SBL Notebook, Week 13

Our arrival at the season’s midpoint is as good a time as any to disperse into the atmosphere our seemingly annual rumination/screed on the sadly diminished state of offense in the SBL. Two or three years ago, back when ’roids were still the rage, the kind of hitting numbers we’re seeing these days, and have been for some weeks, would’ve gotten you laughed out of the league by some of our less charitable owners -- not to mention a virtually guaranteed losing week. No more. Today, you can post minuscule (by traditional standards) numbers across the board and still cobble together a winning or even damn-near-unbeaten week. This week’s Exhibit A of this phenomenon -- and we deploy this example only because it involves the commissioner’s favorite (and, paradoxically, often most-hated) team -- would be Mikee’s Moaners, who got small to the tune of 5 HRs, 28 RBIs, 24 TB, 30 runs and 3 SBs . . . and still went 5-1. Seven saves, a 1.05 K-rat and .360 OBP certainly didn’t hurt their cause, but overall their pitching was nothing special (3.48 ERA, 1.29 BR, 3-3 WL) -– meaning that to a significant degree their diminutive offense carried them to those five wins. In other words, they may have been bad, but others were worse. But that’s nothing new this year -– no matter how bad your team’s stats might look on paper/computer screen, you can often count on somebody else being even tinier. Used to be, double-digit home-run counts and run, RBI and TB totals in the high 30s to low-mid 40s were pretty much the baseline you needed to get to if you wanted to be competitive. Now, low 30s and, increasingly, even the mid-20s are enough to get the job done. With apologies to Jimmy Carter, welcome to the SBL’s Era of Limits. Even as recently as last season, it seemed the league’s fallow periods of offense were always ephemeral, lasting no more than a couple-three weeks. This season is different. We crunched a few numbers and found that over the last seven weeks -– a little more than half the season to date –- the league’s 12 teams have averaged a puny 29.6 RBIs and 30.2 runs. Seven weeks -- that’s not a temporary blip on the screen, that’s a full-blown trend. What’s particularly odd is that teams have been averaging more runs than RBIs (consider that a player can accumulate as many as four RBIs with a single swing, while runs can be accrued only one at a time and usually require help from teammates), and that the average number of home runs during our sample period has actually been a fairly respectable 8.3 per team. So what does this mean –- that 80% to 90% of SBL players’ home runs are solo shots? Who knows? This ain’t the Elias Bureau we’re running over here. All we know is that homers and RBIs usually go together like ballpark franks and beer, but this year there’s a disconnect –- witness Dennis’ Puny Pontiffs’ incongruous totals of 10 HRs and 21 RBIs this week, or the Moaners’ 10 and 24 last week. What we also know: offense, in general, has fallen off a cliff. The steroid era may have been a stain on baseball that won’t wash out, but we in the fantasy world sure do miss it. . . . Meanwhile, in the SBL pennant chases (oh yeah, those), there was significant movement in the American division, where Paulo’s Zeros blew the race open a little bit, executing on 5-and-1-to-0-and-6 pirouette on the second-place BGoff Bammers’ heads and nearly tripling their lead, which leapt from three games to eight. The NL race was static, with Dan’s Cherry Valley Bombers and runners-up JP’s Whiteskins still separated by three games after both went 5-1.