After the Draft Is Over
Apr. 24th, 2022 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperI felt a bit deflated after the draft yesterday. I attribute this partially to the stress of having to draft for a second team that was not my own, but mostly to the fact that this was not an exciting draft for a wide variety of reasons.
The biggest problem was that this was an incredibly *boring* group of players to be drafting from. Yes, we're an eight-team superstar league, but there's usually a lot of talent left in the pool to be snagged when the draft starts. This year? Almost everything that could help you in the current year (other than fungible relief pitchers -- I say "fungible", because we can't rely on relief pitchers coming back for the same reasons that GMs are starting to learn not to hand them big multiyear contracts; their performance from year-to-year is highly variable) was gone by the 10th pick of the draft. I was drafting 8th, so managed to pull one not-very-exciting player and then it was time to draft relief pitchers and any prospects that I could find. All things considered, getting out with a solid pen for this year plus Stephenson, Ruiz, Gallen, and Chisholm was about as well as I could have hoped to do.
So later that day, I was watching the highlights on "Quick Pitch" and they got around to the Marlins vs. Braves game, which featured as leadoff hitters my incumbent second baseman, Ozzie Albies, for the Braves; and my new prospect of a second baseman, Jazz Chisholm, for the Marlins. This was an amusing coincidence.
And then they reported that Chisholm had hit the first pitch of the game for a leadoff home run. In the bottom of the first, Albies lead off and hit the first Marlins pitch of the game for a leadoff home run.
It turns out this is only the second time that opposing leadoff men had hit homers on the first pitch since they started tracking this sort of thing around 1998.
And so *that* will be my good memory of Draft Day this year. It's not as good as the year where I was able to draft Juan Soto and Ronald Acuna Jr. back-to-back (I traded Xander Bogaerts to get the other pick to be able to do this), but that sort of thing doesn't happen every year... :)
The biggest problem was that this was an incredibly *boring* group of players to be drafting from. Yes, we're an eight-team superstar league, but there's usually a lot of talent left in the pool to be snagged when the draft starts. This year? Almost everything that could help you in the current year (other than fungible relief pitchers -- I say "fungible", because we can't rely on relief pitchers coming back for the same reasons that GMs are starting to learn not to hand them big multiyear contracts; their performance from year-to-year is highly variable) was gone by the 10th pick of the draft. I was drafting 8th, so managed to pull one not-very-exciting player and then it was time to draft relief pitchers and any prospects that I could find. All things considered, getting out with a solid pen for this year plus Stephenson, Ruiz, Gallen, and Chisholm was about as well as I could have hoped to do.
So later that day, I was watching the highlights on "Quick Pitch" and they got around to the Marlins vs. Braves game, which featured as leadoff hitters my incumbent second baseman, Ozzie Albies, for the Braves; and my new prospect of a second baseman, Jazz Chisholm, for the Marlins. This was an amusing coincidence.
And then they reported that Chisholm had hit the first pitch of the game for a leadoff home run. In the bottom of the first, Albies lead off and hit the first Marlins pitch of the game for a leadoff home run.
It turns out this is only the second time that opposing leadoff men had hit homers on the first pitch since they started tracking this sort of thing around 1998.
And so *that* will be my good memory of Draft Day this year. It's not as good as the year where I was able to draft Juan Soto and Ronald Acuna Jr. back-to-back (I traded Xander Bogaerts to get the other pick to be able to do this), but that sort of thing doesn't happen every year... :)