on hold

due to some ego/teasing silliness that kept our league stuck at 11 teams, we lost our live draft time. the 12th team joined up before the actual scheduled draft, but it was too late. totally ruined my day, not in the sense that i'm unhappy, but i'm just thrown off by this.

beginning of bad things

cliff lee is now the 'cy young winner' or something like that. his effort was up against ghastly outings from moyer, who i nearly benched, and jurrjens, who i did bench. i've been worried about the rookie pitcher thing; they usually run out of gas towards the end of the year. i'd rather have had him than not have had him, but who else is out there? the league's too deep to find anyone useful. the worst part of this is, shields had a terrible home start and gregg gave up something like 4 runs on a night when everyone else was pitching terribly. oh well; staying at the top for most of the first two thirds of the season was fun.

bring back somebody

in the end, when you're playing in a h2h league, you can never have enough anything. pitchers have either gotten injured, gone sour, or both. i've got melvin mora starting at 3rd, which is great in roto but won't necessarily help me come playoff time. there will be playoffs - i clinched at the end of last week, but my entire offensive bench right now is named hunter pence. i got complacent in this league. i didn't pick up dye when he had 19 hrs and a .300 avg, because i figured i didn't really need him. i didn't pick up alexei ramirez because i figured everyone knew he was good and had already passed on him.

so far, the most important decision (i think) was to trade kevin gregg and carl crawford for bj upton. if i hadn't done that, i wouldn't have carlos quentin, who i picked up after the trade was done. the key is, though, that i didn't have to make the trade to do that deal. i could have dropped a reliever. i could have even dropped pence. maybe that was back when he looked like he'd be great. i'd take him late next year, but definitely not early.

whither grant balfour

all the notes floating around said balfour was supposed to be the guy while percival was on the dl. well, having held on to wheeler this whole time as my insurance policy, and having decided i shouldn't grab balfour when he was briefly available, it's surprising and pleasant to see wheeler's now nailed down the second save of this dl stint. i guess bailing balfour out and earning that first save made an impression.

jensen something

i had plenty of opportunity to pick up jensen lewis, and i did not do it. dotel and wheeler have been the least valuable members of my fantasy bullpen, but dotel definitely is striking them out and keeping down the whip. i'm not worried about him. if there's anyone i should have grabbed, it probably wasn't lewis; it would have been balfour. i already have percival and wheeler's been my percival insurance, but when balfour was dropped, i should have jumped at the chance to grab him. he's been excellent; both he and wheeler are ownable middle relief guys in this 15-team league. i didn't want 3/5 of my bullpen to be rays, but at least i would have gotten all the saves. i consider myself lucky to be up 11 points today; this is dangerous, but i'm starting to think about what it would feel like to win the league. i hadn't really considered that as a real possiblity, and now...i have to keep hoping carlos guillen gets healthy so that my geoff blum or omar infante can get out of my middle infield. i feel like such a bottom feeder. speaking of which, heilman just made his way onto my team.

hanging around

i've made up some ground in rbis, where i'd oddly slipped to third-to-last. it seems weird that i've outpaced anyone in this category, but then i actually am in the top third of the league in terms of home runs. too many solo shots, guys. i think encarnacion is the main offender there, but who knows.

injuries are starting to be a problem; losing orlando hudson is tough just with the dearth of good options out there, and now guillen is sitting out a few because of back issues. i picked up geoff blum and omar infante. nothing to get excited about. earlier this week i debated grabbing jensen lewis, who would have given me a valuable save, but then i'd have had to drop him or someone in order to get a full starting lineup going again.

downhill

i considered myself lucky to sit on top of the league one solitary day after those first few days had gone by. much to my surprise, my team finished at the top nearly every single day since then, and only this past week have i slipped into what seems an inevitable non-winning position. haren had a terrible start tonight, and i'm starting to wonder if berkman's going to hit a home run again. of course he'll hit some, but maybe he won't hit 5 the rest of the year. oddly, right after i tried to deal fielder, he went on a spree of long balls, and made up some ground for me in the process. the strange thing about my team is how few rbis it's racked up through now. taveras hurts, but there's somebody on most rosters who is a low rbi guy, and i'm not one taveras away from contention in the category.