Is baseball played in the Fall?

I was heating up my lunch yesterday and someone asked, "is baseball played in the Fall?"

I laughed for several reasons, but more so because baseball has become a year-round passion of ours.

Note: I fully believe and subscribe to the school of thought that kids should play several sports. My kids play several sports. Baseball just happens to be the sport that we use for life lessons. Baseball is always, and I mean always, around us.

Yes, I replied, we play baseball in the Fall and we love it. But baseball in the Fall is unique for so many reasons. We don't usually keep that close of an eye on the scores. We emphasize fundamentals and the process -- not the outcomes.

Fall baseball has become how I'd like to treat all of baseball. I follow a number of youth baseball organizations and they tout their success winning tournament after tournament.

To some extent, I just don't care if you won that tournament or not. I care more about developing the person and the ballplayer. Are we giving our kids enough of the tools to succeed on the diamond and in life? Granted, I'm "just" a little league coach, but I take that opportunity seriously.

Build the kid. Encourage them. Challenge them. Praise the process, not the results. That is what Fall baseball is all about.

Fantasy Baseball: A few weeks in, how do we adjust and adapt?

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....

The More Good Days than Bad Days Principle

There are seven days in a week, about 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year. Not all of those can be good days. No one has 7 perfectly good days. Likewise, I've never gone through an entire year without a single bad day. I have two reactions to that: The first reaction is the whole "control what you can control" thing. You can control your effort and your attitude. And that's absolutely true. But sometimes a day is so bad that no amount of effort or attitude will fix it. The second reaction is that, in any given week, if you have 4 good days and 3 bad days, you're still winning. Even if you have a few "meh" days, but the good ones are still outnumbering the rough ones, I think we're in a good place. The same goes for our practices with our little leaguers. We've had some truly rough and awful practices. The coach's didn't show up with patience, the kids didn't show up with their attention spans, a...

Fantasy Baseball: Mock Draft Reactions

It's December and, for the diehards, it's officially draft season for fantasy baseball. Frankly, it's fair to ask whether the fantasy baseball season ever really ended. While it's true that many of us began tending to our wounds in October, diagnosing the hits and the misses, a few of us never really stopped thinking, obsessively, about fantasy baseball. For me, personally, I have been trying to stay permanently in "draft-season" meaning I want to be in some form of a draft between now and the end of March. Recently, I was fortunate enough to join several industry experts, including Scott White, Frank Stampfl, and Chris Towers in a 12-team head-to-head points mock draft . In this article, I will cover a few high-level observations (heck, even a few things that surprised me) and the lessons I learned. Lesson #1 : Aaron Judge was not universally considered a first overall pick and that surprised me. This one surprised me. As soon as I drafted Jud...

inthedougout

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