RADIO
For this week's edition of The Friday Meta, I had planned to delve into the question of how owners approach the use of FAAB (free agent acquisition budget) in the early portion of the season. That's a worthwhile topic, but it can also wait a week. There are more immediate concerns at hand - namely, as you may have noticed, that literally every player is hurt.
We've all gazed in horror these past several days upon an all-too-soon deluge of injuries to guys who were expected to be high-profile fantasy assets. Daniel Murphy and Trea Turner broke fingers. Francisco Lindor sprained an ankle. Giancarlo Stanton strained his bicep and landed on the IL before most of us had even heard about an injury. Teammate Miguel Andujar might be done for the year with a torn labrum.
Chris Sale isn't officially listed as injured, but does anyone really believe he'd be sitting 89 on his fastball if he weren't, no matter what Alex Cora suggests? Even as I write this, Javy Baez pulled up lame and is visibly wincing after running out a routine pop fly. The way this opening week has gone, they'll likely need to amputate.
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Everybody Hurts
That's an exaggeration, naturally. But I've already grown weary of my phone buzzing with "a player on your roster's status has changed from healthy to day-to-day" notifications, and I imagine many of you are feeling the same way. We've weathered stretches like this before and will again; it's just that the fantasy gods are not usually this petty this early. Reality intruded on fantasy much too quickly this season.
Injuries will happen as long as my impassioned appeals to the commissioner continue to be summarily ignored...
...which, if history is any guide, is likely to continue in perpetuity. Some men just want to watch the world burn, I suppose.
Anyway, injuries aren't going away anytime soon, and the true mark of a competent or better fantasy owner is in how one deals with them. Yelling at the commissioner on Twitter, while encouraged, is sadly insufficient if one wishes to emerge, bloodied and beaten yet still victorious. In ideal circumstances, you've lined up a reasonable contingency for the vast majority of health-related misfortunes that might befall your squad. In practice, those hamstring pulls and shoulder tears often inspire a more visceral reaction, particularly as they pile up.
If you are adventurous enough to play in a league with limited IL slots (or, as in the case of NFBC leagues like The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational, none at all), this problem can quickly snowball into a crisis with even just a couple of injuries in rapid succession. And of course, the quality of player matters a great deal in this equation. Bottom of the roster guy got hurt? Fine, lemme trade him in for one of the five other players on the waiver wire with a similar range of outcomes. The best player? My heart skips a beat. At a thin position? My fists clench involuntarily. There's nothing but the dregs available on the waiver wire? I AM UNTETHERED AND MY RAGE KNOWS NO BOUNDS.
In shallower or more casual leagues...yeah, it's probably not as bad as all that. Regardless of where your league may sit on the difficulty curve, though, a rash of injuries means higher demand and lower supply in terms of replacements. And when it happens in the first week of the season, it means having to make potentially season-altering decisions with essentially the least amount of actionable data we'll have at any point during the season. The corollary to that is that you have the most time left to find a solution you're ever going to have.
Take Comfort in Your Friends
If you're feeling the pain, just know you aren't alone. We'll get through this together (hopefully because I've done a good job managing RotoBaller's waiver wire pickups list, but either way) and come out the other side as better at this game than we were before. And the day is not yet lost, for we...
Hang on a second, my phone just buzzed.
Jose Ramirez, day-to-day.
Après nous, le déluge.
The Friday Meta is Kyle Bishop's attempt to go beyond the fantasy box score or simple strategic pointers and get at the philosophical and/or behavioral side of the game. It is hopefully not as absurd, pretentious, or absurdly pretentious as that sounds.
