Debut.

"Bruce is loaded with both tools and skills. He's a fantastic hitter who is seemingly incapable of light contact, projecting as a .300+ hitter who approaches 100 extra-base hits annually. He has average to slightly-above speed and has proven to be surprisingly capable in center field, while also showcasing a strong arm. He supplements his natural abilities with strong makeup and an outstanding work ethic. Perfect World Projection: A perennial All-Star and MVP candidate. A true superstar in the mold of a healthy Larry Walker."

Welcome to the Majors, Jay.

NBA Playoff Pool: Standings Through Round Two

Here are the up-to-date standings through the conclusion of the second round of the NBA Playoffs. There are three perfect brackets remaining. As always, each bracket can be viewed through the NBA Playoffs link at the ALA Fantasy Sports website. Each participant's champion is listed after their score.

1. Sean Stokke, 32 (Celtics)
1. Mike Duin, 32 (Celtics)
1. Cici Northup, 32 (Celtics)
4. Steve Duin, 30 (Spurs)
4. Mike Lazar, 30 (Celtics)
6. Andy Popp, 28 (Pistons)
6. Colleen Northup, 28 (Celtics)
8. Chris Platt, 26 (Lakers)
8. Ted Bergeron, 26 (Celtics)
8. Dave Christeson, 26 (Celtics)
11. Joe Simich, 24 (Lakers)
11. Matt Crevier, 24 (Lakers)
11. Dan Goldman, 24 (Celtics)
11. Brandon Seroyer, 24 (Celtics)
11. Jeff Vaudt, 24 (Celtics)
11. Mike Marty, 24 (Celtics)
11. Alex Rosenbloom, 24 (Celtics)
11. Damon Pryor, 24 (Suns)
11. Micah Gantman, 24 (Suns)
20. Joe Nelson, 22 (Celtics)
20. Jordan Spektor, 22 (Celtics)
20. Shaun Wickers, 22 (Celtics)
23. Adam Brady, 20 (Lakers)
23. Loren Northup, 20 (Celtics)
25. Kyle Davis, 18 (Celtics)
26. Tim Hokit, 16 (Lakers)
26. Andrew Gay, 16 (Celtics)

FMLB Team Spotlight: The Waiver Wire Magician

Billy Schreyer has led an intriguing ALA career. As one of the Founding Fathers of A Level Above, he was there in the beginning, fielding a team in all three of ALA’s fantasy games. Yet in recent years, Billy has drifted into the murky underworld of our great fantasy league – first by disappearing from the realm of fantasy football, and then by announcing his retirement from fantasy hoops after an infamous stretch in which he abandoned an injury-crippled team, forcing his hurt players onto the floor when all they wanted was a seat on the bench to rest their torn ACLs and broken limbs. It seemed as though the lack of an ALA Championship had all but demolished Billy Schreyer’s fantasy spirit. Yet through it all, the man they call ‘Ill Bills’ made one thing clear: he would never quit playing fantasy baseball.

And now, six weeks into the 2008 Fantasy MLB season, Billy Schreyer finds himself in an unfamiliar position: 1st place. The top of the heap. How has he gotten there? Where did this sudden, surprising resurgence come from? And the most pressing question: will ShrayDay be able to stay on top?

Billy has a very balanced team – of his league-leading 97.0 Roto Points as of May 14th, 46.5 of those come from his hitters and 50.5 come from his pitching staff. What’s astonishing about Billy’s team is where his stars came from. Billy made a few great draft picks – notably, spending $24 auction dollars on Chipper Jones, who has aged like a fine wine. Chipper’s currently putting up an unbelievable .415 AVG/.475 OBP/.683 SLG and is on pace for 43 HR and 135 RBI. If you’re looking for another outstanding auction pick, look no further than Pat Burrell. After Burrell batted .257 and .256 in the last two years, it wasn’t entirely surprising that the rest of the league let him go to ShrayDay cheaply, at $13 – Burrell has looked like a less powerful Adam Dunn in recent years, as dependable for 30 HR as he was to do serious damage to a fantasy team’s batting average. This year, much to Billy’s delight, Burrell has kept his average above .300 all year and is also slugging a full 120 points higher than his career slugging percentage.



As impressive as Jones and Burrell have been, let there be no doubt why Billy Schreyer is currently in 1st place. As of May 14th, ShrayDay owned three of the top seven players on the ESPN Player Rater, as well as the 14th ranked player. Here are those four players:

#3: Chipper Jones – .415 AVG, 27 R, 10 HR, 31 RBI, 0 SB
#4: Cliff Lee – 6-0, 44 K, 0.67 ERA, 0.67 WHIP
#7: Nate McLouth – .305 AG, 32 R, 10 HR, 31 RBI, 3 SB
#14: Edinson Volquez – 6-1, 57 K, 1.12 ERA, 1.26 WHIP

We’ve discussed Chipper – but look at those other three names. Look at ‘em hard. Now, look at the percentage of CBS leagues that Lee, McLouth, and Volquez were owned in when the fantasy baseball season began:

Cliff Lee: Owned in 21% of leagues
Nate McLouth: Owned in 27% of leagues
Edinson Volquez: Owned in 60% of leagues

This is the amazing thing. Billy picked up all three of those players as free agents after the draft. Cliff Lee, who was demoted to the minors last year after posting a 6.30 ERA and 1.52 WHIP, has come back this year looking like the second coming of Sandy Koufax. Lee’s numbers are beyond mindblowing. They’re seemingly impossible. 53.7 IP. 44 K. Four – FOUR!!! – walks. His 0.67 ERA is the 6th lowest ERA after seven starts since World War II. All of this from someone whose career looked resigned to that of a journeyman after his failed 2007 campaign.



Billy Schreyer’s first place team is Exhibit A in the Museum of Why It Pays Off to Pay Attention. The scary thing? Though Chipper would be hard-pressed to maintain a .415 batting average all year, and Lee’s ERA will certainly not stay below 1.00 forever, ShrayDay isn’t likely to fade away. Even outside of the four fantasy superstars we’ve discussed, Billy has a reliable supporting cast in place – a group that includes a stingy John Smoltz, a reborn Ryan Dempster, and a hard-throwing Josh Beckett on his pitching staff, and a few hitters who haven’t yet hit their stride – notably Robinson Cano and Brad Hawpe. Billy will have to keep an eye on the IP Pace of his pitching staff: he’s currently on track for 1693 IP, far over the 1500 IP limit. But the way his arms are throwing right now, I’m not sure there’s any reason not to run straight into that 1500 IP wall – if ShrayDay’s starters keep throwing like they have, the rest of teams in this league will have their hands full trying to match their peripherals.

A Few Words on OJ

Ten minutes after I walked into my office today, my boss was already giving me shit – “So how do you like that OJ Mayo now?” I’m sure the rest of you aren’t far behind. For those of you who haven’t been glued to your television sets all weekend, a guy named Louis Johnson – formerly a member of OJ’s entourage – came clean and told ESPN that Mayo had accepted $30,000 in gifts over the last four years from an LA promoter named Rodney Guillory. Once OJ made it to the L, he would repay those favors by signing with an agent from Bill Duffy Associates (BDA) – something OJ did the day he declared for the draft.

As fascinating as this story is, my feelings on it are pretty clean cut: as a USC basketball fan, why am I supposed to care about this? Am I supposed to feel guilty, or be pinged with some sort of regret because some guy gave OJ Mayo nice clothes and a flat screen TV?

I’m not a fan of OJ Mayo the celebrity, or OJ Mayo’s entourage, or OJ Mayo’s self-marketing aspirations. I’m a USC basketball fan, and this ‘scandal’ and OJ’s USC basketball career are hardly related. There was no institutional involvement in buying OJ Mayo a flat screen TV. I find it hard to believe that someone like Tim Floyd – who by all accounts is as good a guy as he is a coach, and has repeatedly stood up for OJ’s character and actions – would put his own name on the line if he had any idea that OJ was blatantly breaking NCAA rules.

This thing has nothing to do with OJ’s USC basketball career (which lasted all of one year). It’s not like USC higher-ups visited OJ in high school and slipped him envelopes full of $100 bills that had “Fight On!” written on the back of them. None of this had even the slightest effect on the 20.4 PPG, 4.5 RPG, and 3.3 APG that OJ averaged last year, which is why I couldn’t care less about this as a USC basketball fan.

This is also why idiots like Pat Forde need to get off their bandbox. Really, Pat? This is our fault? Take a second and remember how OJ Mayo ended up at USC – he quite literally recruited himself. He had one of his boys call up Tim Floyd and say “How would you like it if OJ Mayo came to play for the Trojans?” It was clear, both now and then, that this was part of a plan to craft OJ’s “brand” and make him more marketable as a player. LA was an easy place to do that.

According to USC’s official denial of this debacle, both the NCAA and the PAC-10 “reviewed O.J. Mayo's amateur status before and during his enrollment at USC, and did not identify any amateurism violations. Mayo and USC fully cooperated in these investigations.” If this is true, what exactly was USC supposed to do? Were we supposed to say to OJ: “Sorry man – we know you’re a prep legend, and you’d be the highest profile basketball recruit we’ve ever pulled in…but I think we’ll pass. Someone might’ve bought you some new clothes while you were in high school. Good luck playing for UCLA!”

Pat Forde claims that OJ was “a player everyone in Hoopsworld strongly suspected was no amateur before he set foot in Los Angeles.” Um, Pat? If that’s the case, where was your groundbreaking investigative reporting back then? If it was so obvious, why weren’t you telling us about it? Newsflash: THIS HAPPENS EVERYWHERE!! Instead of taking your self-righteous, melodramatic stand that “Someone has to stop USC!!” you should be working a little harder to figure out where else this is going on. You seem to realize that off the basketball court, in the offices of high-profile agents and wherever the shady ‘runners’ like Rodney Guillory hang out, there’s another game being played. For the sake of your readers, why don’t you try and learn a little more about that game while you’re getting over your envy that no one can beat our football team.

Rethinking - and Revising - the ALACS Scoring System

Let’s get to the point right away: the first draft of the year-round ALACS scoring system was flawed. Aside from being unnecessarily complex, the scoring system failed to differentiate between degrees of difficulty, effort, and time involved in different events. Put concisely: every event held identical significance. First place in the NBA Playoff Bracket Pool scored you just as many points as first place in a seven-month long fantasy basketball season. Clearly, this is both illogical and unreasonable.

The scoring system was initially designed with the six-event requirement in mind; we wanted to make sure that someone playing in all nine events had no advantage over someone playing in just six. However, our idea from the start of this project was also to encourage participation in as many events as possible – and the original scoring system did nothing to accomplish that goal. With every event weighted with equal importance, and an average of each participant’s ‘total’ score taken to determine a year-round champion, there was little incentive for someone to play in a game they didn’t consider themselves an expert in.

Now that I’ve had a little time to tinker with this, I think I’ve found a solution – a scoring system that both rewards people for playing in as many events as possible, but also doesn’t discriminate against those of you who choose not to play in every game. Here’s how it will work.

There will be three “levels” of ALACS events, each with a different set of point values that will be distributed to participants based on how they finish. In this link, you will find two tabs: the first tab shows the current ALACS Standings. The second tab shows the new scoring system.

ALACS Year 1 Standings and Point System

In the first level, we have the PGA Majors Competition and the NBA Playoffs Bracket Pool – two pure guessing games. In the second level, we have the two spread competitions – which take a moderate amount of effort, since participants are required to submit picks every week – as well as the NCAA March Madness Pool, which is given more importance than the Level I events because of its prestige and the certainty that it will be the ALACS Event that the most people participate in every year. Finally, we in the third level, we have the three fantasy games, which require a participant to actively manage a roster over an entire season, and the NFL Survivor Pool.

Some people might scoff at the Survivor Pool’s inclusion in the third level – after all, it’s just as much of a guessing game as the bracket pools and spread games – but keep in mind that the Survivor Pool requires a $55 buy-in. This might also be the most exciting game in the ALACS on a week-to-week basis. Not only will you be rooting for an NFL team every week with a life-or-death state of mind, but you’ll have plenty of other teams to root against – the most popular picks in the pool, the teams that, if they lose, would eliminate a bunch of people you’re competing against. It’s going to be fun, and the brainpower behind this ALACS project would like to see the NFL Survivor Pool blow up.

Now, there are a couple of other caveats to the scoring system that are extremely important. Let’s turn to another round of ALACS FAQ to answer some questions you may have.

Q: This is (expletive) ridiculous. I didn’t even get a chance to play in ALA Fantasy Baseball, and now all the (expletive)s that are playing fantasy baseball have a chance to earn way more ALACS points than I can in the events I’m playing in. How is this fair? (expletive) this, I quit!!

A: Alright, calm down. First of all, it’s important to remember that only 10% of each prize pool is going towards the ALACS Master Pool –playing in an event will always be profitable if you do well, regardless of the overall ALACS implications. Moving on, I’m well aware that not everyone had a chance to play fantasy baseball – which is why we’re including a special fantasy game rule for the first year of the ALACS (and the first year only). Participants in all three fantasy games will only get to use two of their ALACS fantasy scores to go towards their year-round total. Though you could still argue that tri-fantasy players have a small advantage since they have three games available to pick those two scores from, the bottom line is that if you were to play in two fantasy games and do well in both of them, you won’t be getting slighted. And if you don’t do well in the two games you play in (which would be basketball and football), you can’t expect us to jump through hoops for you. Besides, the two people currently leading ALA Fantasy Baseball are almost certainly not going to play in the six events necessary to qualify for the year-round title, so calm the (expletive) down.

Q: So…remind me again why I should be playing in all of these games, rather than just the events that I think I’m going to do really well at?

A: I’m glad you asked. Another new caveat with this scoring system is that participants will use their six highest-scoring events to go towards their year-round total score – so if you screw up really bad with your PGA Golfers, it doesn’t hurt you. We’re not averaging all your games anymore; we’re just picking your six best ones. Again: we’re trying to reward participation with this bad boy.

Q: While we’re here, how are fantasy basketball and football going to work? Aren’t there going to be way too many people trying to play to fit in one league?

A: Indeed there will be – which is why the ALACS will support multiple leagues. Go big or go home baby!

If any of you have comments or thoughts related to the new and improved scoring system – please post them in the comments of this entry. I’ll be happy to respond to them. Thanks for reading and, as always, enjoy the games.

NBA Playoff Pool: First Round Wrap-up

Kobe and the Lakers still haven't lost a playoff game.

The first round of the NBA Playoffs concluded on Sunday when the Celtics finally put the Hawks down, and five of the 27 ALACS Brackets made it through the first round unscathed. Sean Stokke, Andy Popp, The Commish, and Cici and Colleen Northup -- two ALACS newcomers -- each correctly predicted the winner of each first round series. They stand atop the standings, which can be found by clicking on the NBA Playoffs link at http://www.alafantasysports.com/.

The San Antonio Spurs undoubtedly did the most damage to the ALACS Pool as a whole -- which is surprising if only because they've been the dominant team of the last decade, and they repeat the same process every year: cruise control for the regular season, calculated dominance in the playoffs. I will never understand how so many of you guys decided this team wasn't making it through the first round this year. Only one participant, Steve Duin, picked the Spurs to win yet another NBA Championship this year.

Taking a quick glance at the pool leaders:
- Sean Stokke missed less games (seven) than the other four perfect brackets. As he and The Commish have identical brackets and an identical NBA Finals length, the best The Commish can hope for at this point is a tie. Unfortunate.
- Andy Popp's bold prediction of a Utah/Detroit NBA Finals -- which would hold only slightly more entertainment value than a Spurs/Pistons rematch, for the record -- is markedly different than anyone else at the top of the pool.
- Colleen Northup was the only pool participant to pick the New Orleans Hornets to reach the Western Conference finals. They've already taken a 1-0 lead over the Spurs.
- Cici Northup was the only one of the pool leaders to pick the Spurs to reach the NBA Finals.

Enjoy the second round.