Todd Zola wrote: If the timing is right, we can do our best to say "pick him up this week", but often, this is as much of a gut call as it is smart. If I have a guy that is droppable and there is no one available that would be particularly useful, I'll take the flier on one of these speculative plays. Perry, Ryan and I play in a couple of NFBC-like leagues that run FAAB on Saturday night, so often we have a feel for guys that may be picked up Sunday night in the NFBC.
First off, a big thanks for taking the time to provide a very detailed response. I am humbled by your generosity -- which only prompts me to want to contribute to this site even more, to what seems like a vibrant community.
Secondly, I have never played in a FAAB league before. Would like to try one out this year, for the hell of it. Saw a lot of material here for how to approach it. Kind of makes it less daunting knowing there is a lot of practical advice here.
Todd Zola wrote: The task of getting everyone familiar with the names is done in Platinum. We project and profile everyone we feel will make an impact that season so you will already have their names in the spring. We provide Minor League rankings in a couple of different forms so you are covered there.
I'm not totally familiar with all the tools and offerings of this site. Essentially, for now, what you're saying is that effort has been focused on providing rankings for Hitters and Pitchers, which represent the player population that we as drafters are most likely to target in our drafts right now (given the always tenuous state of info we have in the off season) and then these same players will each have a write-up come January? Don't know how to use the CVRC. Is it like HQ's value generating engine?
In the meantime then, are we to construct our rankings by joining the hitting and pitching lists ourselves or can the site currently generate a default ranking combining both?
Todd Zola wrote: The tricky part is keeping up with the in-season surprises, for lack of a better word. We produce "rest-of-season" projections, which are one means of keeping stock of possible in-season call-ups as I will add players to the projection, even if they have not been promoted yet, if I feel they will get the call at some point in the season. Getting the word out otherwise will be done in one of two ways - via the free site articles or the message board. Perhaps if the interest is high, we can set up a weekly thread in the Platinum-only forum to discuss free agents for the upcoming week. To piggyback on another point about the site, this is the sort of advantage we have over other sites -- the direct access to us and the fact we PLAY in tout Wars, LABR and the NFBC. You would not just be reading an article every Thursday entitled "Possible Guys to FAAB a Week Early" and not have any interaction with the author.
I’ve been reading you for a long time but never imagined you would take the time to interact with fantasy players online. I am sure everyone here is grateful that you’re taking the time to do this.
Todd Zola wrote: To me, one of the latent gems of the site is the message board. I yearn to have ours as vibrant as Rotojunkie or BaseballHQ - it once was actually. But times have changed and it is quite difficult to build up a community when there are so many other more modern means of social and Internet interaction. But that does not mean we should not still try to use the forums to our advantage and reading the boards is a great way for users to get additional content, past that from the daily articles. As you can probably tell, I much prefer spending my time answering questions on the forums as opposed to coming up with a topic the reader may or may not care about for my "Tuesday" piece or whatever. Like I said, I am a forum rat
Well, if this is the best way to get your views, so be it. This site operates from a totally different perspective than most other pay sites, where most or a lot of the best content is reserved for subscribers. There is a free flow of valuable information on the free areas of this site – so much of it in fact that I hope those who see value in it, will do the honorable thing and become subscribers.
By the way, have your software people provided instructions on how to get around that “invalid token” screen? It still creeps up now and again.
Also, another glitch for me is that whenever a reply text goes over a certain amount of characters, the reply box tends to become ‘jumpy’ and stops scrolling. For this post, I have had to write it up on a Word page and then cut and paste it here. Is that a common occurrence?