Fantasy Baseball: By The Numbers Week Three

Welcome to week three. Its an important week for me as its Little 500 week at Indiana University. For those of you who don’t know what it is, I’ll let Wikipedia explain. To summarize it best, Lance Armstrong called it the “coolest bike race I ever attended.” It’s a week full of activities, including the Little 50 which I will be participating in. So forgive the short intro. Your homework assignment for the week is to rent Breaking Away. Now let’s look at the numbers.

K/BB ratio for Ryan Dempster, as of right now a career high. I wasn’t big on Dempster to start the season, but so far he’s been more than solid. Some looked at his 2008 season as a fluke due to his disappointing 2009 campaign but there may be something more at work here. In ’09 Dempster’s daughter was born with DiGeorge syndrome just a few days before Opening Day. Courtesy of NBC Chicago, “April was as miserable as I’ve ever been, being away from my wife, my son and my daughter’s in a hospital and she’s never seen the outside of anything except an ambulance ride to and from the airport to get medically transported from Arizona to Childrens in Chicago.”

That’s just heartbreaking, and it actually shows in his April numbers, when he posted a 5.40. But he got himself back on track, posting a much more respectable 3.34 and almost 150 strike outs the rest of the season. He’ll be just fine as a decent SP2/great SP3.

Three

RBIs and hits for Tim Lincecum on Saturday. While its always fun to see a pitcher have a big batting line, this is particularly astounding as this gives Lincecum more runs batted in than runs allowed. Its tempting to imagine him ending the season like this, but he would have to have the best hitting season for a pitcher in major league history. Still, it’s good trash talk while it lasts.

Read the rest here.