TheBaseballStars

Consider TheBaseballStars a perfect balance. We can throw out stats or we can talk straight from the gut. When it is 1 a.m. and one of your kids wakes up at 8 in the morning, it is usually time to throw out the stats and talk about fantasy baseball from the gut perspective. Getting back to balance, The Jon has made it The Jon’s mission to enlighten the common fantasy baseballer to Hieroglyphics. A group in the late ’90s that everyone slept on. Hey, TheBaseballStars all … All have Bay Area roots, so we were down fools from the get-go that had to look past wack@$$ gangsta rap to find down diigyloriffic music such as this.

Plus this song as you can hear is called “You Never Knew” from their album “Third Eye Vision.”

It is this same third eye vision that The Jon is going to drop … oh right about know.

Click on the upcoming link fool, and lets get started …

Yeah, you use that vision

To win in fantasy baseball, you have to sweat the details. This isn’t fantasy football where you can piddle around for four days and decide over a cup of coffee that you want to be a fantasy football champ.

Around here you need to scour baseball box scores and find hidden gems and the next hot rookie. Take Edinson Volquez. The guy has come out of nowhere to dominate fantasy pitching. The Jon daresays most fantasy league drafts didn’t involve the name Volquez. This leads to some manager striking fantasy gold on a waiver wire pickup.

Fantasy baseball is the only fake sport that allows you to build a winner just off the waiver wire alone.

This of course has its downfalls which have been arranged in the ever so convenient video list …

1. At the helm: Keep it in perspective — Devoting a good portion of your week to your fantasy baseball team can lead to mild case of overmanaging. Every good manager feels their team should win weekly matchups by double-digit wins. When it doesn’t happen, it is easy to see your team as a noncontender.
   Relax
   Evaluate
   Pick yourself up.
   Take a look at The Jon’s past matchup. The Jon was facing a Dan Uggla owner and The Jon was still able to tie the homer category.
   The Jon’s opponent had a WHIP of 1.04. Yeah, 1.04. That’s a career week, folks. The other owner also had zero losses.
   He did not lose a game.
   The Jon’s losses for the week? Zero.
   The Jon tied 6-6. That’s the breaks. Keep it in perspective.

2. Catch a Bad One. OK so this closely related to point No. 1. But this song is tight and it brings up a good point. You are going to run into a string of bad luck. So when you are facing a team such as FreeSanJose’s that was 5 for 8 with five homers in a matchup two weeks ago against Newspaperman, go ahead and get mad.
   Call up FreeSanJose.
   Cuss him out (or in Newspaperman’s version, cry a lot).
   In other words, have fun with it.
   Look, every championship The Jon has one has been by coming back from overwhelming odds. The Jon’s teams weren’t dominant, they were never in first place and they never had a first round bye.
   There was a lot of faith involved, and a lot of luck. What’s the fun of straight domination? It means your league isn’t competitive.
   FreeSanJose is slowly running away with our league, but he can’t say that he is unbeatable. There are a handful of teams that strike the fear in FreeSanJose and those matchups will be a battle of different team-building strategies. The Jon is on FreeSanJose’s list, and quite frankly … Bring it.

3. Make your move: A simple trap most managers make is to try to have the best of.
   So what is the best of?
   Well it’s when a manager says, “I have the best outfield,” or “I have the best pitching staff.”
   The belief is if you have a lot of best ofs you will have the best team.
   Wrong, son. This will actually be touched upon by FreeSanJose in greater clarity later on this week. The generality is you build your team to be competitive on all levels.
   The Jon will take it a step farther. Back when our State league first started, FreeSanJose had a definite strategy of grabbing top-flight pitching, a couple of stud power hitters and filling out the rest of the offense with astute and lucky pickups. He killed the first couple of seasons.
   The Jon didn’t.
   The Jon looked around and saw what worked for other teams and what didn’t work for The Jon’s team. Adjustments were made. The Jon is a sucker for workhorse pitchers, but still has the dominate, high strikeout guys to combat FreeSanJose’s tendencies in constructing teams.
   FreeSanJose loves the high on-base percentage power hitters. The Jon hates low-average power guys. But there will always be a splash of power hitters on The Jon’s squad to compliment The Jon’s high hit, high average offense.
   Make your move son. Know what type of players you lean toward and then adjust to beat your league’s top teams. That’s how champions are made.

   The Jon had about 3 minutes to watch Baseball Tonight … where’s the baseball?

The wife stepped out, giving The Jon the opportunity to change the news and catch a couple of quick baseball highlights on ESPN.

This crap came on.

This is a youtube video, but The final ESPN version of The Cab offering its own rendition of “Take Me out to the Ballgame” for some contest or whatever.

The ESPN version focused a little more on the overacting kid and had some deer in headlight crowd members singing the song.

Really? This is the best The Cab can do?

Are they a professional band?

The Jon can belt out the same song after about 10 beers, because that is the only way The Jon would represent by having some obnoxious kid steal thunder from The Jon’s asexual band.

The Cab had to be sitting around and the lead singer guy, if there is one, probably said in his?/her? high-pitched voice…

Hey, let’s go to some outdoor meeting area where there a lot of people and hopefully we can find some kid who hams it up for the camera and then we can sing like any geek off the street and try to win a contest. That way everyone can look at our hair and kill America’s Pastime at the same time.

Sheep. The world is full of sheep and bad baseball highlight programming. Real talk.

He’s back

Vladimir Guerrero, had 11 hits 3 homers and 7 RBI this week.

Just saying.

The best fantasy baseball player of all time

Another reason why fantasy baseball is a challenge. Dan Uggla came out of nowhere in his rookie season to provide power at second base.

Last season he sucked.

This season he has 23 homers and his average is hovering around .300.

Yeah, thanks for the heads up on that.

Chipper watch

Chipper got hurt again over the weekend!

His upcoming week is in doubt!

Chipper never does this … ever!

Johnny Cueto

Cueto is a rollercoaster. He is too inconsistent to have any fantasy value at all this season. If you are in a keeper league and have an expendable keeper spot, stash him away and wait for next season.

Yeah we saw the three homers

Good for Mark Teixeira. You hit three homers Sunday. We would much rather have you hit one homer a week. Put a full season together … like the one you had for Texas in 2004 and 2005.

If you can’t beat em’

Time for some real music. The Jon is just surprised MF Doom and Kurious didn’t make it on here sooner.

Buy MF Doom joints … he’ll change your life.

And of course, good luck this week fools.