by MARCPELLETIER » Fri Mar 24, 2006 8:51 pm
thanks kaviksdad. You made a good run. You and I both had injury-prone teams, and I got the luckier part of it. In your case, Mauer got severally injured many times, while cheaper Glaus played more than expected. In my case, I had the luck to have the opposite pattern: cheaper Hairston had season tickets to the DL while Snow remained relatively free of injuries.
riggo,
yeah, I completely miss my predictions for your team, but to my defense, I came within the standard deviation for every other team (sorry, didn't have time to do the West)---I have inverted kaviksdad and coffeeholic, but I think that Kaviksdad did a great job in consistently pulling Brown or Padilla in favor of Capuano against coffeeholic's lefty-loaded line-up--Capuano finished with a 6-2 record.
I didn't forsee the collapse of your SPs squad, as a result, your team departed the most from my initial predictions. I predicted that your SPs would pitcher 100 more innings than what they actually did, particularly Perez and Miller. That's about 100 extra innings that had to be picked up by Eyre and Worrell, and by a tired Mendoza (I had set them around 60 innings for the first two, and 180 IP for Mendoza). Alvarez was terrible. I think that, instead of having useless Redman, your team would have beneficiated from doing something like Kaviksdad did with Capuano--try to keep Alvarez under 25% of L-bats instead of actual 33%.
As for your offense, I still think it wasn't a good idea to rely on Payton and Youkilis in the 4th and 5th slots vs lhp. Payton's performance, barely 10 rbis per 100 AB (actually less than that vs lhp) is simply awful for a clean-up hitter....but to be honest, even a good performance for your clean-up hitter would have not given you 20 extra wins. It just happened to be one bad in the system.
I will congratulate spicki a last time. I already have one of his quote ("I will face the second best team in the league in the first series") pinned down in the lockerroom.
As for my team, everything worked out fine so far. My offense did much better than what I expected, but my pitching did worse than expected. I explain that by saying that I have underestimated the real value of my offense, and that I have been unlucky in allowing so much homeruns behind Santana and Prior (when I had him). Ergo, I have a much better team than what I first thought :lol:
I knew that injuries would hurt my team (especially when you see Burke---5e16---move in rf to replace Walker), but hopefully my team will get in the playoffs fresh, healthy and rested. If I can lower down the number of homeruns allowed and get in the playoffs healthy, then I'll have a heck of a team!!! Although, in all equity, with IRod down for the first four games, I won't have the right to complaint if I lose one of my top gun for the whole series.
Playing etdefender at home or on the road doesn't make any big difference. I will exploit etdefender's bad break, and use the speed of my team's against Redmond's +2. I plan to rely on etdefender's second biggest weakness---all lefty hitters are weak---to settle on Hermanson and O. PErez on games 3 and 4, in between of Santana and Greinke.
Would love to play the second round at home, though---and have Greinke start two games at home (1,6 or 2,7). So go wild-card!!!