sixth place 2013

The regular season is now over for 2013 and that also concludes another year for fantasy baseball. I stumbled and fell flat on my face to start the season and was in last or 12th place after the first month. I just set my eyes on the middle of the pack and adjusted my approach.

I figured I would attack a category and decided to go after saves. At the time I had Kimbrel of the Braves and some teams were in transition so I went after Uehara of the Red Sox and Benoit of the Tigers. That was a fortunate situation to land the new closers to a couple top teams. A few weeks later I picked up Wilhelmsen of the Mariners and got a few weeks worth of saves before he imploded and I tossed him back. Then I grabbed Henderson of the Brewers and he helped to continue pad my save total. A positive benefit was that they were helping my ERA and WHIP totals also. 

I had built up a double digit lead in saves and the first week of September I decided to attack from another direction. I unloaded all my closers by trading Kimbrel and dropping the others except Uehara and picked up starting pitchers with good ERA and WHIP in an attempt to boost my win totals. For the last three weeks of the season I ran eight starters out there along with Uehara. Some games went my way and I was gaining ground.

To bolster my offense the last week of August I made the decision to pick up Yan Gomes of the Indians to pick up my flailing catching corps and dropped the struggling C C Sabathia. Then Paul Goldschmidt, Alex Gordon, Dayan Viciedo, Wilson Ramos and even Chris Carter all had a good run. The offensive catagories started to come off life support and my numbers started to tick up. With two weeks left in the season I actually touched fourth place and stayed there for almost a week.

But my team peaked a week early and fizzled the last week. I took it as a bad omen the Sunday before the last week that I had five starters and only one picked up a win. Several players slumped and went into power outages the last week. I had left Uehara alone on the closer island to ward the others off with a stick and he didn't have one save the last week and I ended up tied in the category. 

I had made my run and came up short. I learned some things which I hope to apply in future seasons. Time to rest up and spring training will be here before we know it.