Harry Caray's Bleacher Bumz Rotisserie League |
|
Search hcbb.info
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
House of Cards - How Half Cajun Lost the 2010 Title |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 by Steven PrentissIt was the end of August 2010 and Half Cajun’s owner Adam Caveney was leading the HCBB with 141 points, 20 more than his nearest competitor. Five short weeks later, his team had plummeted and he found himself with a disappointing 3rd place finish. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? The story of one of the most monumental collapses in HCBB history hasn’t been told until tonight. I’m Steve Croft. This story plus Andy Rooney tonight on 60 minutes.  On October 3rd, 2010, the closest race in HCBB history finally ended. When the smoke cleared, the team that led most of the 2nd half of the season was not in their customary position at the top of the standings. Half Cajun, the team that was the prohibitive favorite with less than a month to go in the season, had actually fallen all the way to 3rd place. The fact that it happened is far less surprising than how it happened. Half Cajun entered the 2010 season in an unassuming fashion – an average group of keepers and what many considered to be an ordinary draft day. Early results backed this – the team spent the early part of April mired in the lower tier of the standings. However, by the middle of April, Half Cajun began their rise to the top, gaining traction in all categories, especially in pitching. On June 14, 2010, Caveney’s squad finally reached the pinnacle. We’ll start our story a couple weeks before that, when the unraveling of the Half Cajun season began, unbeknownst to everyone in the league.  Mired in the bottom of the standings in batting average, Caveney looked to strike a deal in early June to bolster his anemic batting average. Not surprisingly, he found a willing trade partner in Clueless’ Mike Tate. They consummated a trade that brought Martin Prado, who was hitting .323 at the time, and Pablo Sandoval, who hit .330 the previous year. Half Cajun sent Adrian Gonzalez and average-killer Ian Stewart back to Clueless. But, as so often is the case, the best laid plans sometimes fail to meet expectations. Over the remainder of the season, Prado hit a respectable .298. Sandoval, however, hit a feeble .247, only a slight improvement over Stewart. Meanwhile, Gonzalez hit .311 from that point on. As it turned out, the trade ended up being break-even in two categories – batting average and runs – but Half Cajun took a tremendous hit in two other offensive categories – homeruns and RBIs. In the end, the trade cost the squad 14 homers and 27 RBIs – a full 5.5 points in the standings. This move turned out to be mistake number one. Temporarily at least, Caveney survived that blunder. Over the next two months, Half Cajun rose to the summit and stayed there, buoyed by a couple of very good trades. In early June, Caveney traded away starter James Shields, shortly before Shields season completely unraveled, garnering closer Jonathan Papelbon in the deal. And then in early July, Half Cajun traded away Colby Rasmus, one of the league’s top young talents, in a dump deal that added a red-hot Scott Rolen, a resurgent Jay Bruce and a solid end of the rotation starter in Hiroki Kuroda. At that point, all was well. Half Cajun was in first place at 133.5 points, a full 12 points ahead of second place. Although the team would reach a higher point total and a larger lead later in the year, in retrospect, this moment may have been the team’s high point. Because the endless stream of bad news, combined with the numerous questionable moves the team made down the stretch, would prove too much to overcome.  They say that hindsight is 20-20. Looking back, it is painfully clear that the week of July 19, 2010 marked the beginning of the end. Over the course of that week, Caveney made four trades – one dump deal and three minor deals to make the dump deal possible. The end result saw Clay Buchholz, Hong-Chih Kuo and the newly-acquired Jay Bruce leave Half Cajun, to be replaced by Eric Aybar, Joel Hanrahan, Andres Torres and Mike Leake. What Caveney thought was a major upgrade for the stretch run ended up being nothing of the sort. While the team added much needed speed – 14 extra steals which equated to 4 points in the standings – all three of the players traded away performed at All-Star levels for their new teams over the remainder of the season. Bruce hit 15 homers, drove in 31, scored 28 runs and hit a shocking .329 over the last 10 weeks of the season. Kuo became the Dodgers closer, racking up 9 saves with a 1.62 ERA and a 0.831 WHIP in August and September. Buchholz pitched like an ace, piling up 71 innings, 6 wins, a 1.78 ERA and a 1.12 WHIP after the trade. Although Half Cajun didn’t lose much in any one category, cumulatively, the losses were astounding. Even after figuring in what the new players brought to the table, the loss of those three player’s stats turned into lost points in seven of the ten categories – 1 point in innings pitched; 1 point in wins; 1 point in WHIP, .5 points in saves; 2 points in average; 1.5 points in home runs; and .5 points in RBIs. The net loss was 3.5 points – no doubt Caveney was looking for a far better end result from a dump trade. This was mistake number two. As if the errors weren’t enough, Half Cajun started picking up a number of bad breaks starting in August. Early in the month, Caveney bid $2 on outfielder Peter Bourjos, looking for a cheap source of steals. Although Bourjos was getting regular playing time, it was primarily at the expense of Juan Rivera, also on Half Cajun’s squad, but locked into the lineup as a guaranteed keeper. Essentially, two players were filling one role, but taking up two active roster spots. Two weeks later, a freak knee injury to club favorite Chipper Jones knocked him out for the remainder of the season.Team MVP Josh Hamilton struggled through much of the month with an assortment of dings and dents, requiring two cortisone shots. Then, to add injury to insult, Jose Reyes suffered an oblique injury the last week of the month. At this point, Half Cajun was at their high water mark, hitting 141 points, 20 points ahead of their nearest competitor. September began much as August finished. First, Hamilton hit the wall – literally – in Minneapolis on September 4th, knocking him out of action until the final weekend of the season. And then Andres Torres was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Although he missed only nine days, he wasn’t quite the same upon his return. The final injury occurred in the second-to-last weekend of the year as Prado tore his oblique muscle and was lost for the year.As these injuries transpired, Half Cajun was in free fall. By September 7th, they were down 5 points and the lead was down to 7.5 points. A week later, they were down another 6 points and the lead was just 3 points. It was at this point that Half Cajun made their third and final mistake – a gaffe that became the final nail in the coffin of their season. Over the last three weeks, two active roster spots were occupied by a mix of the following four players – Erick Aybar, Emilio Bonifacio, Aaron Cunningham and Wilson Betemit, the latter two acquired by Half Cajun using their final $2 of FAAB money. Their combined stats over those three weeks? 86 at bats, 9 hits for a .104 average. In retrospect, Half Cajun would have been better off with no players in those spots as those horrific 86 at bats generated a batting average drop from .26856 to .26641 and a corresponding loss of two points in the category. And those weren’t the only two spots in the team’s lineup that failed to contribute down the stretch. In fact, the whole team almost completely stopped accumulating stats. Over the final two weeks, Half Cajun was the worst producing team in the league. Some of the stats, or the lack thereof, compiled over that fortnight were daunting – 4 wins, 44 runs, 40 RBIs and a .222 average. What may have been the most amazing thing about the catastrophic collapse is thateven with all of these bad things befalling the Half Cajun squad, Caveney actually came within a whisker of still winning the league. Had any of the mistakes or injuries not happened, Caveney may have been able to hang on and claim his first championship. Although he finished in 3rd place, he only was 1.5 points out of the lead. And looking closer  at the categories, you can really appreciate how near to claiming the trophy Half Cajun came. The squad finished just .0004 in average behind the Ball Hogs; they finished tied in HR with Prolonging the Magic and tied in RBIs with the Tee Timers. On the pitching side, they ended up tied with both Prolonging the Magic and Time to Run in wins, and tied in saves with the Charlestown Chiefs. And in two other categories, Half Cajun finished just behind another team - .0135 behind the Tasmanian Devils in WHIP and 5.7 innings behind Roll the Bones. The latter stat is significant when you consider that two Half Cajun starters, Felix Hernandez and Alex Sanabia, had their final starts of the season skipped.As it turned out, it took the perfect storm of injuries, unfavorable trades, roster management mistakes and general bad luck for Half Cajun to fall short in their quest. And a title that seemed so assured just weeks earlier, slipped through Caveney’s hands. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Website design by Second Wind Interactive © 2009