Fantasy Baseball: I Had Francisco Liriano...On My Bench

This is why fantasy baseball drives me crazy. It's all about the stats, right? That's what the experts continue to preach. Sabermetrics, the way of the future! WHIPS and K/9s and GB/FBs. I'm xFIPed out.

I don't even know what half of those acronyms stand for and if their corresponding number is good or bad until somebody explains it to me. And that happens every time!

So when I had to make the decision of whether to start Francisco Liriano or bench him, I looked to the stats.

I know, a lot of fantasy writers will look to past success to predict future success, which I'm not really sure makes any sense. Things change. And Liriano looked like a changed man, for the worse.

His 2011 game log reads like a horror story, Stephen King, not R.L. Stine:

@TOR: 4 ER, 5 BB, 3 K, L

@NYY - 4 ER, 3 BB, 5 K, L

KC - 7 ER, 1 BB, 4 K, L.

@BAL - 2 ER, 5 BB, 2 K, W

TB - 7 ER, 4 BB, 4 K, L

I know you don't feel like looking up the end results yourself, so here's the damage: 23.2 IP, 24 ER, 18 BB, 18 K. One win, four losses.

What happened to the strikeouts? Dude's got a career 9.2 K/9 and now he has to labor for five punchouts a game? He'd also more than doubled his BB/9 from a career 3.3 to a whopping 6.8. Gross! But at least he had a shiny 9.13 ERA and 1.90 WHIP to call his own. 

With all of these stats telling me no and every writer in the fantasy industry wary—AND with Liriano's own manager threatening to bump him from the rotation—I just couldn't bring myself to start him. Too much bad.

Naturally, a no-hitter ensues. Go me.

I started having a bad feeling about my decision after the fourth inning. Why is it that when you bench one of your players and he is in the process of having a great game, you want him to fail? Yet if he was in your lineup for that great game, you love the guy?

Human minds are weird.

Anybody else out there in the fantasy community feeling the pain I'm feeling? Actually, you probably started him because you're not swayed by mind-controlling stats like some people (me) and you actually have faith in your players.

At least I didn't drop him last week. I was tempted.

By the way, I also benched Edwin Jackson (8 IP, ER) and Ryan Dempster (7 IP, ER, 5 K). These two hobo Joes came into Tuesday's games with 5.86 and 9.58 ERAs, respectively.

Once again, stats screw me. Dempster actually had a no-hitter of his own going into the fourth inning and I was about to have a heart attack. 

Lessons: Don't always trust stats, don't pay too much attention to the experts and the whole world is against me.