10 Ways by Gene Doucette

Gene Doucette’s Top Ten Ways to Make the Leaderboard:

1: get lucky.
2-10: see #1.

Okay, so it’s a bit disingenuous for someone who has been in the top 10 for four weeks (or so) to claim it’s all luck, but that is a lot closer to the truth than anything else I could have said.

Here’s the thing: if you spend a lot of time in the top 50 it’s easy to come to the conclusion that you’re doing something genius-like, but the reality is you’re doing a lot of the same things everybody else is doing, it’s just that it’s worked out better for you. This is my fourth year playing this game, and historically I’ve been fortunate to finish within the top 1000 up until now. If anything has changed it’s been that I’ve watched less baseball this year than I did in any of the other three years.

But that’s not particularly entertaining. Herewith, then, is:

Gene Doucette’s Amazing System

1: pick a pitching staff based on MLB.com’s "probable pitchers" breakdown and hope the writers there have some clue. Favor staffs at home and starting pitchers with high strikeout totals, pitchers whose last game was a good one, staffs facing a crappy team.

2: ignore weather reports unless you happen to have nothing better to do.
2a: curse yourself repeatedly for neglecting to check the weather.
3: pick bats more or less at random, relying almost entirely on:
a: the likelihood they will play
b: their BBC average over the past seven days
c: their batting average
d: the ERA and recent history of the pitcher they’re facing.

3a: be sure to ignore lefty-righty matchups (unless it’s a factor on whether they play); history against a pitcher; avoid the legendary "bum rule" (see below).

3b: accept that there are going to be DNP’s and move on with your life.

3c: likewise, accept that there will be certain positions you should not expect much from, for whatever reason, and go low at those positions when you can. Mine this year: Catcher and DH.

3d: understand that picking players that do well on average will benefit you in the long run more than trying to guess which players are going to have atypically extraordinary games. The slugger that hits a home run once every two games and strikes out every other time is great to have on the day he hits that home run, but I’d rather have the guy who gets on base a lot, can steal bases and so on. Nine of those guys will get you your 25-30 points a night (see below.)

4: never make picks based on whom everyone else is going to pick—either picking with or picking against. You will get yourself in a hell of a lot of trouble if you’re picking a pitching staff only because everyone else will be picking a more obvious one. Take the staff most likely, in your opinion, to get the best score. Besides which, you might be wrong. I can’t tell you how many times I picked a staff I thought would probably end up being the most popular, only to find myself in the minority.

5: don’t be afraid. If you’re wrong, there’s always tomorrow.

Gene Doucette’s Utterly Uncalled-For Rant Against the ‘Bum Rule’

Players that have a good game on Monday are no less likely to have a good game on Tuesday than they were if they had a bad game on Monday. The ‘Bum Rule’ is the sort of analysis that only makes sense after the fact, and is completely useless as a predictor of future events. If the only reason you’re not picking a "hot" player is because he had an unusually good game, you’re making a mistake. That said, it is probably a good idea not to assume that a player averaging 7 BBC points in the past seven days is going to be keeping up that pace. Or to get angry when they don’t.

Taoism and the BBC

I am a terrible leaderboard participant, I have to say. The last ballgame I actually watched was an April game I had tickets for, and I only had the tickets because my mother couldn’t use them. I take maybe 15 minutes a night to do a lineup. I am generally happy when my hitters get at least 30, because 20 from a pitching staff is fairly easy, and a 50 point night is a good enough night, on average, to move me up in the rankings. I don’t really care if my most expensive player doesn’t do much for me on a given evening, because what I was paying for was the likelihood of a good score, not a guarantee of one, so as long as the rest of the team does okay, hey, whatever. My approach to a bad game one DH score is: hey, I’ve got X-number of points already and nine guys plus a pitching staff that hasn’t even started yet. I have perfected the art of underreacting.

Gene’s Utterly Uncalled-For Rant Against a ‘System’

The only real system you need is this:

1: pick the right pitching staff.

Any system you might be employing that goes beyond that is probably self-delusional, the same way ball players equate victories with the way they put on their socks on game day or whatever. This is why systems break down: they are created when something you did got you a good score, and so you did it again, thinking that was the reason. But if you pick any nine every-day professional hitters you’re going to get a decent score more often than not, no matter what system you employed to make those picks. I have tried picking the same players on multiple days, picking all players from the same team for a (non-DH) day, picking no two players from the same team, and so on. All of these approaches worked until they didn’t any more.

So relax. Or not. Whatever works best for you.