The Dongers Club – ’20 Preview: Top 10 Busts
We now move into the real 2020 Preview Articles and first up I’m going to go through 10 things that I am very cautious of in the 2020 MLB season. You can use this for seasonal drafts but also as
The Dongers Club – ’20 Preview: First Pitch
We begin the 2020 Dongers Club Season by taking time to announce the lessons learned, strategy changes and overall plans that I have for the upcoming MLB DFS season based upon a long few months in the off-season to digest 2019 and other prior seasons. To me, no other major sport has gone through more changes the last few years than Baseball and one can anticipate the sport to continue to evolve under the unfortunate direction of Rob Manfred. We’ve seen the well documented shift towards launch angles & exit velocity with an increased emphasis in upside for at bats at the risk of the formerly perceived negative downside of striking out. We’ve seen some teams adopt a unique approach to handling starting pitching with the use of openers or just generally mediocre arms who are only going to go 4 maybe 5 innings at best before turning over to a setup bullpen from the middle on out. And probably most disturbing last season we saw more teams completely going as bad as they can in an effort to gut payroll, rebuild for the future and just not even bother trying to compete while other teams become more ‘super’ teams. It should be well known if you pay attention to anything I say that I’ve never been a fan of Rob Manfred, but to me there’s a clear and obvious direction that MLB should head in terms of it’s competitive balance/scheduling/league structure and it has nothing to do with salary caps or finances. The league is proposing going to a 6 team playoff format in both leagues while also allowing a team to select their opponent. It’s mostly stupid but actually the idea of changing the playoff format isn’t all that bad. You see, one thing that has changed over the years in Baseball is teams now actually understand that sometimes they have no shot at the beginning of the season as the gap between the haves with free-agency money and the have-nots grows. So if they are in a division with too many hurdles to compete in the short term then just go out and be bad all together from the get go. This season we can already rule out the Orioles, Royals, Tigers, Mariners, Marlins, Pirates and Giants from contention. It’s nowhere near as bad as last year where those same teams plus the Blue Jays, White Sox, Rangers, Reds among others went into the season with zero chance at competing. My proposal is as follows. Expand from 30 Major League teams to 32 teams. Re-Align to Eight divisions of Four (Similar to the NFL) Expand the playoffs to Six teams in each league (Similar to the current NFL) The expansion aspect is the easy part. Las Vegas and Montreal make perfect spots with Nashville as a distant third city to add a MLB team. Las Vegas is a hot bed for Baseball talent and is proving to be a fine pro sports town. Montreal is just ripping the bandaid off and going back to a city that lost a team prior assuming they offer up a stadium. Nashville would be the leverage in case Montreal cannot get it done. So we then go to four team divisions AL East: Boston, New York, Baltimore, Toronto AL North: Minnesota, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit AL South: Kansas City, Tampa Bay, Texas, Houston AL West: Seattle, Anaheim, Oakland, Las Vegas NL East: Philadelphia, Montreal, New York, Washington NL North: Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Chicago NL South: St. Louis, Atlanta, Florida, Colorado NL West: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Arizona The American League re-alignment is the easy part but the National League has an obvious issue between the North and South where you lose the Cardinals/Cubs rivalry and also pairing Colorado in the same division as Miami is … well, weird. So this is a spot where expanding to Nashville would make a little more geographical sense as they’d slide into the south with Washington and St. Louis/Colorado would both go into the North (or just call it the midwest) while Pittsburgh slides into the East with Cincinnati, Philadelphia and the NY Mets. Either way you get the general idea. Then the four division winners plus two wild card teams make the playoffs. By doing this you create an easier path for every team to make the playoffs because each team only has to be better than three teams to earn that automatic berth. I would make the first round a three game series where ALL three games are at the home team’s stadium. Keep in mind this is two division winners vs the two wild card teams. Unfair? Deal with it. You want to get an easy path then go win your damn division. Second round would be a five game series 2-2-1 and the Championship rounds would remain best of seven format. There’s a few other details in regards to balanced schedule and interleague play but I’ll spare you those details and just tell you that the schedule would be reduced to 156 games. The argument against this has always been from purists who said it would ruin the statistical integrity of the game. Exactly. That’s already been done. So there Mr. Commissioner. There’s your resolution to your beyond stupid proposal…. THE 2020 DONGERS CLUB Now onto my thoughts for the upcoming DFS season and what changes you will definitely see form the Dongers Club. Until of course I decide to change my mind by April 23rd or some random date like that. I played too much last year and the year before and the year before. By too much I mean too many slates and ultimately I was letting the pride that I had in writing analysis for as many slates as possible interfere with sanity of when I should and should not be doing an article. A lot of this stemmed from me watching or hearing about other “analysts” in the industry who right around mid-March would