Who are these so-called fantasy baseball “experts”, and why do they think they are qualified to help you win your leagues?
For those who follow MLB.com’s Fantasy 411 fantasy baseball show, Bob Sikon is better known as “Bob in Cleveland”.
As a fan of the Fantasy 411, he attended the show’s fantasy baseball summit in Cleveland in 2007. There, he challenged Cleveland Indians GM Mark Shapiro to tell us why we should believe that they could sign C.C. Sabathia to a long-term contract as opposed to trading him away or losing him in free agency. Bob asked assistant GM Chris Antonetti to explain why we should expect Victor Martinez to remain at catcher as opposed to becoming the Tribe’s first baseman of the future. Two very insightful questions, indeed.
Answering the 411′s call for a term to describe a player who racks up a run, home run, RBI, and stolen base all in the same game, he coined the phrase “across the board”. He’s gotten the chance, the last three years, to participate in the 411′s fantasy baseball listener leagues where he became the 2007 Gentile Listener League and 2008 and 2009 Paul C. Smith Listener League Champions. His first “three-peat”!
His Fantasy 411 involvement later led him to become involved with MLB Radio Fans and FantasyBaseballMafia.com where he wrote, edited, and podcasted, but his main “claim to fame” was being published by Rick Wilton, now of Fanball.com, and Ron Shandler, of Baseball HQ, back in the mid-90′s.
Visit Bob on Twitter!
Chris Spencer had his first taste of fantasy sports in 1993, when a friend approached him about his fantasy football league. He was hooked immediately. For the next ten years, he was in a fantasy league for just about every sport out there. He even did an XFL fantasy league! More recently, he has stuck with the two sports closest to his heart … football and baseball.
His main claim to fame is losing the Sparky Anderson Memorial League championship – one of the MLB.com Fantasy 411 fans leagues – by half a point in 2007. He heard about the FantasyBaseballMafia.com leagues on the Fantasy 411 podcast and, in 2008, answered Bob Sikon’s call for aspiring writers. He contributed a weekly article called “Rounding the Bases” to the Mafia site.
His philosophy is to put yourself in good position with the draft and then make championship-winning moves in the season. During the season, you have to pay attention to each and every “real” baseball move and deduce how it affects fantasy baseball. More importantly, you need to decide how you can use that information to your advantage.
He hopes to bring more of an “every-man’s” look to FantasyBaseballTradeMarket.com. Much like everyone else, Chris strives for every advantage he can get in his leagues. The big difference is that he’s going to share the secrets that he uncovers with you – his loyal readers!
Visit Chris on Twitter!
A sports enthusiast for as long as he can remember, Richard Schortemeyer III is currently in his ninth season as a fantasy sports fanatic.
In his own words, “I believe I’ve played all sports where a fantasy league is available. Well, maybe except arena football. I think I’ve played all formats – rotisserie, points, head-to-head – and, I’m in four baseball leagues this year.”
Richard joins us having held previous writing posts with FantasySportsJunkies.com and FantasyBaseballMafia.com and is excited to have a chance to contribute to FBTM. Look for his “take” on the fantasy impact of the biggest happenings in Major League Baseball!
Jesse Severe was the guy who ran his first fantasy leagues by acquiring the USA Today Tuesday and Wednesday editions, two days later, and adding up the stats longhand on notebook paper. After skipping, roughly, the career of Raul Mondesi, he successfully came back to the sport in 2003. Following a preseason trade of Phil Nevin for Johan Santana, he was hooked and never looked back.
Jesse’s claim to fame in fantasy leagues is to try to compete ‘wire to wire’. He generally ends up in the top half of his leagues, winning enough of the time to keep him coming back. He is a fan of ‘sabermetrics’, though he claims no particular competence with formulas.
In 2008, Jesse convinced FantasyBaseballMafia.com to publish a few articles on middle relief, in the course of which he may have independently “discovered” the LIMA plan … a mere ten years after Ron Shandler had already explained it to everyone else.
After receiving an invite to play a keeper league, Matt Vandenbrand was hooked on fantasy baseball. Unfortunately, he had to run clear across town in the snow just to make it to the draft on time. Fortunately, he found himself stuck with Albert Pujols as his very first ever draft pick. It has all been downhill from there.
His addiction to winning grew immensely and was only matched by his desire to learn more about the game he loved. After stumbling across the work of Ron Shandler, Jason Grey, Todd Zola, Alex Patton, and the like, his desire to out-smart and out-learn the competition became an obsession.
A big fan of sabermetrics, he uses it to his advantage as often as possible, preferring to play in deeper mixed leagues and AL-Only formats. Typically, he ends up playing in far too many shallow mixed leagues with friends. He generally lives and dies with the draft, making few trades unless it’s absolutely necessary. He doesn’t feel he has any “real” claim to fame as yet, but he’s sure it’s in the making.
Matt “Tavo” Tavormina actually thought he had ‘invented’ fantasy baseball back in the late 80s! By about 10 years-old, he was hooked on Baseball Strat-o-Matic and decided, why play with old statistics? He came up with a crude scoring system, used only hitters, and convinced his father to draft teams against him each week one Summer. The seed was planted!
In 1996, he took part in his first real fantasy league, and, by the next spring, he was running leagues in each sport. Since then, he has won numerous baseball and football leagues of varying formats. Most recently, he won the inaugural FBTM Challenge League (in 2009) and scored a repeat in his local keeper league (2007 and 2008).
Due to his time in the Marine Corps, he has drafted in some pretty unique locales; including the woods in Camp Lejeune, NC, a base in Kosovo, and in a warehouse in Nasiriyah, Iraq! There is nothing more American-feeling than getting your baseball fix from reading the Stars and Stripes newspaper.
He prefers H2H roto leagues over straight roto or H2H points, because of the instant gratification, but he thinks that roto is the optimal way to determine the best team. He prefers auctions to drafts, and, as for strategy, he likes to use a contrarian approach to finding value by letting others draft over-hyped players before they should while he grabs guys that will outperform their ADPs instead.
