Now that opening weekend is in the books, here are a few thoughts from the Dodgers D’Backs two game series down under.

The Australians knocked it out of the park as hosts. The Sydney Cricket Grounds is an incredible venue, filled with majesty and splendor. And that’s me seeing it through the television. I can only imagine the gravity I would feel being there. The fans were top notch, cheering pretty much everything that both teams did. 

Vin Scully, at 85-years-old, still has it. Yeah, he stumbles a bit more often these days, but what of it? Two moments stand out. The first was when he told the story behind a statue that was erected in center field to honor a notorious heckler from a century ago who tormented the cricket players. Hearing Vinny laugh when recounting some of the heckler’s famous taunts, including “I wish I was a pigeon and you were a statue,” was hilarious. The second was when he was giving a play by play of using the smart phone his daughter had set up for him to compare the times of day in Sydney and Los Angeles, and it not quite going according to plan. I can’t imagine a Dodgers season without him. 

The loss of Patrick Corbin is crippling to the D’Backs. At the risk of stating the obvious, most teams would be suffering pretty significantly if their ace was hurt. But Corbin is the real deal, and Arizona just doesn’t have the resources in reserve that the Dodgers do. It shows, as deputy opening day starter Wade Miley was okay, but you need better than ok to beat Clayton Kershaw. If something, God forbid, would happen to Kershaw, there are at least a few capable arms in reserve that could step in.

Hyun Jin Ryu is very impressive. The Dodgers had their own deputy in Ryu, who was taking the place of Zack Greinke, he of the calf strain and general unwillingness to traverse continents. Ryu was not spectacular; several balls were hit pretty hard and he left a couple of pitches over the plate. But when the going got tough, he was at his best. Appallingly bad defense gave the D’Backs six outs in the fourth inning, but that’s when he stepped up to bail out his infielders with his best pitching of the game. Healthy, he’s a virtual lock to at least repeat his 14 wins from last year.  

Yasiel Puig is going to give me, and probably Don Mattingly, ulcers before the season is done. You love him for his talent. You love him for his hustle. You love him for his enthusiasm. His apparent willingness to start hitting the cut-off man gives you hope. His boneheaded baserunning decisions were apparently not cured by a Winter off, however. And if the perception that he is pretending to feel pain or injury after swinging and missing is true, that’s unacceptable.

I would not want to be on Kirk Gibson’s bad side. Long removed from a playing career where he was known for his intensity, it hasn’t faded. Watching Trevor Cahill walk one batter after the other, you could see him seething just below the surface. I wonder why the camera man kept panning over to Gibby after each base on balls. All it made me do was fear for Cahill’s safety. Anyone know if he was allowed back on the team plane? In any case, I admire it. Gibby is a great manager.

Mattingly is not. Donnie Baseball still has a chance to learn the craft, but he needs to understand that he is under a microscope, contract extension or not. He’s great at some things. The players like him, and you have to give him credit for being willing to engage an umpire when he feels like his team is getting the shaft. But the game planning and decision making have to get better. Lefty righty matchup or not, batting Justin Turner second and Andre Ethier seventh in game 1 is indefensible. Sitting Scott Van Slyke in favor of Mike Baxter after Van Slyke was responsible in one way or another for every run the Dodgers scored is head scratchingly bad. Hey, if you wanted to get some guys playing time for making the trip, say that! But if all wins, whether they’re games 1 and 2 or 101 and 102 count the same, there’s no reason bring along Chone Figgins when he and Dee Gordon are essentially the same player, but Gordon is just better at everything. Including now, center field. Mattingly is fortunate to be steering the ship of a very strong team whose performance can often mask his poor choices. He’s likable, so I hope he gets it one day, but that day ain’t here yet. 

Miguel Montero is not right. Last season a back injury cost him his effectiveness, both defensively and offensively. While his swing looks ok, his defense does not. Montero has long been known for being a good defender, and while he still can block the ball in the dirt, his throwing is bad. Really bad. He’s another guy the D’Backs can ill afford to lose. For their sake, I hope Miggy gets it back. 

Paul Goldschmidt is all that and a bag of chips. He’s Miguel Cabrera good. 

Adrian Gonzalez leads the Dodgers in stolen bases. Yup.

Well, that’s about it. Anyone else glad baseball is back? It was kind of a tease though, wasn’t it? Now we have to go through another week of fake games before the real ones start up again. I hope I remember to eat. 

As my fourth and final fantasy baseball draft (not counting five mocks) of the season approaches, I’ve noticed a few things. First and foremost, I pretty much rule at fantasy football. I have turned a profit every year for the last ten, a minimum of 80% of my teams make the playoffs, and if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me, “How the @#$% did you end up getting all of THOSE guys,” I’d…I should have thought of a way to end that sentence before writing this article. Let’s just sum it up by saying once again that I rule.

Of course I do. Fantasy football is easy. You’re trying assemble a team of yards and touchdowns. If you really wanna get all crazy, you throw in receptions for PPR leagues. Essentially your draft strategy can be oversimplified to, “Take the best available player for the first five rounds before making only slight modifications for positional need and then swing for the fences late.” If you end up with a team loaded with good players, you don’t have to stress over which flex option to play, the awesomeness of your every week starters should assure you a winning record and a playoff spot, where essentially anything can happen.

But this isn’t fantasy football. It’s fantasy baseball, where you have more positions to fill, more statistics to worry about, more players to know, more lineups to set, and more stress in general. Stress! About a fantasy sport!!! Imagine that. It’s no wonder why I, your average man of dashing good lucks (according to my wife) and average intelligence (a generous analysis, according to my “I didn’t marry you for your brain, honey” wife have performed poorly in fantasy baseball compared to fantasy football. So this year, I’ve decided to prove to myself that I can do it. It’s why I’m playing in four leagues, instead of my customary one or two, and why I took the time to partake in multiple mocks. It’s time to become more than a one trick fantasy pony, and show that I’m not just another pretty face in the room.

Here’s a brief overview of my leagues. The two I’ve been playing in consistently the last few years, performing at a consistently mediocre rate, are a 15 keeper and 5 keeper league. Nothing fancy, just assemble the best team you can and keep the best players for the next year. To mix it up a little bit, I jumped into a start from scratch league, and I also took over a 10 keeper team in a points league. This one will probably be the true barometer of whether I’m making any progress or not. I haven’t decided yet whether the team’s previous manager is a mad genius or an incompetent suckbag of fail (that’s a real thing, Wikipedia it… on second thought, don’t. I don’t have time to create a Wikipedia page for it). It’s a points league so starting pitching is hugely valuable. My predecessor managed to land Jose Fernandez, so that’s good. He also seemed to have a good eye for young talent as Wil Meyers and Manny Machado were also on the roster. And then there’s Matt Cain, and Victor Martinez…and if we grimace slightly Panda Sandoval (third base is appallingly barren, it appears)…and where the heck are my other four keepers going to come from? That’s where the good ends the awful begins. Well, in a league where pitching is massively valuable, people will pay massive prices, so I managed to flip Fernandez for Matt Moore, Yasiel Puig and George Springer. Also flipped a draft pick for Domonic Brown. Gritted my teeth and kept Nelson Cruz, for lack of anyone better. And immediately drafted Doug Fister (I think he finishes top 5 in the NL Cy Young voting this year) and Francisco Liriano with high picks to solidify my rotation. Now, to see if I’m genius or a fool.

Since I titled this article “Things I’ve Noticed,” I should probably get to that. First and foremost, I like reading fantasy advice columns as much or more than anyone. I don’t always take the advice but I almost always find the columns to be insightful and entertaining, whether I agree with them or not. Fantasy writers come in good and bad, and they don’t make them much better than Matthew Berry, but even his fantasy baseball advice is bet hedged – in that “well, if this guy is here, I’d take him, but this other guy, you can get similar stats from player c three rounds later.” That’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation, and I think I get it now.

1) As different as the stats and stuff are for fantasy baseball and fantasy football, so are the team managers. What position a guy is gonna go for, and therefore who may be available to you three or four picks down the road is way more difficult to predict. In football, if you’re picking in four spots, and the three guys ahead of you already have a qb, Matt Ryan will still be there when you select. Can’t say that for baseball.
2) Mock drafts are pretty useless after the first few rounds. The few that I did, people seemed to check out by round 5 and let auto pick handle the rest.
3) Everyone likes Ryan Braun, and nobody likes Melky Cabrera. Remember when Cabrera was doing his best Clue Heywood impersonation, minus the whole leading the league in nose hair thing, and then tested positive for PEDs? And remember how he is essentially now a pedestrian player? Well, Ryan Braun was a superstar, then it came to light that he was slamming massive amounts of PEDs (and trying to ruin honest people’s lives), but people are still drafting him like a superstar. Maybe he still is one, without all the artificial enhancement, but maybe he’s Cabrera. I won’t spend a second round pick on him, and that’s not even principle talking…ok, maybe a little.
4) People love Billy Hamilton but hate Dee Gordon. I’m ambivalent towards both, but stolen bases are a category so… you can make similar comparisons using Jonathan Villar and Rajai Davis. One guy is getting snapped up, the other is waiver wire fodder. I don’t understand it. Maybe I should, but I don’t.
5) People sure do use ground ball percentage as a heavily relied upon stat when measuring whether a pitcher’s stats from the previous season were artificially good or bad due to luck. There may be some merit to it, but there are pitchers whose game plans are to pitch toward weak fly ball contact. Some are good, (see Greinke, Zack) others terrible (see Bauer, Trevor). Just because Greinke gave up more fly balls than your average top notch pitcher doesn’t mean it wasn’t by design.
6) Holy hotcakes, Batman, people sure are in a hurry to snag Masahiro Tanaka and Jose Abreu. I get it in dynasty leagues, but really?
7) I buy into the theory that you can get saves late…but there’s a difference between a Kevin Gregg save and a Greg Holland save. There’s a difference between a Fernando Rodney save and a (dammit, why isn’t there a closer with the first name, Rodney!?) Jason Grilli save. There’s a difference between who is closing for the Cubs and who is closing for…a team that isn’t awful.
8) I hate that holds are a statistic in general, but the fact that they are a stat in fantasy baseball is truly infuriating. They take the art out of finding the aforementioned save late on. It means that you can’t smugly sit there knowing that by week 7 of the regular season, you’re going to look like a genius for snagging Cody Allen off the waiver wire because John Axford is a ticking time bomb as Cleveland’s closer. Someone will have grabbed him in the 18th round or so because holds are a @#$%ing category now. Why am I playing fantasy baseball again?
9) Conversely, I like how many leagues now deduct points from hitters who strike out. Makes you really think about where you should take Pedro Alvarez. Funnily enough, on a related note, I took Mark Reynolds with the last pick in one of my drafts. It’s 16 teams so it’s deep, and pickings were slim. The clock was at 7 seconds, the autopick was someone who was hurt, I think. In any event, I panicked and took Reynolds. That was over a week ago and I haven’t dropped him yet, mainly because I haven’t gotten to it yet. I was looking at my roster yesterday and noticed he had that little new news item asterisk by his name on my roster, and I absent-mindedly clicked on it to see what it was. Turned out he doubled and knocked in a few runs, but the point is, I actually looked at a fantasy news item for Mark Reynolds, something no successful fantasy player of the last decade has ever done. This isn’t looking good for me.
10) You shouldn’t select your keepers in a keeper league too far ahead of the deadline. You don’t want to wait for the last second either, because what if something happens that keeps you away from being able to do it? But there is no reason to pick your keepers a month ahead of time. I did that in the league Shaun and I are drafting in this Sunday, my last of the season, and I’m livid with myself for who I kept. I won’t get into who I should have kept over whom I did, I’ll give you a hint. The names Justin Verlander, Matt Kemp, and Craig Kimbrel are part of the conversation.

I noticed like three other things when I was writing this column, but I’m too lazy to change the title so we’re stopping here. Look for podcasts coming soon from your favorite sports blog that most people have never heard of.

While the vast majority of my prospect writing can be found at Grading on the Curve, I decided I should publish my own personal top 100, and figured The Stain is a good spot to do that.  So, here it is, my top 100 prospects in all of baseball.

1) Byron Buxton – OF – Minnesota Twins

2) Xander Bogaerts – SS – Boston Red Sox

3) Miguel Sano – 3B – Minnesota Twins

4) Taijuan Walker – RHP – Seattle Mariners

5) Oscar Tavares – OF – St. Louis Cardinals

6) Javier Baez – SS – Chicago Cubs

7) Francisco Lindor – SS – Cleveland Indians

8) Archie Bradley – RHP – Arizona Diamondbacks

9) Kris Bryant – 3B – Chicago Cubs

10) Austin Hedges – C – San Diego Padres

 

11) Gregory Polanco – OF – Pittsburgh Pirates

12) Addison Russell – SS – Oakland A’s

13) Jonathan Gray – RHP – Colorado Rockies

14) Carlos Correa – SS – Houston Astros

15) Mark Appel – RHP – Houston Astros

16) Robert Stephenson – RHP – Cincinnati Reds

17) Albert Almora – OF – Chicago Cubs

18) Noah Syndergaard – RHP – New York Mets

19) Lucas Giolito – RHP – Washington Nationals

20) Jameson Taillon – RHP – Pittsburgh Pirates

21) Dylan Bundy – RHP – Baltimore Orioles
22) Yordano Ventura – RHP – Kansas City Royals
23) Eddie Butler – RHP – Colorado Rockies
24) George Springer – OF – Houston Astros
25) Raul Aldaberto Mondesi – SS – Kansas City Royals
26) Joc Pederson – OF – Los Angeles Dodgers
27) Kevin Gausman – RHP – Baltimore Orioles
28) Nick Castellanos – 3B – Detroit Tigers
29) Alex Meyer – RHP – Minnesota Twins
30) Julio Urias – LHP – Los Angeles Dodgers

31) Kyle Zimmer – RHP – Kansas City Royals
32) Max Fried – LHP – San Diego Padres
33) Aaron Sanchez – RHP – Toronto Blue Jays
34) Kyle Crick – RHP – San Francisco Giants
35) Jorge Soler – OF – Chicago Cubs
36) Henry Owens – LHP – Boston Red Sox
37) Jackie Bradley Jr. – Boston Red Sox
38) Andrew Heaney – LHP – Miami Marlins
39) Billy Hamilton – OF – Cincinnati Reds
40) Clint Frazier – OF – Cleveland Indians

41) Jorge Alfaro – C – Texas Rangers
42) Tyler Glasnow – RHP – Pittsburgh Pirates
43) Marcus Stroman – RHP – Toronto Blue Jays
44) Travis D’Arnaud – C – New York Mets
45) Corey Seager – SS – Los Angeles Dodgers
46) Kolten Wong – 2B – St. Louis Cardinals
47) Rougned Odor – 2B – Texas Rangers
48) Colin Moran – 3B – Miami Marlins
49) Austin Meadows – OF – Pittsburgh Pirates
50) Blake Swihart – C – Boston Red Sox

51) Lucas Sims – RHP – Atlanta Braves
52) Kohl Stewart – RHP – Minnesota Twins
53) Garin Cecchini – 3B – Boston Red Sox
54) CJ Edwards – RHP – Chicago Cubs
55) Matt Wisler – RHP – San Diego Padres
56) Mike Foltynewicz – RHP – Houston Astros
57) Erik Johnson – RHP – Chicago White Sox
58) Jonathan Singleton – 1B – Houston Astros
59) Maikel Franco – 3B – Philadelphia Phillies
60) Rosell Herrera – SS – Colorado Rockies

61) Matt Barnes – RHP – Boston Red Sox
62) Chris Owings – SS – Arizona Diamondbacks
63) Allan Webster – RHP – Boston Red Sox
64) David Dahl – OF – Colorado Rockies
65) Sean Manea – LHP – Kansas City Royals
66) Trey Ball – LHP – Boston Red Sox
67) Zach Lee – RHP – Los Angeles Dodgers
68) Eddie Rosario – 2B – Minnesota Twins
69) Hunter Harvey – RHP – Baltimore Orioles
70) Braden Shipley – RHP – Arizona Diamondbacks

71) JP Crawford – SS – Philadelphia Phillies
72) Arismendy Alcantara – 2B – Chicago Cubs
73) Allen Hanson – SS – Pittsburgh Pirates
74) AJ Cole – RHP – Washington Nationals
75) Reese McGuire – C – Pittsburgh Pirates
76) Christian Bethancourt – C – Atlanta Braves
77) Mookie Betts – 2B – Boston Red Sox
78) Jorge Bonifacio – OF – Kansas City Royals
79) Jake Odorizzi – RHP – Tampa Bay Rays
80) Jonathan Schoop – 2B – Baltimore Orioles

81) Gary Sanchez – C – New York Yankees
82) Stephen Piscotty – OF – St. Louis Cardinals
83) James Paxton – LHP – Seattle Mariners
84) Joey Gallo – 3B – Texas Rangers
85) Miguel Almonte – RHP – Kansas City Royals
86) Brian Goodwin – OF – Washington Nationals
87) Hunter Dozier – 3B – Kansas City Royals
88) Luis Sardinas – SS – Texas Rangers
89) Ross Stripling – RHP – Los Angeles Dodgers
90) Matt Davidson – 3B – Chicago White Sox

91) Manuel Margot – OF – Boston Red Sox
92) Josmil Pinto – C – Minnesota Twins
93) Trevor Bauer – RHP – Cleveland Indians
94) Casey Kelly – RHP – San Diego Padres
95) Phillip Ervin – OF – Cincinnati Reds
96) Hak-Ju Lee – SS – Tampa Bay Rays
97) Jesse Biddle – LHP – Philadelphia Phillies
98) Chi Chi Rodriguez – RHP – Texas Rangers
99) C.J. Cron – 1B – Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
100) Raimel Tapia – OF – San Diego Padres