inthedougout

For some of us, the end of the fantasy baseball season was welcomed with a warm embrace.  The fatigue of setting lineups, identifying waiver wire pickups, and making daily -- if not hourly -- decisions about your team can spoil what most of us consider a hobby.  The end of the fantasy baseball season allows us to pivot entirely over to fantasy football, mostly so that we can retain any semblance of bragging rights we have among our friends and family.   However, for others, we use this time to understand and dissect what proved to be a very interesting fantasy baseball season.  If you won a championship, this is the time you should seek to understand how you developed that team, what key decisions you made along the way, and maybe which lucky breaks fell your way.  If you lost, you should be doing the same exact thing -- break down where the failures occurred.  Was it just a bad draft?  Which rankings did you use to get there?  Was it several...

  Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash It's August 15th and if you're still reading this, congratulations: you have made it this far.  Fantasy baseball is a grind, especially for those of you who play in daily lineup leagues.  If your teams are anything like mine, you've had your share of heartbreak and you're looking for that little spark to get you going.  Just within the past month or so, I've lost Jazz Chisholm, Chris Sale, and Fernando Tatis.  At this rate, you have a better chance of finding a $20 bill lying under your couch cushion than finding the spark plug to jolt your team into playoff contention.  Alas, you're reading this because you looked for that $20 bill and couldn't find it, so let's see if we can find you a spark plug or two:   Vinnie Pasquatino, 1B, Royals :  A few days ago, I mentioned Vinnie as a key pickup you could make if you were reeling from the Tatis news.  By now, he's very likely gone.  If you play in a ...

Photo by Derek Story on Unsplash Yesterday, the biggest news of the season broke: Fernando Tatis would be suspended for 80 games .  Naturally, I had, and continue to have questions, so let's dive in: What is his re-draft value going into next year?  This year, we thought there were a fair number of questions surrounding many of the superstars in the league.  We didn't know how healthy Mike Trout was, whether Mookie Betts could get past his hip issues, and how Fernando Tatis would recover from his wrist injury.  Oh, and there were questions with Ronald Acuna, as well, and his recovery from a torn ACL. It looks like we will go into next year with many of the same questions.  Mike Trout was diagnosed with a degenerative back condition .  Mookie Betts looks like he's in an outlier season, from a health perspective.  Ronald Acuna is not the same player he was prior to the injury.  And our friend, Fernando, is going to go into next season with some hea...

Until now, this website has been used for me to map out my interest as a youth coach.  Somewhere along the way, I used this website as a means of helping me digest and process some health issues I have been confronting.  However, fantasy baseball has been, and continues to be, a tremendous source of joy for me.  This website has lagged quite a bit as I not only dealt with my health issues but tried to figure out a content area.  If you're reading anything on this website for the first time, everything before now will very likely just look like a menu of randomness.  Because it is.  But going forward, I will start focusing on fantasy baseball articles.  If you have any content you'd like to see that you're not seeing somewhere, drop a comment or send me a note.  

  My parents and I have a complicated relationship, at best.  The details of that relationship are too much to post here publicly and, frankly, they are far too embarrassing.  But if I don't share some  details, this post won't make any sense. The filtered, adulterated version :  I come from a long lineage of substance abuse.  Fortunately for me, I have been able to break the cycle, but that doesn't mean that I haven't had my life completely upended by it.  There were forgotten birthdays.  Credit card debt.  And a host of other things a "healthy" parent wouldn't do to a child. The relationship now is particularly complicated.  My father passed away a number of years ago.  My mother is alive, but in an assisted living facility.  The basis of our relationship consists of her asking me to make purchases for her so that she can regain material possessions that were lost to bankruptcy and eviction. I have been putting off thinking a...

Stress is inevitable.  What an obvious statement to make, right?  But it's true.  Avoiding stress is like avoiding oxygen; stress will always  exist in some shape or form.  If you want to find stress, you won't have to look too far.  Your email inbox.  Your news outlet.  Your social media feed.  Even thinking about this is kind of stressful, in and of itself.  What exactly is the solution, then?   At the risk of oversimplifying this, and to be sure, this doesn't apply universally, but: stress doesn't just "go away" with a new situation or circumstance.  New situations and circumstances bring new and different stressors.  Maybe your boss was a d*ck at your old job, but in your new digs, your new co-worker is pretty jealous of your new position and is determined to bring you down a peg.  Or maybe you weren't satisfied with your kid's school and the quality of the education, so you moved to a new school only to see ...

                                               It has been a while since I have posted anything.  Recently, I suffered a knee injury that has been quite debilitating.  This injury, and the experience I will be writing about, has given me new insights on life that I'd love to share.  My hope is that I can help anyone else who is going through a difficult time and maybe even teach you a few strategies about getting through a difficult time. For several months, I have lived in debilitating pain.  I spent my days on my back, barely a participant in life.  To anyone that has been dealing with pain and I failed to acknowledge, I am beyond apologetic.  I feel like an asshole for not acknowledging the pain of those around me.  See, when you're not in pain, it's very easy to take how normal you feel for granted.  That ease with which ever...