In the offseason I added Jason Grilli on virtually every fantasy team because I knew of the stuff he had. I knew he would be dominant. I knew he would be the best closer in baseball. If nothing else, this post is just confirmation that yes; at one moment in time my stroke of genius was at least correct.

A lot of other guys who are stuck on name brands were busy grabbing the likes of Josh Beckett, Joel Hanrahan, Jesus Montero and Mike Fiers in unlucky round 13. That’s when I gave Grilli a home, about five rounds later than he deservedly should have been packing his bags. Just brilliant if I do say so myself. I got more props for a late-round grab of Sergio Santos. That’s how little people respected Grilli coming into this season – but fortunate for me I was not one of those people.

A post over at FanGraphs today documents how dominant Jason Grilli has been. This has been awesome to watch.

Some type of Tyson Ross breaking ball that didn’t work out was launched 431 feet into the night in San Diego, just a stroke after midnight.

Writers have spent the week comparing Harper to Pete Reiser; who was just a young Dodgers outfielder who ran into a lot of walls and never hit more than 14 home runs in a season.

I guarantee Pete Reiser never hit a ball this far. Nats win 6-1. Harper homers. Stephen Strasburg actually went more than seven innings. All is right with the fantasy baseball world.

Have you ever heard the expression “this guy has the power to hit them out of Yosemite”? When I think about Yosemite, I’m actually thinking about San Diego’s Petco Park. That is Yosemite. Tyson Ross: Bryce Harper just made you famous.

Tony Perkis offers:
Cory Lidle
Rob Deer
Lance Berkman Pubic Hair
Round 114 pick

Tony Perkis would like to trade for:
Prince Fielder
Troy Tulowitzki
Original piece of antique family heir loom artwork
Your last pair of shoes
Round 2 pick

Check out the gap between the called third strike and home plate

Yesterday Mariano Rivera record his 16th save of the season.  The final out was a strikeout of Michael Morse.  No one confuses Morse for an elite hitter, but the need to review the final strike call is glaring.  It wasn’t close.  I know humans aren’t perfect and they get graded and all, but it’s just a bad call to end a game.  And then the umpire, Jerry Layne, did his little strike out dance.  Is this really necessary.  Does an NFL referee add a little stank to his offsides call?  Be a professional, audibly say strike three, maybe make a fist to indicate out and walk off the field.  Below is the pitch chart.

The worst is that the pitch is right next to a called ball.  98% accuracy is fine when the misses are close.  I’m not sure exactly how the umpires are graded but the misses should be weighted by distance from zone.  A call missed by an inch isn’t as bad as one missed by 6 inches.  Abtter should protect the plate and probably swing at a close one.  But no one can reasonably expect Morse to swing at a pitch like that. (unless he is fooled, which he is a decent amount)  To top it all off, Fayne does his strikeout dance to end the game.  Not quite an #umpshow, but combined with the bad call, it’s horrible.

Jerry Fayne about to pull a Street Fighter tiger upper cut on Michael Morse

It was a Tuesday night in early September, 1993. My dad tucked me into bed and turned on my Super Mario Brothers AM radio to 700 WLW on my nightstand and told me to go to sleep. Joe Nuxhall was talking to his audience and we were about to embark upon a historic performance.

On that night, ‘Hard Hittin’ Mark Whiten was born. Just before I drifted off to dreamland he nailed the first of his four homers in the game at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. By the time I awoke to eat my Captain Crunch, he had nailed three more. It was the second game of a doubleheader. The Reds lost 15-2. Whiten had 12 RBI. TWELVE.

A calendar week later, the crazy SOB hit two more. For that one week span, he homered six times. He drove in 17 runs. He hit .393 and OPS’d at a 1.469 clip. If a guy did something like that in today’s world there would be a bounty put out for him. It’s so good it’s almost illegal.

And now we present a new weekly feature here at Diamond Hoggers that will run each Sunday evening or Monday evening. Each week we will take a player who went bat-shit for the week in arrears and crown him the Hard Hittin’ Mark Whiten Memorial Player of the Week. These players will forever live in infamy here at the blog for having a week that kicked everyone else’s ass.

I’m going to spend some quality time with my wife tonight, and for the first time this season we’re going to watch her Yankees. I’m not particulary thrilled about having to watch the Yanks minus Jeter, or a true ace on the bump. There’s just not much to keep my interests.

And THEN I see who is pitching for the Seattle Mariners. I don’t mean to interrupt quality baseball posts with this nonsense that further fills the endless space of the internet, but doesn’t Hisashi Iwakuma look like Splinter? I have always thought that. Besides, this guy has received zero run-time and features some of the best stuff in baseball through 8 starts this year.

Nastiest splitter in the game, rat-faced Iwakuma (a valuable member of my fantasy team) brings his 0.74 WHIP and 6.38 K to BB ratio into Yankee Stadium. Most likely so that my wife’s Yankees can shit all over him. Ol’ Splinter here better have packed enough wise advice for himself and his four sons. He’s going to need it tonight, because regression is coming and Hell’s coming with it!

Didn’t Michealangelo and the rest of the turtles live in a sewer in New York City? Yes, I am screwed up.

One of our favorite players around the league, The Dread Pirate is finding his way once again.

We were actually watching this game live (illegally – MLB blackout restrictions can’t keep us down) when McCutchen went boom off the last arm in the Brewers bullpen, poor Mike Fiers. Pirates win 4-3 in a thriller. And the Pirates are hanging tough at 22-17. They’re not going to the playoffs or anything. But it would be good for baseball if the Buccos were able to finally crack that .500 egg after all these years.

We’ve got a suspicion this is going to be the year.

McCutch going clutch in extras….walk off

My friend asks me on Google Talk today where I was valuing Andrew McCucthen.  Now, walk off home runs aren’t a category in any fantasy league I know, but if they were, you’d be happy with Cutch tonight.  This was your basic late inning relief no out walk off home run.  On a 2-2 count, Cutch took Fiers over the right center field wall.

No need to even tally this one up.  We can just look in on the post game celebration.  The Pirates are hanging in there so far.  Can they keep it up, or will they suffer a similar late season collapse.

A single up the middle spelled disaster tonight

Jim Johnson has been pretty good this year with 14 saves and an ERA and WHIP under1.  Today was not a good day.  Trying to hold onto a one run lead.  Johnson gave up a pair of singles before he was gifted double play ball and his hopes for pulling a save out went up.  One single, later the game was tied.  An HBP and another single later, the lead was gone.  Details:

The tally:  4! singles, 1 HBP. 2 runs and 1 blown save.  A lot of people think Jim Johnson has been pitching above his head.  I won’t say but his year just got a little worse tonight.

I got my copy of iOOTP 13 a few weeks ago and dove right in.  I decided to go with the Toronto Blue Jays this time around to see if  my sim team could match up to the expectations of the real world team this year.

If you’re used to the iOOTP format, you will pick up right where you left off.  The action is pretty smooth as you’d expect and the set up is pretty much exactly the same.

I went with the re-draft new season format.  I like that in this version you can pick what teams are in the league.  It has randomize function.  I tried to stick to the real thing.  I like the re-draft because I like fantasy baseball, but it would probably be fun to take a team on the cusp like the Orioles and see what you can do with them.  Here is pretty much the offense I drafted.

I’m pretty sure I went Trout, Stanton, Castro, Zunino and Eaton were my top picks.  I heavily leaned towards young players because I knew my payroll wouldn’t be very high to begin with.  Check the staff I came up with after the jump:

Horrible, right?  Leake had a pretty good season.  But I obviously leaned towards hitting during the draft.  I have found that highly ranked hitters seem to be a little more consistent in iOOTP, but I’m sure that’s just perception.  Anyway, I like seeing 50 HR more than 230Ks.

I learned a lot about how to win in iOOTP from my previous foray in iOOTP12.  So this time, my teams did fairly well from the beginning.  Here are my three year finishes:

2015 was particularly successful for me.  These are the awards I won that year.

• World Series
• Manager of the Year
• Mike Leake won the “Cy Young”
• Mike Trout won the MVP and the batting title
• Nolan Fontana won the Rookie of the Year
• Adam Eaton won a Gold Glove in CF

Not bad for one season.  I had trouble getting over the hump with my first two teams and I learned my lesson on pitching.  I traded some high yield prospects like Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano for Dylan Bundy – who was already an overall 80.  And another few prospects, Starling Marte and Jorge Soler for Zach Wheeler.  So take note, you will probably have trouble making it past the league championship without solid top of the line pitching.

Some new features I found pretty enjoyable on this update:

• New medal achievements to unlock like winning 10 games in a row or hitting 3 home runs in a game.
• A little better trading intelligence.  Not quite as easy to trick the computer into a good trade.  (If you want to challenge yourself, don’t allow yourself to trade except to accept offers…much harder when you can’t flip veterans, especially if you own a smaller market team)

This game is great for those times when you have 15-20 minutes to kill.  It’s much less intensive than OOTP, so you can jump in and out.  Although, be warned, you may look up and realize an hour or more has gone by, you’ve won a few games, made a few trades, and have 3 guys on the DL. (And your wife is staring at you wondering why the clothes aren’t folded).  Enjoy!