Hollinger: All-Underrated Team

Continue Reading March 21st, 2006

LINK: http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/insider/columns/sto…
Hollinger picks the league’s 12 most underrated players:
Nazr Mohammed, Spurs
I’m cheating a little and playing Mohammed at his natural position on this team since he’s only 6-9. Whether at power forward or center, he is easily overlooked because of his lack of athleticism and terrible hands. Yet at the end of the day, his […]

Fantasy Baseball is here!

Continue Reading March 21st, 2006

The biggest story of the day is actually The Red Sock’s fantasy team. We had our auction draft the other day and are fairly pleased with our team. There is nothing like fantasy sports to get you excited for a new season.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with an auction draft, it is run like an auction. Clear? Good.

There seems to be several strategies one could take, but our favorite was by a man we will call Moron. Each team was given $220 for 20 players, nine hitters, seven pitchers and four bench players. Moron decided to spend $210 on his first ten guys, which left him exactly $10 for his last ten. Everyone get your calculators out and do the math at home. Got it? It works out to $1 per player. This meant that the only players that he could purchase were the ones that he himself nominated. People routinely overbid him, even on players they didn’t like, which meant that he sat there, for several hours, unable to do anything.

This brought us great joy. We take pleasure in the suffering and discomfort of others. Our favorite part was that as he went on his spending spree for stud A-Rod ($47), pitchers Roy Oswalt ($32) and B.J. Ryan ($31), and better-than-average guys like Juan Pierre ($29) and Victor Martinez ($29) he would laugh and say, “I can’t believe I’m overpaying for these guys.” Those five guys accounted for $158 of his teams $220, thus screwing him for the rest of the auction.

We handled our team fairly differently. With great patience and collectivity, we never over-bid on any one player, thus leaving us financially stable throughout the draft. Here’s a list of our guys and how much we paid for each of them.

Soriano is too cool for the outfield

Continue Reading March 21st, 2006

The big story of the day is that Alfonso Soriano apparently thinks he’s too cool for school, or at least the outfield. After much build-up over the off-season about whether Soriano or Vidro would change positions, it looks as though GM Bowden has chosen Vidro to remain at 2nd, much to the chagrin of Soriano.

By refusing to take the field yesterday, the Nationals will now turn to the commissioner about possibly putting Soriano on the DQ list, which sounds a lot like GQ, but isn’t. This list means he won’t be getting paid. Not getting paid makes us sad, so we can only imagine how Soriano would feel if he stopped getting paid the $10 million he’s due this year.

Let’s all just take a moment to appreciate what it would take for us to refuse to go to work and forfeit that much money. We would probably sacrifice a testicle to keep that kind of money rolling in. But apparently Soriano won’t even switch positions on the baseball field, not even mentioning the fact that he is notoriously bad at 2nd base. If he were a Gold Glover maybe we could see him thinking it was a slap in the face, but the guy can’t even catch a ground ball cleanly.

Our guess is that he will come to his senses and be in left field shagging fly balls before the end of spring training.