inthedougout

Last time, we talked about failure.  I'm still sitting in it.  I can't claim to be thriving in it, at least not yet.  But I am bruised.  Still licking the wounds. I am also contemplating two questions: What are you willing to risk?  Are you willing to risk sitting in the failure?   I still haven't figured out the answers to those questions, but I did find us some inspiration as we navigate. So as you sit in your failure, I invite you to read p ossibly the most inspiration words you will find today - courtesy of the Oriah Mountain Dreamer ... "The Invitation." It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own so

Recently, it feels like I am engulfed in failure.  The flames of failure completely surround me.  I feel charred - that burnt-to-a-crisp feeling.  There is no amount of ketchup or sauce that can save this meal.   I will likely split this into multiple parts, but today, I will focus most heavily on initial reactions to failure, particularly in those first    1)  So much of internal failure is really the blunt force of external factors.  I may have to harp on this point a few times, re-stating it in enough different ways that it will eventually make sense.  When we fail, it feels like it is about something inside of us that failed.  It's not.  Sure, maybe we weren't as good as another candidate, but it doesn't mean that we - or anything embedded within us - failed.  Separate the external event from you, the person.  You are not a failure  even if your mission failed. 2)  You get up the next day.   In some ways, nothing changes about the next day - you brush your teeth.  You p

Coaching baseball is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things to do. I have been lucky enough to coach a variety of sports - flag football, soccer, basketball, and baseball.  By far - the most difficult sport to coach is baseball. For starters, there are a few things about the sport working against you.  First, there's just more equipment.  With nearly every other sport, there isn't a bag full of equipment necessary to play the game.  In baseball, however, you're contending with gloves, bats, helmets, and so on.  As a coach, I have to bring catcher's equipment, hitting nets, tees, and so forth.  Judging by the weakened suspension in the rear axle of my car - it is a lot of equipment.  With other sports?  You usually only need the shoes on your feet and a desire to play the game - the balls are supplied.  The second thing working against you is idle time.  There is just more idle time with baseball.  In other sports, the players aren't as isolated from a play as t

January is a month of new beginnings.  Clean slates.  Resolutions.  The end of one year, the beginning of another.  For us, it also marks the end of the fantasy football season and, officially, the beginning of the march to fantasy baseball season. For some, the grind never stopped, which is why we're here, in January, talking prospects.  Going into any new season, my personal opinion is that the veterans have largely solidified their status - in one direction or another.  It is the prospects -- the post-hype and the new-hype that disorient and disturb the board more than any other category of players.  That's our inquiry for the moment. Post-hype prospects I have three post-hype prospects that I am targeting, in particular.  They are Michael Busch (Cubs), Kyle Manzardo (Guardians), and Curtis Mead (Rays).  Busch is a pretty easy pick, but I suspect his price is going to get too expensive relative to his ADP neighbors.  Busch was shipped from the Dodgers to the Cubs, which is o

We are several weeks into the season and, at this point, we can all agree that everything we knew going into the season was thrown out the window as soon as the games started.  That said, there is still a lot of baseball yet to play and for us, as fantasy nerds, a lot of in-season management to navigate.  As we move forward into summer, here are a few things I either have done or am thinking about doing. Use your FAAB to get the young pitchers and sell them, almost immediately, for impact bats. Put this one in the category of "shiny new toy."  Sure, I have preyed on our inattentiveness, but in re-draft settings, I see no issue with snagging these higher-end rookie pitchers and then flipping them.  In two different settings, I was able to flip Bibee for Miguel Vargas and then, separately, Mason Miller for Jordan Walker. Will these trades work out for me?  Probably not, but I have a lot more faith in Vargas and Walker, particularly, than I do in Bibee and Miller.  Find the leve

Last year was one of my more successful fantasy baseball seasons.  I played in nearly 10 leagues, all different shapes, sizes, and contexts.  Heck, I was lucky enough to play in the so-called "Listener League" at CBS with Scott White, Frank Stampfl, and Chris Towers.  I even wound up winning that league.  However, as successful as last year was for me, I was disappointed with how I got there.  It felt more like throwing darts as opposed to knowing which darts I was throwing and why.  There was little examination -- a post mortem -- to figure out which darts failed and why.  In other words, it felt more lucky than good.  I wasn't satisfied with that and thus, this year, my approach was to be far more systematic.  Now that I can reflect on the draft season, here's how my strategy formalized. 1.   Go into your draft with a clear strategy.  This year, mine was the infamous "OF-3B-2B" stack. My goal for every draft was to leave the first three rounds with an outf