Bill Roper's Journal

Tomorrow is our annual fantasy baseball draft. This means that I should finish whatever research that I think really needs to be done tonight.

Mostly, I think I'll just check the box scores. :)

I may not have gotten everything done that I would have hoped to get done, but a lot of things are done.

Tomorrow is Picnicon. The weather forecast for tomorrow is absolutely gorgeous and I'm hoping that it holds. Sam and Bonnie went out and picked up a number of items from the store today. I picked up a few more items later. Tomorrow morning, we hit Sam's Club to grab meat and buns and then we will be on our way. I have collected all the names of everyone who has RSVP'd and have them on a little list which I really should remember to take with me so that Gretchen doesn't have to text me a photograph of it. :)

I also used up some rewards certificates at DXL, ordering some shirts on-line and running out to pick them up this afternoon. Earlier, Gretchen and I got lunch, picked up the Walmart order, and grabbed lunch for the kids to bring home.

And I sent out a first trial run for the computer-based first half of our APBA season and am now waiting for the updates from the rest of the league. The final run for the first half (the one that counts) will be next Saturday so that everyone can get rolling.

Tonight, Gretchen and I finished the ninth season of "Suits". We enjoyed it.

We have 10 episodes of "Pearson" that will also go away at the end of the month, but -- to be honest! -- my desire to watch Chicago politics is sharply limited by my proximity to the real thing. :)

I've spent some time the last couple of days going over the new APBA baseball card set in advance of the draft a couple of weekends from now. As opposed to last year, which had no starting pitching available in the draft but a whole lot of hitting, this year has not a lot of hitting available but a whole lot of starting pitching available under the pitching cap for our league.

I am drafting last again this year (which is a good thing, as it means my team did well, as in a combined record of 107-55 worth of well), but it means that my draft strategy is like a leaf upon the wind, dependent on the whims of the other seven teams drafting in front of me. On the other hand, there is *so* much starting pitching that will be available in this draft that I should be able to find *something* that I can add to my rotation, which has a lot of good names that spent a lot of the season injured last year. I have two full-time starters spread out across four different names (Ohtani, Fried, Woodruff, Kershaw), which is going to make roster construction entertaining.

In other amusing news, I got all of those pitchers save Kershaw in the same rookie draft back in 2020. Which we held in my back yard due to COVID. Kershaw is the longest tenured player on the team, as I drafted him in 2009.

I have a number of monstrously good position players coming back -- Ohtani, Acuna, Freeman, Soto, and Julio Rodrigues -- and the quite serviceable Ozzie Albies at second base, but shortstop, third base, and catcher are about to be problematic with very few better solutions available in the draft or -- I suspect, having looked at the other teams! -- by trade. There are some teams that have assets that they could move, but finding a good matchup is going to be difficult.

Last year, I was able to flip Zac Gallen from a surplus of starting pitching for the rights to draft Julio Rodriguez, which worked out well for both teams. This year, my only surplus asset is Bryce Harper and he is going to cover DH at bats when Ohtani can't play and back up Freddie Freeman, so I *could* deal him, but it would have to be a really good offer to move him.

We'll see what happens.

We managed to finish up our annual APBA baseball draft in a bit less than five hours, which was a pretty good pace, given that it ran sixteen rounds before it was over. I was done in seven rounds, but I had a lot fewer holes to fill than some of the teams.

As I mentioned before, I had a lot of quality starting pitching coming back in a year when no quality starting pitching was available in the draft due to the league-imposed cap. And it turned out that I was able to deal off Zac Gallen, who I had picked up in last year's draft and who had come back as a top-rated pitcher, for the number two pick overall in this year's draft. The team that I dealt Gallen to was woefully short on pitching and quite long on outfield, which helped, because the best young players in the draft were outfielders.

Then I got a surprise. The fellow with the first pick in the draft decided to take a flyer on a relief pitcher who had a uniquely excellent card with a pitching grade (A&B with control) that we *never* see in the draft, despite the fact that he's limited to pitching very few innings. I hadn't expected him to go that early because of the limited innings, but I was wrong.

And I was happy to be wrong, because this meant that I could pick up AL Rookie of the Year Julio Rodriguez with the number two overall pick in the draft. This was really helpful, because although I have excellent outfielders (Harper, Buxton, Acuna, Soto) they were really short on at bats, because of injuries. Rodriguez covers a multitude of sins and is young and talented.

Having solved the at bat problem for outfield, I still had at bat problems at second base (Albies, Chisholm) due to injuries, and catcher (Stephenson, d'Arnaud, Ruiz -- the last providing some at bats, but not particularly *good* ones this year, although he remains a prospect). Harris went right after Rodriguez (no surprise) and then Adley Rutschman, the young Baltimore catcher, followed by Andres Gimenez, *another* relief pitcher, and Alejandro Kirk, the young Toronto catcher. And now it was back to me, with both of the good young catchers in the draft gone. I wasn't surprised.

Except that the not-quite-so-young-but-won-the-NL-batting-title-last-year second baseman for the Mets, Jeff McNeil was still available with a whole bunch of at bats. Well, solve the problems that you can, so I grabbed McNeil.

The rest of my draft was simple. As usual, I needed to fill in the bullpen, and having determined that there were "plenty" of quality relief pitchers for my purposes, I drafted A.J. Minter in round two, followed by Erik Swanson in round three, and Ryan Helsley in round four. Bullpen rebuilt, with Emmanuel Clase and Collin McHugh as holdovers.

I picked up MacKenzie Gore as a starting pitcher prospect in round five, and added Brendan Donovan in round six as a backup *everything* because he spent the winter working on his power stroke and if he develops some power, he will be really impressive.

Finally, I grabbed one more pitching prospect in the seventh round with Hunter Greene.

We're playing with the DH this year, following the major leagues, so my DH slot is already covered by the returning Shohei Ohtani. Unnamed players around the infield include Freddie Freeman, Manny Machado, Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa, and Dansby Swanson, while the starting rotation consists of Clayton Kershaw, Max Fried, the aforementioned Ohtani, Yu Darvish, Brandon Woodruff, and Luis Severino, with Jamethon Taillon and Walker Buehler as spot starters.

This should be a good team. (Remembering that this is an eight team league, there are a *lot* of good players.)

We'll see how it plays.

This afternoon, I finished (almost) getting the taxes ready to go to the accountant. I still need one number from my financial advisor to make sure that the return for my Dad's trust has everything needed, but I dropped off an email today and should be able to get that in the morning.

Then I played the next-to-last batch of games for the computer division in my APBA baseball league. I have an eight game lead in the division with thirteen games left to play. This makes me think my chances are good, but with a magic number of six, things can still go wrong. Shohei Ohtani leads the team with 46 home runs. No one else on the team has more than 30. :) And he has a 14-5 record as a starting pitcher. One starts to understand how he won the MVP in 2021.

We finished up the evening watching the end of the Cuba vs. USA game, which was a good thing if you were a USA (and Cardinals fan), as Wainwright and Mikolas only gave up a run each while each pitching four innings. And although Arenado left the game after getting hit with a pitch, the X-rays were negative, so that's a *very* good thing.

I can see the new APBA cards for next season before the printed versions are released if I pay for the season for the online APBA Go application. It's not that expensive and I did.

Without having looked at the other teams in the league, my team has (at least) come back ok. And the pitching staff is aces, as I have 111 A (top grade) starts, all but 28 with low walk rates; while I have 76 B (one grade down) starts, with 46 of those having higher walk rates.

It's a *nice* pitching staff.

(The A starters are Fried, Gallen, Kershaw, and Ohtani; the B starters are Darvish, Severino, and Woodruff. I also get to tack on a monster closer with Emmanuel Clase from Cleveland...)

It was a lovely warm day today, so Gretchen and I picked out carryout and had an in-car picnic lunch at one of the local parks. After that, it was time to head off for our annual baseball draft.

This year was a bit odd, as we are down two managers at the moment, which meant that I drafted for one of the absent managers while the other co-commissioner drafted for the other manager. As the draft order worked out, that meant that each of us was drafting for an absent manager who was drafting directly ahead of the other co-commissioner. The only good thing is that we were less personally conflicted this way.

The draft went very much as I expected and not at all as I'd expected for a variety of reasons. The position player talent available in the draft this year was extraordinarily thin, while there were four (maybe five -- no, just four) starting pitchers available under the pitching cap and sufficient relief talent to go around, if not make everyone deliriously happy. But really, there was going to be a shortage of good position players after the first round and a half.

So the fellow with the first pick in the draft grabbed Marcus Semien, which no one could argue with. I was drafting for an open franchise with the next pick and grabbed Wander Franco, who wasn't necessarily the player that the team *needed* the most, but clearly the most talented available player for a team that had remarkably few needs for a team drafting second. Things wibbled and wobbled down to me at the bottom of the round. I had thought to possibly take a starting pitcher, but none were left, which was largely ok, because Tyler Stephenson, a relatively young and talented catcher had fallen to me and my needs at catcher were large, so that was my first draft pick.

My bullpen had also completely fallen apart so I picked Emmanuel Clase, Andrew Chafin, Andy Kittredge, and Collin McHugh in successive rounds, filling four of the five open positions.

I still needed to collect some more catching talent, so I then picked Keibert Ruiz, the young catcher for the Nationals, who is not eligible to play this year, but will, I hope, be useful in the future. (The available catching this year was terrible. Really terrible.)

In the seventh round, I closed out the bullpen with Michael Fulmer. Then in the eighth round, I dropped the useless-this-year Chris Paddack who I had picked up on a flyer last year so that I could replace him with Zac Gallen, who is slightly more useful this year and (I hope!) a better flyer.

I finished up in the ninth round, adding second baseman Jazz Chisholm to replace Jake Cronenworth. I hope I have traded up, but in any case, I have traded younger.

And that's it. I mostly got everything I might have hoped to get.

Now, I need to see if I have enough of everything, given the lack of turnover among the position players.

It'll be interesting.

I have been trying to figure out how to generate a schedule for our APBA league for the 60 game computer season. Normally, I would just let the program generate the schedule, but because I want to schedule exactly five games per team per calendar week, that doesn't work.

So I let the program generate the schedule and I then exported to a CSV file that I could open in Excel.
There I rearranged the dates for the games so that this happened, moving bits of schedule where this didn't match up correctly to the end of the season, and then assembling some semblance of a schedule for what turned out to be the last week and a half or so. And then I imported the schedule back into the program.

This looks like it actually worked.

And I am greatly relieved.

Today is the day before Julie's 13th birthday. She wanted to go out to Red Robin for dinner tonight instead of tomorrow, so we headed out that way after work and a good (and filling) time was had by all.

Tomorrow, we continue the birthday celebration and start the softball season.

Sunday, we have our annual fantasy baseball draft.

Oh, and Monday, there's another softball game. :)

Must be the busy part of the season...

I am happy to see the baseball season finally getting underway.

From a fantasy baseball POV, it figures that I would have two players who were supposed to be in tonight's games hitting the IL. I am hoping for better luck tomorrow. :)

(I'm hoping that everyone who is out recovers well and quickly. I just take a greater interest in the guys on my team.)