like this comes up, my feeling is that the guy who f-ed up should be the one penalized. In this case that was me. It would make sense that since I cut Gregg, he should stay cut and John should be allowed to claim him. I obviously can't take Accardo, so that leaves me with an empty spot on my roster which I can still fill with my transaction for the week.

This would all be fine and good, but what if John hadn't picked up Gregg? It has happened many times in the past where teams have picked up players that were already on someone else's roster. We've always just negated the pickup. But if we used that standard here, it gives me a do-over and screws John out of the player he wanted.

So, I'm changing the rule. Once you cut a player, he is cut - even if the player you want to pick up is already on someone else's roster. If that happens, you are allowed to pick up a different player to fill the empty spot, but the original player you cut remains cut from the time you first announced it.

There - that should sew it up.

So, think before you cut.

Eligible Positions

As I've mentioned earlier, the new stats service doesn't include games played by position, so I am not able to post eligible positions for all players. They do give me a "usual" position, which I've put in the stats in the place where eligible positions used to be.

For most players this doesn't matter, but for certain ones it does and will more and more as the season wears on. Unfortunately, you will all have to police this yourselves for now. If you play a guy in his "usual" position according to the stats, I'll count it as legal. If he's out of position according to that, I'll probably check and warn you. I'll keep looking for an alternative data source for this, but I have my doubts that I will find something suitable. It will probably have to be a manual process.

I did email STATS and request that they add it, but I don't know that they would do it this year as they don't like to change the data layout once it's established.

UPDATE: There are buttons on the website to the USA Today games played by position charts that are fairly easy to read.

Daily Stats

The daily hitting and pitching stats are posted, and should be every morning from now on. I still have a few more things to set up, but I'm pretty close to being back in business

Premature Jocularity

From Joe:

Add: Xavier Nady - OF - PITT

Drop - Cameron Maylin - OF - FLA

I love watching early season pickups in fantasy leagues. People forget all of the spring training stats, all of last year's stats, all of the 3-year weighted averages, all of the projections, and everything else they know and pick guys up based on a couple of games' performances - or, in this case, one game.

This is no rip on Joe, because a lot of people do it, but if Xavier Nady is better than Cameron Maybin today, why wasn't he better last Saturday?

I'm going to make a new award - the Tuffy Rhodes Award. Joe should win this year, hands down.

Game 1 Preliminary Stats

Despite Joel's YouTube videos (which I passed off as an April Fools joke - considering the source, that would be likely), the preliminary Game 1 stats were posted to the website at 6:30 this morning. If you ever go to the site and don't find something you think should be there, hit "refresh" on your browser. Sometimes I've needed to do that to get all of the latest updates. I recall adding something to the HTML code last year so you wouldn't have to do that, but I forget if it ever worked.

There is one error in the stats that I know of. Pitchers are not given credit for fractions of an inning pitched. The old stats service used to send me 6.3 for six and one third innings. The new service sends 6.1. When I rewrote the formula for pitcher's points, I forgot to take that into account. As an example, Ben Sheets (6.1 2 0 0 2 7) should have 22 points instead of 21.

Please let me know if you find anything else wrong. As I said, I pretty much needed to rewrite or make major edits to all of my spreadsheet formulas. It would be amazing if this were the only thing I missed.

Junior Prognosticators

From Junior FNFT Owner 2 Catchers, 1 Cup:

"dale jake and bill have the best teams i think my money is on
dale"

Progress

After a solid 5 hours of work tonight, I'm making progress with all of the web and spreadsheet updates. Chances are I'll be able to post preliminary Game 1 stats tomorrow morning. I've also got the year-to-date batting stats in pretty good shape. Pitching will come latter. Remember, I'm doing all of this for two leagues.

You can follow along with the other league here:

junior.fnftbaseball.com

Website Updates

I've added an RSS feed to the FNFT Blog as well as YTD hitter's stats. The format needs to be cleaned up a bit, but this is basically what they will look like.

Did any of you ever use the player links last year that linked to the RotoTimes pages for each player? I can link to Yahoo Sports pages this year if you'd like me to.

Here's an example.

If you used them, please let me know by commenting to this post. I'll probably put them in one way or another, but I'm just curious.

Enough for this morning. I've got to go to my other job.

Good News

First of all, happy Opening Day to everyone. I just logged in to the STATS site at 6:30 a.m. and the stats from last night's game are already there. Granted it's only one game, but 6:30 a.m. is better than the 7:00 a.m. service from the other place. As I age, I more and more sleep farmer's hours, so there were many mornings when I was sitting here waiting for the stats to come at 7:00 so I could work.

(I say this only for your information - not to raise your expectations that the stats will be posted any earlier than they already were. Eggs are for eating. Go do that and when you come back I'll have the stats posted.)

***Thank You For Following Directions***

I have re-fired the FNFT World Series Blog and shortened the name to simply FNFT Blog. I am going to use this space to tell you about league information, and also to prattle on about anything that I think is generally FNFT related. I am using this forum because it is much easier to update from anywhere I can get on the web and more permanent than email. I highly encourage you to check in here often at least during the early part of the season as I will keep you all up to date on the behind the scenes doings of the league, and inform you about things like rules clarifications, scheduling quirks, dispute settlements - I don't know, whatever comes up. If you ask me about something that I wrote about in here, I'm going to say, "Did you check the blog?" So check the blog.

Finally, despite how much you all enjoy FNFT, I realize that the league competes for a share of your time and online reading. Therefore, I will follow the convention I use in emails by putting a set of asterisks before and after the headings of ***Really Important Posts***. That's the stuff you really should read. The rest is up to you.

I am post-dating this entry so it stays a the top of the list until the end of the week. Please check here regularly. There will eventually be an obvious link to the blog on the website. Scroll down below this post for newer stuff this week.

UPDATE: I moved this post to it's regular spot. Click on banner above to view entire blog.

How Come Some Of You Insist On Always Having Such Long Team Names That Don't Fit In The Space I Have Allocated For Them In My Spreadsheets?

Just wondering.

Bear With Me

This first week or so is going to be a little slow in terms of getting results as I continue to transition over to the new stats service. There are a trillion spreadsheet formulas that I have to modify before I can post anything.

The new service (STATS) is still working out some of the kinks and changing their online access page. I still don't know about the timeliness of them posting stats. They've posted the two games from Japan, but it's hard to tell from those. I am hoping for early morning delivery, but we'll see.

One bummer is that the stats I get will not include games played by position so I may not be able to publish those in the weekly results. I know that's something important to have so I'll have to see what I can work out. There are other places on the web to get that, but probably no easy way to incorporate it into our results sheets.

With the change to three divisions, adding a 13th team, changing to a new stats service, and changing the main way I communicate with all of you (this blog) this is very much a rebuilding year for FNFT. As I say, bear with me. I'll get it all worked out.