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Gur-who?

Go forward to more recent blurbs.

8/31 - When I read about Joe Borchard's 504-foot HR in U.S Cellular Field, I was struck not only by the length of the hit, but by the length of the stadium's tenure. According to the article, this was the longest home run in the 14 year history of U.S. Cellular Field. That field has already been around for 14 years? Time flies!

The RIFC draft concluded late yesterday. I've invited all managers to post any general thoughts on the draft, and non-managers are also invited to post comments or questions. A separate draft recap thread has been set up for this purpose. Also, posted rationales of each pick are nearing completion.

With the NFL season only 9 days away, the GuruPatron division in TSN Ultimate Salary Cap Football has only 7 teams registered so far, including mine and my wife's. All GuruPatrons are invited, and can find the password at the bottom of the GuruPatron validation page. If you are an interested GuruPatron (or want to become one) and you can't access that info for some reason, send me an email.

8/30 - After being subjected to a dial-up internet connection for the past two weeks, I don't know how those of you who have nothing faster can stand it. I've always tried to keep this site relatively bandwidth friendly by using simple page layouts without a lot of embedded images. But there are some sites out there that clearly don't have that philosophy - with TSN and MLB.com being notable examples. It's brutal to have to navigate those sites without a broadband connection.

Although I've been "vacationing" the past two weeks, I think I spent an average of 4 or more hours online each day. Some vacation. One of the primary culprits was draft activity for the RotoGuru Invitational Football Challenge (RIFC). We officially started the draft 2 weeks ago, and it will most likely finish today. If you're interested, I hope you've been following it at the Football Forum, where there are a number of RIFC draft threads (there is also a league icon along the left side of this page which links to the draft in progress.) One highlight of the draft is the posting of rationales for each pick (at the forum). If you are preparing for a draft of your own, you may find those rationales to be of interest.

Now that I'm back in broadband-land, I'll be working on getting Football Pickoff launched for 2004. If you have any thoughts about potential modifications for this year's game, please weigh in quickly here. I hope to have the game ready by the end of this week.

8/13 - Friday the 13th!

Yesterday, the stars were aligned for a lot of popular pitchers to start, including Schmidt, Santana, Sheets, Pedro, Jaret Wright, El Duque, and so on. Usually, when that happens, it seems like the results are disappointing. But the pitchers had it going yesterday, and if your TSN team produced less than 500 TSNP yesterday, you probably lost ground. Pedro and Schmidt combined for 18 scoreless innings and 334 TSNP by themselves. And if you didn't have a full stable of pitchers working, you were hard pressed to make up much ground with your hitters. The list of top hitters is not exactly a "Who's Who" of popular hitters.

Tomorrow, I climb in the GuruMobile and aim it toward Ohio, where I'll be vacationing for the next two weeks. In all likelihood, I'll skip the blurb updates during that time. Of course, all of the stats will continue to be updated as usual, assuming that my laptop behaves.

By the way, I plan to go to the Indians/Yankees game at the Jake on Monday, August 23. If any other Gurupies plan to be at that game, drop me an email and maybe we can meet.

8/12 - The PGA Championship has begun, and almost 200 GuruGolf teams have 4 active golfers this week. There is no strong consensus on golfer picks, with the mostly widely held golfer, DiMarco and Cink, on only 30% of all rosters. The course, Whistling Straits, is expected to be tough on scoring, but so far the players seem to have the upper hand, with 2 guys already at -5 on the front 9. I suspect the wind is benign this morning.

Who is that masked man in the Dodgers rotation? Jeff Weaver racked up his third straight 3-digit TSNP game last night, this one good for 141 TSNP in Cincy. He was almost matched by Jeff Suppan of the Cardinals who got 140 TSNP against the Marlins. Suppan game came out of the blue, as he hadn't totaled 100 TSNP cumulatively in the past month. And the third gem was tossed by the Cubs' Jeff Zambrano, 130 TSNP vs. the Padres. Maybe if he really was named Jeff he could have gotten an extra 10 TSNP.

Suppan's gem may have seemingly come out of nowhere, but on the hitting side there was an equally "where'd that come from?" performance from Randy Wolf, who went yard twice in Philly, going 3-3 with 3 runs scored and 3 RBIs. He did surrender 4 runs, so he wasn't quite able to handle all of the offensive needs on his own. But his teammates went overboard, scoring 12 more (in addition to Wolf's three), for a 15-4 rout. The Rockies must have felt like they were back in Coors Field.

8/11 - Almost 1000 TSN Ultimate managers picked up Randy Johnson yesterday. Less than 100 picked up Livan Hernandez. Sometimes, collective wisdom is wrong. Johnson didn't pitch badly, but got off to a rocky start, and Livan never looked back. And at the end of the game, the difference was about 100 TSNP.

Of course, you could have done even better by picking up Gil Meche against Minnesota.

Nahhh, I didn't think so.

As promised (well, as anticipated, at least), the football sortable stats are now set up with 2004 draft prices for TSN, Swirve, and PSC. Individual player pages are up, the Assimilator is running, and you should be all set for your preseason roster analysis. TSN has not yet priced rookies, so I'll have to add those prices when they're released. I think everything is running OK, but let me know if something looks wrong. Team affiliations are based on NFL.com listings as of Monday (adjusted for Tim Brown). Hopefully, NFL.com was up to date.

8/10 - Curt Schilling's Fenway matchup vs. Tampa Bay looked pretty good on paper, given his success at home and his record against the D-Rays, including last week's complete game effort. But, as they say, that's why they play the games on the field. Curt just hasn't played like we expect from Schilling, and three D-Rays hit it too farthing.

There are no more off days for the rest of the week, so schedule is unlikely to determine your player choices for the next few days. The interesting pitching matchup today is Randy Johnson against Livan Hernandez. Livan has been pitching pretty well lately, and August has traditionally been a good month for him. Randy, of course, is still Randy, and is always capable of a monster outing. But neither plays for a team that scores a lot. On paper, it looks like a low scoring pitchers duel. And, as yesterday's Schilling owners will tell you, that paper might as well be hanging on a roll in your bathroom.

PSC launched its football games last night. I'm still in the process of getting the sortable stats configured with TSN and Swirve players and prices, so I'll now be able to include PSC players in the process. Hopefully, I'll have it done by tomorrow.

8/9 - If you've been to the message forum since Friday evening, you probably noticed a few format changes. The major one is that the general index page now lists the title of the thread with the most recent post, as well as the name of the person who posted. The last poster's name also now appears on the index page for each of the forum areas. So, you can get a bit more information about the source of the most recent activity without necessarily having to peek inside. Thanks to Gurupie KnicksFan for suggesting these changes. They were fairly easy to implement, and the extra information can certainly be useful.

My primary task this week will be to get the sortable stats updated with 2004 player information for the TSN and Swirve games. Believe it or not, the NFL regular season starts exactly one month from today.

8/6 - According to the Elias Sports Bureau (which evidently doesn't have much pressing work to do), last night's Zambrano-Santos pitching matchup was the first time two Victors have faced each other in a MLB game since 1931. Of course, only one was the victor.

This morning, I added a quick feature to the scoring recap page in GuruGolf. If you are managing more than one team, there is now a dropdown menu that allows you to quickly maneuver among them without having to go through the "My Account" page or fiddle with the URL. One caveat, however. If you are looking at someone else's team, the menu will list that manager's other teams, not yours. Thanks to Gurupie Barrington for suggesting this simple and effective navigation aid.

8/5 - Anyone have Brian Anderson last night? How about Mike Bacsik? Or Jose Lima?

Of the three, Lima is the only one with any meaningful ownership in the TSN game, on about 3.3% of Ultimate teams. But those were the only three pitchers to top 100 TSNP, and Lima's 101 TSNP just barely made it. Anderson had the masterpiece, a rather unlikely 2-hit complete game shutout over the White Sox, totaling 173 TSNP.

Today's baseball action features a lot of afternoon games, so make your roster moves early. Of the 14 games on today's slate, 9 are in the daylight.

8/4 - I was surprised to see Melvin Mora's TSN price drop so much on Monday ($80K), in spite of it being an off day for Baltimore. Admittedly, Mora hadn't been particularly hot for the past week (although he did have 20 TSNP on Sunday), but he did have a doubleheader on Tuesday, and with almost everybody off on Monday, his schedule suggested that he should be held until at least today. But for some reason, 440 TSN Ultimate managers dumped him on Monday, followed by another 250 on doubleheader day. And they all paid the price when Mora garnered 66 TSNP. Twelve days ago he put up 78 TSNP in another twin bill. Too bad Baltimore doesn't play two more often.

I made another addition to the GuruGolf team recap page. On the bottom section which lists the results for each tournament, I've added a column for cumulative ranking. This shows your overall ranking as of the end of each tournament, so that you can see what your weekly progress has been (or what the progress of other teams has been).

Thanks to Gurupie HooeyPooey for suggesting this enhancement. Now I don't need to remember what my prior rankings were. And neither do you! And I'm particularly thankful to have GuruGolf to divert my attention from the results of my miserable pitching selections in TSN Baseball.

8/3 - I spent the weekend in Peoria, so I was in Cubs territory when the Nomar Garciaparra trade broke. For the next two days, I listened to a steady stream ofNomar Garci-euphoria from both broadcasters and fans. Hopefully, Nomar was be rejuvenated as well, because expectations are high. On the other hand, Nomah was never able to overcome the Boston curse, so I don't know why the Cubs should expect any different.

In any event, I'm back at RotoGuru World Headquarters again, and we're back to a full slate of MLB games - in fact, an overfull slate of 16 games, as Baltimore and Seattle play two. Two months to go - unless you're really only counting down to football season, in which case the NFL regular season opens just 5 weeks from Thursday.

This week's golf tournament is The International, which features a unique scoring system (modified Stableford) intended to encourage aggressive play. GuruGolf scoring will continue to use standard scoring, although I don't think any golfer has to worry about anything worse than a double bogey this week. There is also an extra cut prior to the last round, so only 36 golfers (plus ties) will survive to play on Sunday.

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