Highlights From Diamond Mind July 2024

TOURNAMENT NEWS

The Grand Open Tournament XVIII and the 2024 Masters have both advanced to Round 3.

Round 3 of the GOT saw the field reduced from 108 to 72 teams. Three 77-win teams made the cut, with five others missing out.

Defending champion Alan (WhatsMyID) Herzberg’s The Fabulous Thunderbirds in the Willie Hernandez League topped all tournament participants in Round 2 with a 102-60 record.

Round 3 of the 2024 Masters comprises two linked accelerated seasons – Classic followed by SSG – with participants choosing four different franchise/position groups (IF, OF, SP, C/RP) from which to draft their rosters, with their SSG rosters in the second league being limited to the players they finished the season with in the Classic first league.

At the end of Round 2, Herzberg also is tied atop the Masters leaderboard with Richard (richinaz) Ashman.

REGISTER NOW FOR LADDER LEAGUES STANDARD ASSN SEASON 56

Registration is now open for Season 56 of the Ladder Leagues Standard Association.

For those unfamiliar with them, the Ladder Leagues operate similarly to European soccer. The Standard Association presently comprises seven ranked leagues. At the end of each Ladder Leagues season, the top teams from each league are promoted to higher leagues and the bottom teams are relegated to lower leagues. The promotion and relegation system in the Ladder Leagues ensures competitive leagues with similarly-skilled owners.

Standard Association leagues are autodraft leagues. There is another Ladder Leagues association – the Random 600 Association – which are manual draft leagues and runs on its own schedule.

The Standard Association uses all Standard League rules, with the DH on or off in alternate years. In Season 56, the DH will be off. New Classic salaries, which will be introduced in mid/late July, will be in effect in SA56 leagues. Along with the GOT, success in the Ladder Leagues Standard Association could be viewed as the “gold standard” of owner achievement.

Why not give it a try?

FEARSOME FOURSOME

In major league history, no reliever has ever been the winning pitcher in all four games of a postseason series.  (Jesse Orosco is the only reliever to win three games in a series, which he did in the 1986 NLCS.)

Bob Lee registered this remarkable feat for Ron (8GoBucs21) Carr’s Bone Gap Batarians in the Toss 5 Alive league.  After picking up the win after blowing the save in Game 1 of the series, he picked up wins in extra innings in Games 4 (3-2/3 scoreless IP), 6 (2 scoreless IP) and 7 (2 scoreless IP).

CUSTOM LEAGUES KINGS

This week we’re back with Bob Jecmen.

Click here to read more.

THE TIPPING POINT

Each month we’ll offer a few tips in this space that may come in handy for the beginner as well as the experienced team owner.

Progression leagues are a popular type of continuing custom league.  In general, they progress through real seasons – year by year or in multi-year increments – and team owners are allowed to carry over players from one progression season to the next, who are referred to as “keepers”.  Each new season in the progression, there will be some form of draft for free agents and players making their debut in the progression’s upcoming real season(s).

Just as the GM of a real team must maintain a steady flow of affordable talent to have sustained success, team owners in progression leagues must look and plan ahead to future seasons.  To facilitate the process of planning ahead, creating “test” leagues with the player pool(s) of the next season(s) in the progression can help.

Test leagues mirroring the upcoming seasons in the progression enable you to:

• see what your roster could look like with your keepers
• identify free agents in your current league that you might want to add, so that you can claim them as keepers in the upcoming season
• identify incoming “rookies” and probable free agents

There are a number of sites – such as BBREF – that list major league player debuts by season.  (For the BBREF URL, just change the year in the URL to view your season of choice.)