Week 7 - Rocky Horror Baseball Show

I was watching an episode of "Cosmos: A Space Odyssey" this weekend (spectacular show, by the way...I am pretty sure most of it is completely made up and its hosted by Mike Tyson's brother Neil, but the images are spectacular and its like catnip for little kids) and the host started talking about the amazingly innate human ability to recognize patterns and to develop plans to act on them.  For ancient humans, recognizing the patterns of stars in the night sky allowed them to understand when the weather was going to change or when their food was going to migrate and prepare/move their camps accordingly.  In modern times, pattern recognition helps do way more important things like analyze the stock market or dominate blackjack (it's not counting cards, people, its pattern recognition...and its been an adventagous human characteristic for millenia.  You can't kick me out of a casino for using a tool that we as a species has been developing since the dawn of man.  Wait, you can because it's an Indian reservation? What?) 
In fantasy baseball, most of us use trends to determine everything from "Who should I pickup and/or drop?", to "Which one of my craptastic catchers will do the least damage to my ratios this week?", to "Is that crazy Charlie "Mars" Blackmon really going to continue to hit like prime aged Stan Musial?" I can't tell you which player to drop/add (I picked up Martin Perez for God's sake), and I can't tell you which of your shit sandwiches wearing catchers gear that you should put into your lineup this week, but I can tell you that Blackmon's return from super duper star to being "just" a solid player is well under way.  Sorry Kyler, but Blackmon's slash line has gone from 374/418/616 coming into May 1 to 339/376/570 after yesterday.  He will be back to being Todd Hollandsworth in no time (seriously...check 2000, 2001 and 2002 for Hollandsworth, strangely also in Colorado...he was very injury prone, but the total with the Rockies for this 3 years: 631 PAs, .318/.367/.545 44 2bs, 28 HRs, 19 SBs.  Current ESPN projection for Blackmon: 626 PAs, 339/376/570 -they dont alter the slash stats from the current- 32 2bs, 32 HRs, 32 SBs, and I am already on record saying I think Mars will slow down...crazy close comparison).  Hollandsworth had that 1 season worth of amazing.  Other than that his career ranged from decent to "is that his stat line or a smear in your underwear?"
Anyways, as I was checking box scores this morning there was a very strange trend that I saw repeating itself over and over again.  That trend was supposedly really good baseball players playing like 6 year olds who have never hit off a tee before and pitchers who may or may not have been throwing pitches underhand.  We have a fairly small league, there are only 10 teams and we start 1 player at each spot, so we are using roughly the top 1/3 of position players and top 1/3 of starting pitchers and, for the most part, the end of game dominators from the RP ranks.  This week, however, there were 20 position players that were started that failed to reach the Mendoza line and 18 pitchers that were used that had WHIPs over 2.00.  Holy Bajeesus, I would make a joke but its more sad than funny.
At least we have Victor Martinez.  Martinez hit his 10th homer of the season last night against the Red Sawks.  Thats not that exciting, you say.  But...he has only struck out 9 times this year.  Martinez is on pace (never going to actually happen though) to be only the 46th player since 1901 to have more HRs than Ks, and only the 3rd since 1957 (Barry Bonds in 2004, 45 HRs - 41 Ks, and George Brett in 1980, 24 HRs - 22 Ks).  In case you were wondering, the best HR-K ratio ever in MLB is Tommy Holmes in 1945 with 28 HRs and 9 strikeout.  You arent reading that wrong...dude struck out 9 times in 713 plate appearances.  It was a War year, so its a bit skewed, but Holmes had 9 seasons (1942 - 1950) where he batted more than 363 times, and never struck out more than 20 times in a season.

I promise, there will actually be recaps eventually.  This week, we had one matchup between Bone Thugs, one matchup between Harmonizers and a trio of Crossroads (man I miss my uncle Charles, ya'll).