Third place isn't THAT bad...

I’m glad to hear that Eric swapped out all those “serve and protect” mottos with the “We’re Rhode Island!” motto. It’s about time Rhode Island was recognized for something other than being the smallest state in the union. Coincidentally, I ran around the city last night replacing all the Krispy Kreme “Hot Now!” signs with “We’re Donuts!” – because I don’t think the name “Krispy Kreme” accurately conveys the product of the establishment. Their donuts are neither krispy nor kremey – and don’t even get me started on the blatant misspellings…

Since there was some talk about Kinky Friedman yesterday, I thought I’d post a link to an article about him. He’s a rather unique individual, and I like his idea that “politics is the only field in which the more experience you have, the worse you get.” I just might have to vote for this guy…

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/19/60minutes/
main1221449.shtml

So anyway… it’s been a while since I updated everyone on my fantasy baseball status. I’ve been hovering around fourth place for a while – occasionally spending some time at fifth or climbing back to third. My offense has been great, but my pitching has been having a hard time with consistency. I can’t believe I took Carpenter as my FIRST pick – my best pitchers have actually been Contreras and, more recently, Sabathia (who was on the DL for the first part of the year – but fortunately for me, he came back with a vengeance. I believe one of the guys in the league called him a “man-god” after one of his high-point games…). So I’ve been relying on Contreras and the man-god Sabathia to accrue my points. Carpenter hasn’t been horrible – he’s been averaging about 17 points a game – but he’s nowhere near as good as all those fantasy baseball magazines seemed to think he’d be.

Rick, of all people, is in first place right now. (And I don’t know why I said “of all people”… I guess because he was in LAST place for much of the first part of the season.) However, he’s also WAY over the games pitched average (he’s pitched 105 games… I’ve only pitched 78…). So at SOME point, he’s gonna run out of games to pitch, and he’ll have to rely on his subpar offense – and that is when I, no doubt, will carefully and deliberately climb back into first place. I mean, I’m just guessing, but I’m pretty sure that’s the way it’ll happen. :)

Our friend Nick wrote up a summary of the season so far – here are a couple excerpts:

Amazingly, Rick finds himself in first place at the halfway mark with the best pitching average in the league...and as we've all heard, ad nauseam to these ears, pitching wins championships. Rick is doing well with his starting pitching and his offense has picked up nicely here lately. I believe Rick is somewhat of a favorite in this thing especially if he can pull off a trade in a month or so for a stud reliever or position player. The rest of the league can't help but hope that Rick's ride is a fluke, but I think he just might be legit this year... Can he hold this up for three more months and will his lack of RP appearances catch up with him? This all remains to be seen.

Lisa is holding her own quite well this year. Sitting in the top half of the league and making a play for a possible money spot is noteworthy for a girl and all - Very nice for her rookie campaign. However, her once promising closers have blown far too many saves this year and the piling up of negative performances is causing her pitching average to atrophy to the weaker levels in the league. This must improve if she wants to blog-brag about beating the 'boys' to the money spots.

And I most certainly DO want to blog-brag about beating the boys, so I’ll have to see what I can do about that. Although I have to disagree about my closers – I really don’t think they’ve been THAT bad. In fact, there’ve been times when I felt like my closers were all that was holding up my pitching average. My PITCHING in general has been lacking, but hopefully that’ll change in the second half of the season.

So tonight, I’m going to see Superman Returns with some of these guys, and I’ll probably get to hear about how horrible my team is, or, at the very least, how horrible the Yankees are. The Yankee Haters are fervent in Texas. The Yankees could have some sort of freak, bizarre, undefeated season, and they’d STILL be the suckiest team in baseball. (Is “suckiest” a word? Faisal? You’re my made-up word go-to guy – whaddya think? :))