So one thing I hear every day is: “Why don’t we have more opportunities to wager on sports?”
Just kidding. You can ask Emmanuel Clase if you don’t believe me, but there are far too many opportunities to bet on sports.
On the other hand, the great thing about there being 6.8 million too many opportunities to bet on sports is that offering one more chance won’t do any social harm. For the last 20 years or so, my friend Danny Wong has run a home run pool (pictured above: a home run pool — get it?) that he has graciously opened to any Braves Journal readers who are interested. Full Disclosure: I run the website for this contest, and I participate, but my only stake if any of you enter is that, should I win something, it will be more.
The rules are simple: you pick 8 players from among the 126 players who hit 16 or more last season. The total for these 8 players for last year has to be less than 219. Those are your 8 players for the whole season; there is no substitution.
There are seven separate contests, regular season only. One for each month (March is combined with April; September is combined with October) and one aggregate for the entire season. Your score for a month, or overall is the homers hit by the top 6 of your 8 players in that month. Thus, in general, the players that count will change from month to month, and your top 6 for the season need not necessarily be your top 6 in any particular month, though in practice they usually will be.
Prizes are awarded every month to the monthly winners (5% of the total pool per month) and the rest is paid out to the top four finishers at the end ona descending scale. Historically, thre have been about 100 entries, with monthly prizes of around $750 and end-of-season first price of approximately $5,000. The entry fee is $150.
If you’re interested in playing, go to https://wongpool2026.anvil.app. You get an ID and can then pick as many teams as you want. Most of the fun is in naming the teams… we have no limit on names. You can make teams and not enter the contest, but if you actually want to enter, you have to Venmo Danny with the entrance fee. Write me at webmaster@wongpool.com (one of my many email addresses) and I’ll tell how to pay Danny directly, or you can pay me and I’ll pay him. When the season starts, I will delete any unpaid teams.
Once the season starts, the same website will report daily on standings. Good luck if you decide to get in.
Spencer Strider will open the season on the IL with an oblique strain.
AA continues to amaze with his failure to address the second biggest need on the roster aside form shortstop, and it has only gotten worse.
Hell, I’ll say it: trying to stay healthy as an elite pro athlete and subsisting on tofu, soy milk, and quinoa are mutually exclusive.
That might not be helping the situation for sure…lol
I don’t really care one way or the other but your claim made me wonder if someone had studied such a basic question. Turns out they have and you’re right:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8623732/
From Sunday’s game, Lopez was around 91 or so on 4 seamer. I was expecting a move on him today and not this move. So, adding a potential Lopez problem the pitching destruction cascade is past High Falls, but no quit Niagara or Victoria and hopefully never gets to Iguazu.
AA spent the money. I have no problems there. Problem is that he gave Strider $20M instead of a pitcher who has proven he can stay healthy.
Strider is slowly becoming my least favorite Brave with how much of a genius he portrays himself coupled with his inability to stay healthy. Congrats dude, you’re Mr. Health Scientist. Well, let’s see some fruit of that.
Lopez says his problem is mechanical and not physical, but it would not surprise me at all to see him also go to the IL after a start or 2.
On a lighter note:
Great stuff. But what made him really great was how shallow he could play and still make these catches. His great plays were routine bloops to center field. These were the cherry on top.
Six of the eight were in support of Tom Glavine, but Glavine went in the Hall of Fame twelve years before him.
I saw Andruw make a catch in Durham in early 1996 that was almost a mirror of the Phillies catch in the video. He just made the difficult look normal.
To me, Andruw wasn’t as impressive-looking defensively as Andrelton was however many years later, he was just disorientingly great. For the first several months that I saw him in center, he wasn’t where I expected him to be. The batter would hit the ball at a certain angle towards left center or right center and I’d think, “OK, that’s going to the wall, now will the runner will be able to score from first…oh, Andruw’s there & is going to catch it. Never mind.” When the TV shot switched to the camera showing the outfield, he was always three steps closer to the ball than I expected. The catches themselves didn’t seem that amazing, it was just that he got those phenomenal jumps and so was in position to make so many of them look routine.
I’m shocked, shocked that gambling is being discussed here.
I can’t force myself to discuss the ongoing health disaster that is the Braves’ rotation; or, to be more accurate, my mental health requires me to avoid that subject. Instead, I, like ububba, will focus on lighter Braves-related news. This past Saturday night, my wife and I saw the great Emmylou Harris in concert. We first saw her almost 50 years ago, and we thought she was as good as ever. Did you know that she is a big Braves fan? She’ll watch Braves games on her phone when she’s on the road, including backstage, and she works her tour so that she can see games. And to make the concert even more Braves-centric, I spotted Mike Mills of REM there (wearing a cool nudie suit). Mills is also a huge Braves fan.
Hoping she did “Pancho & Lefty…”
Yeah, negating the blooper singles don’t make for as great a reel, I suppose. But what’s also so amazing about the highlights from that reel is the ease with which he makes those plays. No histrionics, just “I-meant-to-do-that/this-is-what-I-do” simplicity.
And when he makes that game-ending/shutout-saving snag in Montreal, you see Glavine look at the catcher & just say, “Wow,” which is about as much emotion as you ever got out of him.
Keeping it as light as possible today… because tomorrow afternoon I get to fly out of LGA… fully charge the phone & bring a new book, I think.
tflloyd,
At grand opera house Macon? I know she was there in the past few days.
Yep, Cliff. A great venue for a great artist.
I was mostly being flippant about the vegan thing, but I do think there is something to it. This is the third time — I think — that Strider has had an oblique issue. That’s a relatively uncommon injury for pitchers. He’s also had hamstring issues in the past as well. He is earning a valid reputation for being injury prone. I think you have to at least consider whether the vegan lifestyle is doing him any favors in terms of his athleticism and his ability to stay healthy.
I will admit to getting triggered about Strider stuff. There was so much nauseating Strider worship with the “he’s vegan!”, “he’s quadzilla!”, “he’s so analytical!” stuff. But he was also an out-of-nowhere fantasy baseball sensation. He led the league in wins and strikeouts at age 24, two things that rack up fantasy points but have a lot less value in real baseball. He only had a 3.0 WAR that year. Jair Jurrjens had a 6.5 WAR season as a 23-year old, for instance, and we can think of many other examples of players who had early success that they couldn’t replicate. When I started consuming fantasy baseball content, I was confused why he was being talked about so much. They still want that 2023 fantasy season to come back.
What’s asinine is that AA then felt compelled to lock him up longterm. Why him? What was in his profile that said that he was any better bet than the others to stay healthy and be worth his contract?
Of course, I’m also the sucker because I took him in the 7th round this year, so I get what I deserve. He can still have a really good season, but I’m not sure why fans are shocked.
I’m not sure that Jurrjens at age 23 is a great comp for Strider at 24 except in the general sense that pitchers often don’t sustain early-career success, and I can see why people were so much more excited about Strider than about Jurrjens. The big difference to me is that Strider had 13.5 K/9 and 2.8 BB/9 (and 13.8 & 3.1 the previous year), while Jurrjens had 6.4 and 3.1 (and similar numbers his previous year). The league contexts were a bit different, but it’s not like we’re comparing the 2020s with the 1960s or 1970s. Jurrjens had a better ERA and ERA+, but my guess is that a relatively low BABIP allowed of .274 compared to Strider’s .316 accounts for a lot of that, and Strider’s FIP was an ML-best 2.85 compared to Jurrjens’ 3.68. Jurrjens did pitch about 30 more innings than Strider, which is definitely worth something. I haven’t done any research, but I’m nonetheless pretty sure that a pitcher with good results and Strider’s K & BB rates is a much better bet for longterm career success than one with similar results at a similar age and Jurrjens’s rates.
And to answer your question Rob, I don’t know what the front office thought about Strider’s chances of staying healthy, but I imagine they thought that as long as he could stay reasonably healthy, he was going to be really good, while they couldn’t be as sure that most pitchers would stay really good even if they were healthy.
Ironically, Strider picked up the vegan diet under the pretense that not eating meat reduces inflammation. I wouldn’t be surprised if he switched it up.
AA got a lot of hate for not locking up Fried who was also frequently brilliant/injured.
I didn’t take many Braves pitchers in my fantasy draft. Just Raisel, a late-pick Fuentes and last-pick Schwellenbach to stash. Went hard on Braves hitters though: Ronald, Riley, Olson (and Freddie)
I’m definitely losing again this year 🙂
Bollocks. From the time Fried joined the rotation in 2019, he had only one season significantly shortened by injury, which was 2023. So that’s one out of 6 seasons. Most of us were clamoring to lock him up after the 2021 and 2022 seasons, at which time he had an outstanding track record.
We were never giving any pitcher on the wrong side of 30 an 8 year deal, which I believe is what Fried got. And we shouldn’t have given him that. I will defend AA on this.
The question was extending him at 27-28 (yes), not whether we should’ve outbid the Yankees for his services as a 30-year-old free agent (no).
We can’t know whether any conversation was had about an extension but none was ever made public, so I assume that no serious offer was made to give a 6 year deal at say $22 million per season to 28 yo Max Fried.
Jon, how deep is your league? I was able to get Fuentes off the waiver wire.
How many IL spots do you have? Was it worth stashing Schwelly for that long? I have 2 IL spots that are currently clogged, but they’ll come available in mid-April. I wonder if I should stash Schwelly.
Max Fried, a union rep, was always going to test the market.
Fried had the perma-blister that’s easily forgotten in hindsight and he missed a lot of time in the minors.
My league is 11 teams mixed and a bunch of Dads with casual interest. Maybe 3-4 teams are truly competitive each year.
Waivers open tomorrow. We drafted Sunday.
BravesVision and Spectrum reached a deal.
I did the math and Yastrzemski’s 6 homers in 42 plate appearances works out to a tidy 96 for a full season. But then you will sit him against lefties so it’s probably only in the low 60’s.
As long as his platoon partner hits about 30 we’ll be ok.
AA and McGuirk’s baseball management of this organization is in “Bold strategy, Cotton” territory.
Malpractice. They ought to be hung, drawn and quartered, metaphorically speaking.
Dang, it sure would be nice if spring stats actually meant something. We have 5 position players OPSing over 1000 and we are blowing away the rest of the grapefruit league. Maybe spring training will matter for the first time in my lifetime.
Definitely. This is our year. 350 HRs
Spring is meaningless, yeah, yeah, but it feels a lot better to win the Grapefruit cup (for the first time in 20 years I think) with Riley, Olson, Yaz, and Baldwin posting video game numbers and just about every pitcher looking decent than to go 11-19 and hope we will sort of flip a switch on Friday.
Heck even Harris has a .600 OPS in spring which for him is like 1.000 this time of year.
To me, Harris may have had the most encouraging spring of anyone. His walk rate was just under 9%; he’s never even been at 5% in any season in his career. If he could just walk at league average rates he is a very valuable player.
To be fair, his total number of bases on balls this spring was 4. Like all spring training stats, the small sample size renders it likely meaningless. But remember that he went a couple of months last year in which he didn’t have 4 walks.
Good morning from Denver airport! First time ever, I will be in the US during opening day and am excited to be able to watch the Braves. This was quite an offseason but I cannot help but be optimistic. The offense needs to carry the team likely on most days, at least until June. Go Braves!
That’s right. The winter is long enough without giving up on the spring.