EHCC 2018 Performance ⅓

There's an old saying in baseball that it takes a third of season to figure out you really have, a third of a season to fix it and a third of a season to see what happens. We're a third of the way through the 2018 baseball regular season. What do you really have?

The leader in top weekly score so far is San Juan with 100 points in week 7. The leader? for worst weekly score so far is Tokyo with 26 points in week 6.

Tokyo Storm Warning
Note to Tokyo, our league allows us to put our DL’d players in designated DL spots. This allows us to pick up additional players while our regular players are injured. No need to keep all of your DL’d players in your bench spots, use the DL, pick up other players, increase your chances of winning. This is fundamental. Furthermore, if you’re unhappy with the performance of a player on your roster you can exchange him at any time for a free agent player. No  need to ride/die with players that have fallen short of expectations. According to Yahoo TKO has technically made 5 roster moves on the season, which are the 5 autodrafted player adds from the madraft (a draft in which TKO didn’t attend or leave a draft list). Therefore TKO has made 0 roster moves on the year. 7 weeks, 0 roster moves. For reference, TKO is at 5, the next closest is 13 and the rest of the league average is 22.3.

Speaking of missed drafts. What is TKO’s participation rate in drafts since 2013? I can’t say for sure but we all know that it’s very poor at best. I’m sure they’ve made a couple but I can’t really remember any. Missing a draft isn’t a big deal if you’re leaving a draft list with someone. Is that happening? No. I consider this to be inexcusable if it happens once. Never mind regularly.

And how about that awful draft day trade last season? TKO traded the #1 overall midp AND their 2nd rd mapick for 2018 for Hanley Ramirez and Lance Lynn. Let me rephrase that, TKO had their pick between Vlad Jr and Acuna and elected to trade it away for 2 end of the roster players. If that isn’t enough to question an ownership group’s aptitude than I don’t know what you’re looking for. Even worse is that if TKO hadn’t traded that pick they were going to take Jason Groome #1 overall. I’m all for going out and getting the guy that you want, but Groome wasn’t even close to being the best player on the board. In fact, he ended up going #19 overall. And some considered that a stretch. It's a sign that TKO has lost touch with the game.

Of course, none of this is new news to the rest of the owners of the EHCC. I know that the commish has given TKO a couple warning shots over the last year or so regarding their participation. And sure, the players currently on their roster seem to get yahtzee’d around from time to time. Again, no actual roster moves in 2018. Is moving your starters around a few times over 7 weeks enough to claim that the roster is being actively managed? I’m all for giving guys some rope when it comes to life/ehcc balance. We’ve all got other things going on. Sometimes we’re not able to be as involved as we’d like. But we’re going on 5 years of declining participation/engagement. The collective league has been understanding of the difficulties of managing a team from the other side of the world. But we’ve reached the point where almost no effort is being put forth.

I’d like to officially put forth that The Tokyo Omyoujis be considered for contraction. Over the past 5 years the owner’s level of participation has dwindled. If/when they’re reachable they makes lopsided trades that compromise integrity of the league. They routinely miss drafts and the general roster management is unacceptable. Absolutely nothing personal. We’ve just reached a point where the owner isn’t engaged enough to warrant keeping the franchise in Tokyo. Honestly this has gone on much longer than we should’ve allowed. It’s time…

2018 Championship Betting Lines…
With the supreme court taking the reins off of sports betting it’s fitting that the EHCC get in on the action. Here are the betting odds on winning the 2018 EHCC Championship…

   WEY (5-1)
   QC (7-1)
   SJ (10-1)
   SD (12-1)
   BW (20-1)
   LV (30-1)
   DUB (30-1)
   TIJ (50-1)
   TKO (50-1)
   RAK (150-1)
   RIO (200-1)
   SFV (200-1)

LV Pitching
A post from me wouldn’t be complete without a rant about The Las Vegas Doggs’ pitching strategy. Although I think I’ve said everything that could ever be said about it. I’ll I’ve got left is the scoreboard…

SV 6-1-0 0.857
SV, ERA, WHIP 12-9-0 0.571
W, SV, K, ERA, WHIP 12-23-0 0.343

Also, rumor has it that LV is collecting as many mipicks as they can for the upcoming midraft. They’re said to have been exclusively scouting starting pitchers. Could this be the beginning of the end for their zero-SP strategy?

Line Drives
Does anyone else miss the smack board in yahoo? It was kinda dumb but it made the game feel a little more human.

#stillmadaboutstrickland #vivamelancon

What ever happened to that podcast that was recorded during the winter meetings?

After a lengthy rebuild, it’s nice to see Bridgewater as a contender. Hopefully this version of Bridgewater will help the nightmare of the 2012 exdraft go away.

Trading for Osuna might’ve been an incredibly smart or incredibly stupid move depending on if/what he actually did. #osunadidntdoit #freeosuna #shefelldownthestairs #slipandfall #notguiltyyallgottofeelme

Juan Soto getting the call to the majors at 19 years old after starting the year at low-A ball is bananas. Think the Nats know that their window is closing?

Feeling Unlucky?
Below is a summary of the PF and PA for the 2018 1/3 regular season. The PF shows how well you’ve performed on average on the 10-120 scale. Adding a new wrinkle, I’ve broken out Points For by Hitting and Pitching. As in my previous posts, the delta(∆) column is your PA minus 65 (65 being the average). This number gives you an idea of how “lucky” you’ve been in regards to performance against you. You’ll see that the most “lucky” teams so far in 2018 are San Juan, Las Vegas, Bridgewater and Santo Domingo. While the most “unlucky” teams have been Rakeville, Rio and San Fernando Valley.

Just looking at the PF numbers, the league has clearly broken itself into 3 tiers. The ‘championship contender’ tier with WEY, QC, SJ and SD. The ‘it could happen’ tier with LV, BW, TIJ and DUB. And the ‘is it football season yet’ tier with RAK, TKO, TIO and SFV.