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Go forward to more recent blurbs.

7/25 - The MLB trade deadline isn’t until next Tuesday, but we’re already seeing a good deal of player movement. For fantasy purposes, this has implications not only for the players who are traded, but also on the remaining roster players for the teams involved. Regular players can suddenly be relegated to a bench role, and vice versa. Make sure you are thinking about the big picture. When Hanley Ramirez shows up on the Dodgers, who will lose playing time? And who will fill the void in Miami?

The RBC Canadian Open tees off tomorrow morning. For those looking ahead, be aware that next week’s GuruGolf event is the Reno-Tahoe Open, which is actually the secondary tournament for the PGA; the top players will be playing at the WGC event in Akron, which has a limited number of entrants and no second-round cut. GuruGolf prefers to use tournaments that offer a cut.

I’ll be away for the next week on a family vacation, so blurbs will once again go on hiatus. See you in August.

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7/23 - Much of this morning’s sports news centers around the NCAA penalties for Penn State. Rather than tie up blurb space with only one (my) opinion, there is a relevant discussion thread at the Football forum (starting with post 63). Feel free to weigh in.

On to GuruGolf results:
British Open prize winners:
West Texas Lowballers (best ball, -43)
caddies & Waterboy (worst ball, tied at +58)

Here’s a curious observation on golfer performance. As you may know, GuruGolfer price changes are based on a formula which includes an evaluation of how each player did, hole-by-hole, relative to the rest of the field. Getting a birdie on an easy hole is not valued nearly as highly as getting a birdie on a difficult hole. This is done for each hole and round independently, so there are 72 different scoring holes to evaluate. Without going into more detail on the scoring method, I was surprised to discover which two golfers were ranked the highest this weekend: Rickie Fowler and Miguel Angel Jimenez. (Els and Scott ranked #3 and #4.) Fowler’s ranking was particularly helped by 4th round birdies on hole #1 (one of only 3 total birdies on that hole) and #17 (1/4). Jimenez had several similarly scarce birdies. Neither player got much TV exposure, as they were never in contention. And neither was widely owned (Fowler was on only 6 GuruGolf foursomes, and Jimenez on 5). You can see the full details of each player’s British Open scorecard here: http://rotoguru1.com/cgi-bin/gallcards.pl?tourney=37). If you were surprised to see a high priced golfer like Fowler finish at +3 (tied for 31st) and still earn a +$80 price gain, that’s why.

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7/20 - Brant Snedeker took advantage of an early tee time today to claim the second round lead of the British Open at -10, tied with Nick Faldo for the lowest 36-hole score in Open history. Adam Scott could still conceivably catch him, as he stands at -8 with six holes to play.

The GuruGolf bargain of the week looks like Steven Alker at this point. Priced at the minimum of $500, he stands at -2 after two rounds with 8 birdies. Mark Calcavecchia ($620) is a close second, at -1 with 7 birdies. Tom Watson ($650) is hanging in there at even par through 7 holes (3 birdies), which makes him the highest ranked Watson at this point (Bubba is at +1 through 9 holes).

Turning to baseball, if you are playing in contests today, watch the weather. Games in New York, Philly, and Washington all look like possible washouts, with rain probabilities of at least 70%. Of course, that could change.

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7/19 - The British Open is underway. The course is uncharacteristically green, the weather is uncharacteristically benign, and the scores are uncharacteristically low. (And after typing it three times, I just realized that the word uncharacteristically is uncharacteristically long.)

Steve Stricker is the carryover favorite in GuruGolf, on roughly 25% of active foursomes. Curiously, Adam Scott is not on any GuruGolf foursomes. Coincidentally, his current GuruGolf price is exactly the same as Tiger Woods’ price ($1510). How cool would it be if Scott and Woods were paired for either of the weekend rounds? And how impossible would it be for Stevie Williams to stay out of the limelight if that pairing should occur?

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7/18 - Are you ready for the British Open? The first tee time is shortly after 1am ET, so get your GuruGolf foursome set before you go to bed. Remember that as a major tournament, the top team in each of best and worst ball scoring receive a prize. So even if you’re only a casual or occasional GuruGolfer, this is one tournament to enter. And if you are value-challenged, going for the worst-ball title is always fun for a major tournament. And no so easy, either

Baseball offers a full slate again, with six of those games scheduled in the afternoon. That always makes line-up setting tricky. There are also a lot of weather situations to monitor today. As of this morning, six games show rain probabilities of 40% or higher. Be alert!

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7/17 - Back to normal. Usually, when there’s a disturbance in the server network force, the interruption only lasts for several hours at most. But this latest episode took more than 48 hours before all functionality was fully restored. I’m so glad this didn’t happen until after I returned from my vacation.

Thanks to all for your patience during the “disturbance.”

We have a full slate of MLB games tonight. The weather looks iffy in several locales, with the SF@Atlanta game looking the “iffiest.” My guess is that all games will be played, but some may experience delays. Remember to check the weather dashboard for updates during the day if potential postponements or weather conditions are a concern to you.

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7/16 - Not a very gentle re-entry into life as a RotoGuru. As I was flying back from the west coast on Saturday, the server network which hosts the rotoguru domains was hit by a large-scale denial of service attack (not targeting rotoguru, but with similar impact), severely limiting site accessibility. The attack lasted throughout most of Sunday as well. I am told that the attack has been eliminated now, but some (critical) site functionality has yet to be fully restored. In particular, any data that needs to be accessed and updated from external sources (e.g., weather data, daily stats) is still extremely limited. Thus, some features at both RotoGuru and DailyBaseballData.com are still either empty, limited, or out of date. I hope that this will all be resolved by the end of Monday, but I have not yet received any definitive timetable for restoration. Welcome back.

Here is the current status of data as of this morning:
Baseball stats (sortables, etc): Updated through Saturday night’s games.
Fireleague: Salaries still reflect Saturday morning resets.
Daily contest salaries: I believe these are all current for Monday contests.
DailyBaseballData.com: Kind of a mess.

Somehow, in the midst of the madness, I was able to complete the tournament processing for GuruGolf. Since this was the final tournament prior to the next major, here are the results of the “Open Faced Sandwich” Contest:

"Open Faced Sandwich contest" prize winners:
Best ball: brassies (tiebreaker)
Worst ball: Sand traps (tiebreaker)
Note that in both cases, the tiebreaker was needed to break a tie. The winner is the team with the greatest team value increase during the contest period.

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7/5 - On Tuesday, I took a look at the leading fantasy hitters for the first half of the season. Today, I’ll review starting pitchers.

In all covered formats, the top two pitchers have been Verlander and R.A. Dickey. Matt Cain then consistently ranks as #3. Verlander is no surprise. Dickey, however, was the 73rd SP drafted in the RIBC leagues, and was undrafted in the RIBC itself. If you took him as a late pick (or even as a free agent pickup), that was quite a coup. Even Cain was a bargain, as he was the 15th SP drafted this spring, behind Lincecum, Lester, and Haren, to name a few. Other top-ten pitchers who were significant draft day bargains include Chris Sale (59th SP drafted) and Gio Gonzalez (37th).

On the flip side, excluding pitchers who have been injured, here’s a short list of “oops” picks: Cliff Lee (drafted 4th), Tim Lincecum (5th), and Dan Haren (11th).

In GuruGolf, Jim Furyk is the popular favorite for this week’s tournament, on slightly more than 25% of active foursomes.

With the All Star break pending and some summer travel on the immediate horizon for me, I’ll be suspending blurbs for the next week. Enjoy the break.

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7/3 - There was a time earlier this season when Josh Hamilton was the dominant hitter in virtually any fantasy scoring format. But for the past 30 days, in some formats he’s not even ranked within the top 100 hitters. That still puts him in the top five in most formats (and at #1 in some), although the competition is very tight, with guys like Carlos Gonzalez, Jose Bautista, Joey Votto, Ryan Braun, and Andrew McCutchen all crowding the top of the sortable stats. No surprises there. Kemp and Tulowitzki are notably absent, but those are injury-related. Miguel Cabrera, who was generally the consensus #1 draft pick in the spring, ranks as high as #5 in some systems, but closer to #10 in others. And Albert Pujols, in spite of tremendous improvement lately, still only barely cracks the top 10 just for the month of June. I suspect he dug himself too deep in a hole to ever get his YTD stats into elite territory.

So who are the biggest overachievers to date? Just doing a cursory scan through the sortable stats, I’d say it’s either David Ortiz or Edwin Encarnacion. Ortiz was (on average) a 6th round pick in the RIBC drafts; Encarnacion went no earlier than late in the 9th. Yet both are generally ranked in the top 10 so far. Melky Cabrera is another possibility, generally drafted in round 13. And perhaps showing the greatest disparity with draft results is Mike Trout, who was a 23rd round pick on average, yet has now cracked the top 25 YTD in several scoring formats, and is generally second only to Bautista over the month of June.

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7/2 - The All-Star break is just a week away. When I was a kid, I remember the All Star game having a special significance. Now, it simply marks the midpoint of the season – and a 3-day hiatus from stats production.

Kudos to brassies, who took best ball honors in GuruGolf this weekend with a -43. He didn’t have Tiger in his foursome, but he did have Adam Scott. Can you imagine how cool it would have been if Tiger and Adam Scott had met in a playoff yesterday? The “Stevie Williams Smackdown.” But it was not to be. Meanwhile, Initial Investors took the worst ball honors with a +66, 7-strokes better than the runner-up.

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2012: June . . . May . . . April . . . March . . . February . . . January