Introduction

This is essentially my blurb about why I am doing this, what my background is and why on earth you should care what I have to say. After explaining those things I hope that you are still reading and wish to see what I have to say about my philosophy on building a winning fantasy baseball team.

To get the boring stuff out of the way first I am embarking upon creating this fantasy baseball page because quite frankly I’ve always had more fun talking about and researching about fantasy baseball than I have had playing it. Don’t get me wrong I love to play it and I’ve been fairly successful so far but really if you put me in a pub with a few friends I’d rather debate the merits of Steve Delabar vs Joaquin Benoit than sit in front of a computer setting my lineup. I started playing fantasy baseball in 2000 in an AL only auction league with a group of guys that had been playing for a few years together. Now I had played in a few snake draft leagues before then and thought I knew my stuff but this was above my head. I got destroyed but learned some valuable lessons. After a few years of this I left the league and started a league of my own with some friends which was also AL only and auction. We drew up a constitution and are now in our 7^th year. I've been fairly successful but that's only because I spend more time thinking about fantasy baseball than anyone I know that is not directly employed in the industry. 

I began preparing for fantasy baseball many years ago by buying magazines, scribbling notes and then scrambling at the auction for dollar values and strategies. These were not successful years. Intuitively I understood that while we may value standard 5 x 5 categories to win what I really needed to look at what the skills supporting those outcomes. To this end I started with the obvious which was Rotoworld and then followed the TMR first to his yahoo group and then to his own website. I’ve long been a disciple of Matthew Berry although I will confess to reading him less and less now that he’s on ESPN.  About 3 years ago I found myself looking for an edge on my competitors. It seemed that everyone went to ESPN or Rotoworld for their information. Perhaps a few dabbled in other mainstream sites but that was it. I decided to take a flyer on Ron Shandler’s guide and was instantly mesmerized. It provided everything I wanted in a guide with the added benefit that I could glean information from the numbers that even their writers had missed. This is now my bible every year but I’ve also added fangraphs and Brooks Baseball to the mix.

The other source of information that I use is real baseball. Everyone always talks about this but from my experience not enough people legitimately watch the games, see patterns emerge or jobs open up and act on that. They rely on some website to provide that information which may be late coming or never arrive. I also find that reading baseball articles that are not fantasy focused will provide tons of information that your competitors might miss.

We all want information that our competitors don’t have. This is true for Wall Street and it’s true for fantasy baseball. I don’t profess to have all the answers and truthfully I will likely have very few answers but if you create a good rotation of information sources you will likely gain insight or information that your competitors will miss. Hopefully this site is one of those sources.

I named this blog Shallow Fly because, well because my first choice name is taken by some guy that hasn't blogged since 2006 and this is a baseball term. 

My only hope with this is that I get to talk about my favourite subject (I'm Canadian and I spell as such) and that perhaps someone out there enjoys this. 

Onwards...