Week Four Summary

Welcome everybody to This Week in Murphy Memorial (TWIMM), where GM Jaques is stepping in for a traveling Commissioner McNulty. Once again, the ROYL featured a series of heated match-ups, but after all the dust had settled, the standings stood unchanged after the week.

League leader Scuffie McGee eked out a close one, with GM Sigel needing to pull out all of the wily tricks one would expect from team inspired by Ol’ Scuffballs. The win was anything but conventional. With 57 Rs and 18 HRs the offense was firing more freely than a US gunship off the Iranian coast. Yet they couldn’t hold RBI, SB or AVG, losing all three categories by narrow margins. Al Pujols, still smarting from the great “Sizemore-ic shift” in GM Sigel’s depth chart this offseason, took this week’s match-up personally and led the Three R’s in hitting. Scuff took four of five pitching categories, but curiously could not muster a single win despite starting nine pitchers on the week.

For the Cracker Jacks, oh what a difference a week makes! After thumping the Shirts in Week Three with a barrage of RBI Crax had a regression to the mean. A paltry offensive week still mustered him a 3-1-1 record in hitting as the Road Babes also couldn’t duplicate the previous week’s juggernaught performance against Float It. Nine of ten categories came down to the final day and the Babes snuck out with the victory. GM Sands, voted the league’s most purely intelligent member, was heard mumbling some nonsense about Icarus which really made no sense to anyone else but himself. Meanwhile, Freund decided to light the Bong of Victory, a key ritual to his new tantric approach to fantasy baseball, which thus far has yielded a two week winning streak.

The Steaks and Fastballs had a relatively quiet affair, despite it being one of the more lopsided results of the week. The Balls are doing their best to shrug off any hint of sophomore slump. This was by far the best result anyone has ever had who happened to put Jesus Colome in their starting lineup. Balls’ GM Mike Hoffman commented on this “anti-orthodox” move, “I knew it would take some fucked up shit to make Iafe take his eyes of the prize this week. So, I thought to myself, what better way to create havoc than by putting a guy named Jesus on my team? It didn’t hurt that his initials were actually J.C. I don’t think Iafe ever recovered from that mental mind-fuck. And people think Sands is smart.”

The match-up between Hot Ice and Busey was waged on two battlegrounds this week. Busey took the match-up by sweeping the hitting categories and doing enough on the mound to get the overall win. Their rivalry, unquenched by fantasy, took them outside the fantasy arena as both stepped up on their soapboxes for some heated political debate. If these two sat on a political seesaw, it would balance itself perfectly. They each stood across the great partisan divide, stared one another down and lobbied for their beliefs like a young Hamilton and Burr. Leaving aside the political particulars, it was a great moment for the ROYL, proving yet again that it’s more than just some really overly intense fantasy baseball that makes this league great.

The Shirts and Float It faced off, both reeling from absurdly ridiculous weeks by their Week Three opponents. This match-up was decided on the final day, as the hitting categories were basically already determined. The Shirts were confident that they could win the week or at least tie having posted a very solid pitching week, led by Clay Buccholz, despite only starting seven pitchers. But after Saturday night when Terry Francona pulled a Grady Little, leaving Buccholz in a little too long and costing the Shirts a crucial win, Float It responded with a textbook Sunday Surge. Down 15 Ks with 3 starts to go, Beckett opened the game notching strikeouts for nine of the first ten outs he induced. “Thomas” Edison Volquez followed up Beckett with another massive K night and then Jered Weaver notched a Sunday Night win to steal the week for his squad.

Who knew so little movement in the standings could be packed with so much drama? That about does it for TWIMM… With a month behind us MM is as strong as ever and the season is still anybody’s for the taking.