Baseball

It's been one heck of a fun second week of baseball. Everyone is on the DL, multiple games have seen benches-clearing brawls, and Shohei Ohtani looks like he might actually stand a chance to be the phenom he was billed as. Ok, so there are varying degrees of "fun" there, but hey! Life isn't just slurping down ice cream and raisins under a palm tree. Which denotes true fun, of course. You know what melts ice cream? If you answered "a spicy Dominican sunset," well, you're weird. Correct, but weird. It's fire, you silly goose!…

Welcome to the first edition of my weekly Fire & Ice articles here on Fantrax. Each week I'll be looking at a player who has been under performing (Ice) and over performing (Fire) and diving into the numbers to evaluate whether their performance is legitimate or anomalous. The title is also as close as I could get to a Game of Thrones reference without getting too carried away (and if you ever want to talk Thrones please find me @NathanDokken on Twitter).There's only one week in the books, so a lot of stats aren't…

Well, folks, here we are. It's the end of the line for my 2018 Dudes and Don'ts, and it's my first foray into calling D&Ds at closer. They're an incredibly volatile bunch, and with so many bullpens still unclear as we roll into the season, one call could be completely wrong within a few days of me writing this. All it takes right now is one bad outing for one of the guys vying for a job to bump him way down the closer depth chart. So what the hell, let's have some fun! It is fantasy, after all. To the Dude! The Dude -…

Welcome to the Negative Nate version of Dudes and Don'ts! It was actually more difficult than I thought it would be for me to come up with names here. I dislike plenty of starters, but with most of them, it's all purely injury related. That doesn't make for great written content. "Hey, this guy gets hurt all the time. He'll get hurt again this year. Don't draft him!" Shampoo, rinse, repeat. Guys like James Paxton, Alex Wood, Rich Hill, and Danny Duffy all congregate under this umbrella of doom. I expect varying returns of…

Much like the best barbeque sauce or a stern letter sent to a co-worker, there’s no better type of prediction than a bold one. And I’ve seen plenty of writers throw out bold predictions like “Francisco Lindor finishes 2018 as a top-15 player!” To those writers, I give a hearty scoff. That’s not a bold prediction; that’s a mild prediction. That’s the generic brand sauce that disappoints your friends and neighbors when you pull it out for your grilling session. It’s the Kyle Seager of predictions. It likely produces, but no…