Four More Teams Meet The Blade: The PL Wacky Leagues Week 2 Recap

It’s not all just fun and games over here at Pitcher List, sometimes we all like to really hunker down and focus on only the most serious tests of fantasy skill. Hence, the Wacky Leagues. These leagues are made up of a mix of PL staffers and PL+ members, so if you haven’t already, head on over to the PL+ sign up page and get on the Discord so you can start prepping for the 2021 Wacky Season.

Asher Dratel will be bringing you all of the recaps for the Guillotine Leagues and WorstBall Categories, while Myles Nelson keeps us all up to date on WorstBall Points and the Grand Theft leagues.

The Guillotine Leagues

First off, I have to make a correction to my Week 1 recap: Kyle Seiler spent all $1000 of his FAAB on the first elimination window, grabbing himself Kyle Hendricks, Marcell Ozuna, and Dinelson Lamet. That’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for him.

Anyway, onto week 2, where another pair of ill-fated managers in each league find themselves with 23 empty roster slots and no way to fill them.

One of the best and most counterintuitive things about Guillotine is that the scores reset every week, so there are no standings and nobody is ever really in “first place.” Everybody starts Monday with 0 points, so when a manager pulls off say, 108 points in a single day to catapult up the standings it’s kind of a big deal. And Benjamin Haller did just that in League 2, with a 108.50 point day on Wednesday. Matt Olson and Joc Pederson each hitting two homers on the day, along with Aaron Nola and Dallas Keuchel putting up some capital-A Ace numbers, keeping him away from the reaper’s blade for another week.

What is very intuitive is the desperation you can feel late in the week as you survey your points total (or lack thereof) and start game-planning how you stay out of the bottom slots. I’ll let Tina and Ben’s words do the talking here:

In League 1, Ben Brown didn’t get those no-hitters, and his team name Guillotine This became a self-fulfilling prophecy. His unlucky partner at the bottom of the week was Nathan Hursh, which means we got (siren noise here) MIKE TROUT ON THE WAIVER WIRE FOLKS. Nathan’s loss was Christopher Reeve’s gain, as he beat out six other managers to snag Dad Strength Trout for $617. Jake Matier bid a healthy $107 to pick up Spencer Turnbull, the only other player who cleared triple digits in the bidding this week. Jake might also be interested to know the 2nd place bid for Turnbull was, uh, $19. Mr. Matier spread his funds around this week though, also picking up Matt Olson ($71), David Fletcher ($47), and Wil Myers ($67), giving him some offensive punch for decent bargains, while still having $700 left in his overall budget. Interestingly enough, rookie sensation Kyle Lewis garnered nary a single bid, nor did Anthony Rendon?! What is going on over in League 1, people?!

The end of Week 2 sees Christopher Reeves as the owner of the lightest FAAB pocketbook, with only $2 left. But then again he has Trout so who knows if he’ll even need it. Meanwhile, Rich Holman, who has easily avoided danger in both weeks so far is sitting pretty atop a princely sum of $943 FAAB remaining.

In League 2, it was Tina Yu and Justin Paradis who found themselves in the bottom two. Both of them picked up at least one player from my roster following our first week, meaning my team was clearly cursed and I can sleep easy knowing my elimination was unavoidable. While Trout remains firmly rostered in League 2, Justin’s elimination meant that Childish Bambino himself, Juan Soto went out onto the wire, where he fetched a $615 winning bid from Benjamin Haller, who also added Trout’s teammate Anthony Rendon for another $210. Joey Gallo, who set off the most intense bidding war last week went for a tepid $161 this time around, with only three managers getting beaten out by Myles Nelson. I wish him better luck than the managers who previously opted to take on the lefty masher. Big names still on the wire after elimination night in League 2 include Eddie Rosario and Carlos Correa.

At the end of Week 2, Kyle Seiler remains both in the game, and the only manager with $0 remaining in his FAAB pool. Noah Scott’s big pick-ups of Francisco Lindor and DJ LeMahieu this week put him in the second-lowest spot, with only $30 remaining. But much like Christopher Reeves, he already has Trout. League 2’s moneybags spot is occupied currently by KingHippo, who still has $845 remaining to spend in the coming weeks. Maybe.

WorstBall Categories

For every good baseball team and player, there must be a bad one. Our ten intrepid managers continued their race to the bottom in the WorstBall Categories league, but whomst amongst us did the worst on the way to being the best?

Alex Chase deserves a shout out for winning 9 out of 10 categories this week including 3 GIDPs, with blown saves remaining a 0-0 tie between him and Kyle Seiler. Seriously people, trying to predict those in a weekly league is very tough, nobody in any matchup this week got a single one. Ryan Amore, Victor, and Scott Chu’s teams also saw their SLG end up lower than their OBP by Sunday night, the sure sign of a strong WorstBall lineup.

This week it was Doc Brown’s team who didn’t get the memo about what league they’re in as his offense put up a .345 OBP and a .642 SLG while his pitching only took 1 loss to go with a 1.59 ERA and 0.88 WHIP thanks in part to first overall pick Antonio Senzatela’s impressive start to the season. All of that competence saw him drop from 6th to 9th place in the standings.

Hitter Of The Week: Evan White. I feel bad picking somebody on my team twice in a row here, but White finished the week with a .045 OBP and .095 SLG while whiffing 11 times and adding 1 GIDP on top. And that’s not a small sample size, he only missed one game this week.

Pitcher Of The Week: Tanner Roark,  who finished the week with 1 L, 5 BBs, a 12.00 ERA, and a 2.67 WHIP from a single outing. Other pitchers put up similar ratios or BB numbers, but Roark gave you all that badness from just one roster spot. Honorable mention has to go to Craig Kimbrel, who would likely have earned this week’s honor were it not for a whole slate of suspended games.

WorstBall Points

This is my second season in WorstBall, and my third league overall. I thought I’d see everything in our first year, but I never saw this. Erik van Rheenen’s team, this past week, scored… -1 points. That’s right, they were so good on the field that they managed to score -1 points, meaning their contribution was a net positive, which is not what you want in WorstBall. The main issue is that all of his pitchers did well, as every single one of them scored in the negatives and combined for -32 points. While the hitters fared a little better, having no games from Tyler O’Neill all week really hurt, and in the end he went backward. Unreal.

My own matchup with graphics manager Justin Paradis went right down to the wire, as I only beat him by 9 points, and for much of the final day we were tied. I’m sure it hurts to look across the matchups in the league and see you scored the 4th most points in the league, but them’s the breaks in H2H. You gotta beat who’s in front of you, and Paradis ran into some bad luck there. On the flip side, dynasty writer and self-proclaimed WorstBall aficionado Trevor Hooth scored the least points of any winning team, with a measly 103 points, but lucky for him he was playing against van Rheenen.

Hitter of the Week: Keston Hiura tried to not win this award, as he showed up on Sunday with a 3/5 outing with a home run and 2 runs scored, but he had amassed too many points already, and finished the week as our top scorer with 37.5 points. That’s what going 7/29 at the plate with 14 strikeouts, 2 GIDPs, and 3 errors will do for you.

Pitcher of the Week: There’s absolutely no doubt about this whatsoever. Madison Bumgarner’s week was so bad, that just his performance last week would put him 5th on the season leaderboards. He has two starts, both losses, totaling 6.1 IP, 13 earned runs, 6 home runs allowed, and 3 hit batters. As with most of the time pitchers win this award, Bumgarner was immediately placed on the IL.

Grand Theft Baseball

Two weeks, two times losing a player to my opponent.

Losing Giovanny Gallegos last week wasn’t that bad, really. I thought he was going to be the Cardinals’ closer, and he may still be, but they’ve played no games since I lost him, and he hadn’t done anything for me prior to losing him that I didn’t really feel his loss. This week though, I was really nervous. We could only protect 12 players on our roster, and when I was making my list I ended up with 13 players that I wanted to protect. I sat there staring at my list for a long time, deciding between Jorge Polanco, or James Karinchak. Karinchak is exciting, he’s new, he’s got a flamethrower for an arm and is breathing down Hand’s neck for the closer’s job. Polanco is steadier, he’s not going to be the best at his position, but he’s a steady bat, he’s in a great lineup, and it’s hard to find someone who has his kind of floor. In a league like this, you need players who will produce every week. So I ended up protecting Polanco, figuring that Karinchak still isn’t actually the closer, and I shouldn’t use a protection slot on what amounts to an elite handcuff.

And then PL+ member Mike P stole Karinchak from me. And it sucks. I love watching Karinchak pitch and now he’s not on my team. This truly burns. At least I didn’t lose Matt Chapman, like one of the other members of our league. Other notable players that were stolen include Corey Seager, Eugenio Suarez, and James Paxton.

Next week we will only be able to protect 9 players, or about 40% of our roster. Looking back over my list, if I had to drop another three names from there… boy is that tough. Jorge Polanco, Kenley Jansen, Yoan Moncada, Eugenio Suarez, and dare I say J.D. Martinez would all be on there? I hate this. Please god of Grand Theft, let me be on top for once.