Welcome folks to the Pitcher List staff leagues. This year Pitcher List added a huge amount of new staff members which allowed us to expand from three to a whopping six leagues! As a reminder, these leagues are standard 5×5 and are set up relegation style, which means if you finish in the top three, you move up; if you finish bottom three, you move down.
Legacy League
Best Performance: Ian’s Pornogriffey (Ian Post)
Who else? Ian came one win away from a clean sweep of Myles Nelson in Week 12, ending up with a 9-0-1 victory. We all know that a dominating categories victory doesn’t always mean your team was good, just merely better than the other team. This isn’t true of Ian Post: his team whacked 14 HRs (4 from Domingo Santana) and stole 4 bases (3 from Mallex Smith)- shoutout Mariners! Not only that, but Post’s pitching staff ended up with a 2.96 ERA and a 0.96 WHIP after getting 37 Ks in one day from Walker Buehler, Brad Peacock, and Aaron Nola. Ian maintains his vicegrip on first place.
Closest Matchup: Troy & Amed in the AM (Austin Bristow) vs Miggy Stardust (Jay Dunbar)
Honestly, I could’ve picked any matchup here as the league had two 6-4 matchups, a 5-4-1 matchup, and a 5-5 tie! I was tempted to give the nod to Alex Fast’s (12th place) exciting matchup against Rick Graham (second place). Rick got the 6-4 victory in the end, but the two were virtually tied in ERA and WHIP for the better part of Sunday until J.A. Happ brought everything crashing down. But the highlight here goes to Austin and Jay. Austin got the 5-4-1 win but it could NOT have been closer: 35-31 in runs, 11-10 in HRs, 34-32 in RBI, 2-1 in saves, and a 3-3 tie in wins.
Interesting Stat: The Legacy League currently features a four-way tie for eighth place between Nick Pollack, Myles, myself (Dave Cherman), and Max Posner. If the year were to end in such a tie, we would actually have to resort to the consolation bracket.
— Dave Cherman
Prodigy League
Biggest victory: Boydz-in-the-Hood over Astudillo Ghibli, 7-2
The prodigy league had a pair of five-category victories this week, but Brandon’s commanding victory over Ben took the cake. Brandon rode hot hitting from Gary Sanchez, Mike Trout and Charlie Blackmon to victories in four of the five hitting categories, and stellar performances on the bump from Justin Verlander and a pair of Yankees in Masahiro Tanaka and James Paxton helped win ERA and WHIP. Brandon’s victory pushed him into second place, while the defeat dropped Ben down to seventh.
Closest Matchup: Troy Klauder vs. Acuna Moncada, 6-4
Although myself and Nate tied last week at 5-5, we were both very far apart in most categories, so the closest matchup award once again goes to our leader, Troy Klauder, for his second straight 6-4 victory. He eked out victories in home runs (11-9) and wins (2-1) while narrowly losing in RBI (29-26) and saves (4-3).
Weirdest stat: The battle between Jeff’s team and the Statcast Darlings was much closer than the final 6-1-3 score indicated. Jeff and Michael’s team finished tied with 38 runs, 11 home runs and two wins apiece, while Michael earned narrow victories in RBI (35-34) and saves (4-3). That’s right, these two teams were almost tied in every hitting statistic, but Michael’s narrow victories and his big advantage in pitching (thanks to Jacob deGrom, Jake Arrieta and Joe Musgrove) helped earn him the biggest margin of victory for the week. Baseball is weird.
Biggest waiver wire add: Jordan Yamomoto, Hurling Archer’s
Technically Yamamoto was added at the end of last week, but his excellent performance on Sunday earned Stephen a win and lowered his WHIP, two categories he narrowly won thanks to the rookie right-hander’s dominance.
– Andy Patton
Futures League
Best Performance: Colin Charles (Knuckle Curve) def. Scott Chu (Big League Chu), 8-2
The most literal interpretation of the topic for Week 12. Every matchup had maybe one category that could have gone either way, but not enough to actually change the outcome of the week. In this category it was WHIP, which Colin took 1.15-1.16. The rest were firmly won, although not in dominant fashion: HR (12-9), RBI (34-29), SB (4-2) as examples.
Closest Matchup: Michael Augustine (Snell’s Bells) def. Dan Wist (Juanderkinds) 5-4
One again taking the most literal interpretation of this topic because there wasn’t really a close match. Even this one did not have many close categories with Runs (35-29), HR (11-9), RBI (38-32), SB (3-9), AVG (.278-.286), K (33-63), ERA (4.85-6.11) and WHIP (1.41-1.28) firmly decided. Only Wins (3-3) were tied and Saves (3-2) were close.
Weirdest Team Stat: Jake Bridges’ (Valley of the Dahls) pitching line: 101 IP — 0 saves
How is this possible? Especially since he does have one reliever: Raisel Iglesias, who is borderline losing the Reds’ closing job. That said, Jake didn’t need a save as he tied Dan (AMC’s Breaking Bats) in the category.
– Travis Sherer
PL-League-1
The league has now reached the point where every team has played every other team once, so strength of schedule is not a factor at the moment in terms of matchups (but is in terms of playing teams on hot or cold streaks).
There was a bit of a shakeup at the top of the standings as Massive Deverstation (Ben Ruppert) smacked around Mostly Nats (Charlie Wright) enough to leap into second place and knock the Nats down to fourth. The Wild Card race heated up a bit as Hedenson’s Team (Hunter Denson) stumbled and Stephen Dudas’s Team (Stephen Dudas) continued their collapse down the standings. Meanwhile, the Maryland Wolfdogs (Ryan Fickes) and Beliebers (Ben Hizer) each ticked up a notch in the standings with .700 aW% weeks.
Best Performance
Mikey’s Team has suddenly become a powerhouse and posted an impressive 8.03 zTotal compared to the league average for the week, more than doubling the output of any other team. Considering how terrible the team was performing earlier in the season, that put Mikey’s Week 12 performance at a 13.11 zTotal compared to the team average for the season. Mikey lead the way in SB and AVG while putting up a second-best SV total for the week and third-best W and K, all without any truly terrible performances as the team had the “best bad performance” of the week with an eighth-best RBI total.
Strongest Category: Mikey’s Team with a 2.29 zSB from 11 SB.
Weakest Category: Stephen Dudas’s Team with a -2.44 zERA from a 7.87 ERA.
Best Matchup
The matchup between the newly rebranded Air Yordans (Alex Isherwood) and Mikey’s Team saw a combined .650 zW%, as both teams put up extremely solid weeks, despite the 7-3 victory for Mikey’s Team. The Yordans knocked the cover off the ball to the tune of 43 R, 49 RBI, and 14 HR, but stumbled a bit on the pitching side. Mikey was able to post the aforementioned 11 SB and an impressive .326 AVG to combine with a clean sweep on the pitching side (including season bests for the team in K, W, and SV) to take the victory. Mikey also posted the team’s best marks for the season in R and RBI, despite losing the categories, as well as SB.
Statistical Oddities
After sitting at an atrocious .244 aW% through Week 9, Mikey’s Team has posted a .717 aW% over the last three weeks against league leading Led Z.Eflin and two wild card contenders, the Maryland Wolfdogs and Air Yordans.
– Ryan Fickes
PL-League-2
Best performance: Consider this one a tossup between The Story Profar (Jordan Larimore) and Holland Otts (Clay Cotton), though I wound up with a much more favorable end result, winning 9-1. Clay’s great performance earned him only a 6-4 victory. Luck of the draw. My team put up 82 R/RBI, 12 home runs, five steals and batted .312. That went along with a 3.24 ERA, .98 WHIP, six saves and 40 strikeouts. I strangely had a weird week with only one win, though, which was the category I lost.
Clay also had a very strong week, posting 36 R, 40 RBI, 14 home runs and four steals while batting .305. His pitchers had four wins, two saves and 43 strikeouts to go along with a 2.74 ERA and 1.26 WHIP.
Closest matchup: The matchup between Otto Von Bettsmarck (Rob D.) and Yu Snell My Bum (John Hale) had two categories tie (home runs and wins), and two other categories within one point of flipping, but the remaining categories were all won by a pretty wide margin. Rob won RBI 29-28, and stolen bases 4-3.
– Jordan Larimore
The Bottom of the Barrel
Best Performance: ESchaff (Eric Schaff)
Eric made it to the top of the pile on pitching – even during the worst week for pitching I can remember (multiple 6+ ERA teams for the week). Jacob deGrom and the resurgent Jose Leclerc (anyone else want to capitalize that first C after spelling out deGrom) led the effort, putting mid-2’s in ERA and a sub-1 WHIP for the week. On the offensive side of the ball, Matt Chapman and Jonathan Lucroy (what year is this?) put up solid efforts to allow Eric to put up 84 roto points on the week.
Closest Matchup: ESchaff (Eric Schaff) vs. Tinseltown Monarchs (Jessica)
Eric needed each and every one of those 84 roto points, as Jessica was nipping on his heels with 80 of her own. Jessica had three batters bat over .400 for the week (Howie Kendrick, D. J. LeMahieu, and Chris Taylor) and saw Walker Buehler throw up a CG against the Rockies with 16 Ks. Eric eked out the real life victory on the back of tying in HR at 13, since it looked like Eric would sweep pitching and Jessica would sweep hitting for the week.
– David Fenko