Zen and the Art of Fantasy Football: Accepting Failure as a Necessity, Not a Problem

Zen Time:

A central feature of Buddhism, especially Zen, is meditation. Sitting meditation is, in fact, called zazenwhich makes the connection between Zen and meditation hard to miss. I resisted any kind of formal Buddhist practice for a very long time, mainly because I was convinced that meditation could not be a useful activity. After all, what’s the use of just sitting around?

It turns out that it is difficult to count the good ways that come from just sitting. Besides increasing concentration and the ability to remain patient and calm, as well as allowing a more balanced frequency, there are real health benefits. There is evidence that meditation has a positive effect on things like depression, high blood pressure, sleep problems, etc. In my life, meditation has clearly improved my ability to receive help. answer by considering what is happening in life, as opposed to being hasty responding in it. It turns out that the difference between feedback and reaction can be huge.

Looking back now, I understand better that my initial resistance to meditation had to do with fear of failure. I was sure I’d be terrible at it – how on earth was I going to think about anything for long? I felt that there was no way I could dwell on nothing, so to avoid what I considered to be a failure, I avoided meditation altogether. Now, however, my understanding is very different: instead of seeing distraction as an obstacle to meditation, I now think that distraction is an important part of the practice. Distraction is natural – the brain thinks, whether we want it to or not. The process of meditation, as far as I know, is not so much learning not to think as it is learning to notice when thinking occurs. How often do we create a narrative in our head that becomes our perception of reality? Part of the meditation practice is recognizing thoughts for what they are – thoughts, not reality. My thoughts may be supported true, but not really true. Things that actually happened to me part of what I use to build my memories, but those memories are also made of what I fear might happen, the wish would have happened instead, or the future possibilities I have created in thin air. Part of the meditation process is simply realizing that we are actually thinking, not remembering. We create narratives around our lives, and the more we learn to recognize when we are creating the narrative, the better we become at pausing and coming back to the breath. It’s easy and hard and frustrating and completely life-changing for me.

So, what I initially feared would be my failure is the only way I can improve – I get better at reflecting on disruptions and learn to accept when I lose my focus. It is to realize that I have been interrupted when I learn not to be interrupted.

How in the world does this work in fantasy baseball?

I may have said it once or twice now: Dreaming is a game of failure. We cannot predict human behavior 100% of the time, so our guesses about players will be wrong. In general. The best fantasy players are bad at predicting what players will do; they’re just not as bad at it as the rest of us. The best fantasy players still can’t react to their lapses in analysis, be able to respond and adjust accordingly, while the rest of us still bemoan our misses – or, worse, blame the players for how they failed them. The best fantasy players are able to admit that their analysis was wrong and quickly begin the process of rebuilding the analysis to help move forward.

This requires looking closely at your teams and being honest with yourself. In that spirit, I’m taking a few minutes this week to look back at some of the analytical misses I’ve done in this column. In seeing misses, I hope to make changes where they are called for and improve my progression process so that misses come less often in the future (more on that in future articles). Here it is:

Spencer Arrighetti – looking for Ks, getting a headache

In my May 19 piece, I recommended taking Arrighetti, thinking he would bring a mix of Ks and inconsistencies. If you’ve picked him up, you’ve seen the inconsistent side – Arrighetti has been brilliant and very bad. By the end of May, his results were outstanding, at least in ways that mattered to legendary managers: Arrighetti’s numbers were solid (with an ERA under 2.00 and a WHIP over 1.10), and he was winning. If you went with him, you were probably glad you picked him up in those first 2 weeks despite his lack of strikeouts. Good news… His Ks picked up well. Bad news… his results haven’t been very good lately. In June, his ERA is up to 9.00 (yikes) while his WHIP is up to 1.60 for the month. However, he averaged 28.1% K% and 18.4% K-BB% (including improving his BB% by about 4.5%).

So, what’s next for Arrighetti? The truth is: I don’t know. Unfortunately, this is the kind of experience Arrighetti has had – good results mixed with bad results. If you’re protecting your ratings, then it makes sense to get Arrighetti away from your team, but if you’re in a position to need Ks, I think I’m still on board with him. I like that he has better control of the strike zone, and his June BABIP (.361) and LOB% (54.2%) suggest he’s been really unlucky this month (maybe because of the high ground balls he’s fielding?). Maybe this is my stubbornness, but right now, I’m tempted to play Arrighetti in soft matchups and bench him against better teams (which, as I said in the May 19 episode, was my strategy anyway) to see if his luck would improve. But when his K% drops or he continues to get hit, it obviously makes sense to demote him. I am not in 15 teams yet. In leagues with 12 teams and less, though, I’m very hesitant to put him on my list.

Michael Conforto and Matt Shaw – increased playing time… not so much

I wrote about both Conforto (May 25th) and Shaw (June 22nd) in recent articles thinking both players were moving into consistent playing time roles. For Conforto, his increased playing time continued for a few days but then quickly petered out. He finds himself getting a few more at bats lately, but apparently I’m just reading the tea leaves wrong here. For Shaw, the story is the same. By the time I wrote about him, his playing time was over and he stayed a few games after my article was published before quickly exiting. Right now, Shaw seems to be shaping up to be more of a shortside platoon role, so obviously, I didn’t get a good read on what was going on there. Neither player has much reason to be on the roster yet, but I’ll be watching Shaw closely to see if anything changes there. Obviously I need to get a better idea of ​​how to implement Craig Counsell’s system in Chicago before making any big moves on taking over the Cubs’ pitching staff.

Nolan Schanuel and Mike Trout – obviously, these guys are the people they’ve always been

In my March 30 article, I made an argument for getting on board with Schanuel’s rise to power while not being too happy about Trout’s hot start. Oops.

My argument with Schanuel was that he didn’t seem to turn too often to be able to hit the ball more. Since then, however, Schanuel’s numbers have stabilized in ways that don’t exactly help fantasy managers. You swing out of place more often now, and his HH% is back to normal. His EV this year is the same as last year, while his maxEV is 3 mph lower and his Barrel% is cut in half. Although he had 2 employees at the end of March, he now has 6 in total. Nothing to see here – obviously I’m not happy about anything.

For Trout, I made the argument that his declining bat speed was concerning while also assuming that his K% would return to recent levels (closer to 30%) and his walk rate would dip below 20% (since he didn’t have 20+% in his career outside of 2018). However, his bat speed is back (up to 75.1 mph, 85th percentile), his K% is pretty good (just 24.8%), and while his walk rate has dropped below 20%, it’s slightly below that number (19.7%). And his Statcast page is ridiculous:

Trout isn’t a great trout anymore, mostly because of injuries (like the one he has in IL right now). But this guy is still amazing when he’s on the field. Will he stay healthy once he returns to IL? My confidence isn’t high, but apparently, he was worth the risk of being listed, at least if you want a piece of the stat line that currently stands at .234 BA, 17 HR, 54 R, 36 RBI, and 7 SB. If there are Trout managers in my league looking to get out from under his IL status, I would be interested in getting an elite power bat in the second half. Just watch out for soft tissue damage.

One of the takeaways from my Angels experience is simple: If a player establishes themselves as having certain skills, assume those skills will remain the same until there is substantial evidence of change.

May your decisions this coming week be all measured responses, not rash reactions. Let’s hope mine will be the same. Until next week. – Hamley