Maroon: A rebuilding year: my way back to baseball
From Annie Maroon at The Hardball Times on March 21, 2018:
Scattered throughout my apartment are pages of handwritten notes, in notebooks and on index cards, about baseball players. Before the 2015 season, I pulled together major sites’ fantasy rankings, combed through FanGraphs, and compiled rough positional rankings of my own for my upcoming Yahoo draft. (I had won the league the year before, but my analysis was still quite fallible; most notably, I remained unconvinced by Jake Arrieta’s promising 2014.)
This took days – and still fell short, I’m sure, of the time some of my friends put into their fantasy teams. But it felt like work only in the best way: like if I put in enough effort, I would get something worthwhile for it. Watching baseball often felt like this, and there really was a payoff (even outside of fantasy, where I stood to win actual money). I enjoyed watching pitchers more when I knew their repertoires, and noticed them using their breaking ball more often the second time through the order. The more I knew about my team, the more secure I felt, fandom giving me authority and stability – something to come home to, regardless of how the rest of the day went.
Read the full article here: https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/a-rebuilding-year-my-way-back-to-baseball/
Originally published: March 22, 2018. Last Updated: March 22, 2018.