LL Longball 08 Review

Alas L.L. Longball… we hardly knew you. Longball is not allowed to play fantasy sports anymore, and the CPL will be a bit less without them. Longball has been responsible for some of the greatest moments of the brief CPL history, 3 of which we will briefly review:

‘Cole Hamels is a sleeper.’ Of course, Mr. Hamels is an elite starting pitcher now, but back in the 07 draft, the e-giggles were all over the draft board as Longball reached about 8 rounds early and took Hamels in the first round. His reasoning, as quoted above, was classic.
Twice in 2008, Longball lost all his pitching category stats due to the minimum innings rule. The wonderful moral to this story is ‘know your league rules’ because there was a rumored conversation at the end of the season that quoted Longball as saying, “There is a minimum innings rule?”
In the same conversation mentioned in #2, after Longball was informed he could track his IP on the stat tracker, the following question was asked: “There is a stat-tracker?”

Priceless. We are going to miss Longball. Hopefully his replacement plays fantasy baseball with the same flair.

- Best Move: Grabbing an injured Shane Victorino off waivers paid dividends down the road. Of course, SV is a Philly, so this was fairly automatic.

- Worst Move: Keeping Bret Myers was pretty bad at the time, and proved to be pretty bad by the end of the year, but looking at Longball’s 07 roster, there really weren’t a whole lot of other options. We’ll call cutting Carlos Quentin for Aaron Hill the day after the draft the worst move.

- Biggest Surprise: I guess this will go to Dan Uggla, who had a great first half, and the self-destructed in the All-Star game.

- Biggest Disappointment: The fall of Verlander from top 10 pitcher to really bad pitcher traded for George Sherrill has to be the biggest disappointment.

- Blog Would Have…: Tried to trade one of the 3 kept pitchers for offense all day every day once the draft was done.

- Longball’s new owner should keep: Howard and Miggy are no-brainers. I guess Hamels goes #3, and then I guess there’s Derrick Lee and, well, Uggla? Eeck.

- Final Draft Grade: C- Tough to grade based on drafted players remaining on the roster, because Brad Penny (1051) and Pudge (793) should not have been on this roster past June. Tom Gordon, set up man extraordinaire, was taken in the 15th round? Kenny Lofton still hasn’t played in 2008. Lee, Oswalt, Young, Uggla, Anderson and Quentin were all solid picks.

- Final Season Grade: C+ Somehow, this roster came in 4th. That just shows how important Ryan Howard and Miggy were to this team.

- 2009 Outlook: Two solid keepers, both at CI positions, but after that, there are a lot of questions. Good luck Matthew.