Expos' 23-year-old (in fact, he just turned 23 last Sunday) Javier Vazquez was the pitching star last night, with 225 SWP and 187 BPP, in spite of a meaningless 9th inning dinger by Sosa. That's his second consecutive strong pitching start, and his outing before that wasn't so bad either; he was on the losing side of Cone's perfect game, when he really had only one bad inning (the 5-run second inning).

Meanwhile, Kenny Rogers and Todd Ritchie hooked up in a noontime pitcher's duel. The two of them combined for 13 IP, 5 hits, and 2 ER allowed. Neither got the win, though, as Dennis Cook blew the save in the top of the 8th, then nabbed the undeserved win when the Mets rocked the Pirate bullpen for 7 runs in the bottom of the same inning.

Butch Huskey had his second good night at DH for the Red Sox, where he is 5-9 in his first 2 games, with 6 RBIs and 2 home runs (and it really should be 3 HRs, since the umps blew a HR call on Tuesday night). Manny Ramirez showed no lingering effects from being hit by a pitch earlier in the week, knocking in 4 runs with 2 doubles and a HR. And Jeff Bagwell, while not quite outhitting Hampton, did outproduce him with 3 runs and 4 RBI (incl. his 33rd HR).

Yesterday's SW repricing returned to relative normalcy (aside from some lingering confusion about when trades between last Wednesday's and Saturday's repricing were counted.) At least price sensitivities were back to their pre-All-Star levels. Frankly, though, we're getting to that point in the season when price gains are of secondary importance to many teams, and pitching rotations dominate the trade flows. In fact, 71% of all trades last week were pitching trades. As has been extensively discussed in the message forum, this heavy pitcher rotation activity results in a sustained downward price trend for the most popularly rotated pitchers. Although they do get a boost during weeks with 2 starts, the overall trend is negative, due to the discounting of buys - as a simple buy/sell rotation trade produces a marginally negative price impact. So even if your roster value seems to have plateaued, you can still benefit as the best pitchers gradually get cheaper and cheaper.

Team rankings for all versions of the SW/CNN games were posted last evening. Although I can access a worldwide ranking value for the SW midseason teams, it is clear that these rankings are flawed - which is probably why they're excluded from the manager's statement at the SW midseason site. So I just blotted them out.

Tonight, my family hitches up the wagons once again and begins the westward journey toward Buckeye land. We'll be on the road most of Friday and Saturday, since we're making a few college campus visits in eastern PA along the way (Lehigh, Lafayette, and Bucknell). Thus, some of the stat updates the next two days won't be posted until evening. I'll try to wake up early enough to get "Yesterday's points" and the Assimilator posted prior to hitting the road, but that schedule is also dependent on having correct stats to work with - which is anything but a certainty. By Sunday, I'll be stationary on the Marblehead peninsula, and the update schedule should be fairly normal for most of the ensuing two weeks (as long as lightning doesn't fry my modem again this year).

There is one job for which I could use some Gurupie assistance during the next two weeks. In order to prepare the team rankings, I have to download approximately 1000 pages of data. At home, the speed of my cable modem makes this feasible. But I'll be restricted to a 53K phone modem connection for the next few weeks, rendering this exercise inefficient. If I could recruit someone with a high speed connection (a cable modem at minimum, but a direct line - perhaps through your office hookup - would be even faster) to periodically capture team data and email it to me, I'd be much obliged. Other than a fast connection, all you would need is Excel 97. I can send you my spreadsheet with macros, and virtually all you'd need to do is push a button, wait, and then email the resulting spreadsheet to me. It would be nice to rerun the team rankings at least after each repricing. If you can help, send me an email and I'll provide the details.

On the road again...

Brady Anderson was the only hitter to top 80 pts. under both scoring formulas, but his 2 HRs and 4 ribbies weren't enough for Mussina.

I hope to post the first midseason team rankings after today's SW repricing, so if you want to be included, send me your team info ASAP. See the bottom of the full season SW or CNN rankings pages for instructions.

A few of you have emailed me to say the poll server still seems to be down. While it certainly is erratic, it is up periodically, and as of this morning there are 182 votes cast, so some people are getting through. If you want to vote, you'll just need to be patient, I guess.

Bobby Witt was the surprise stud of the night, tossing a 4 hit shutout against pathetic Anaheim. Greg Maddux was right behind, though, waiting until the 9th inning to surrender his only run against the Brewers.

The hitting stars for Monday were Fred McGriff and Matt Mieske, both who homered twice. Craig Biggio only went yard once, but added 2 doubles and a single to finish a close third in the hitting sweepstakes.

There must still be some lingering problems at Echelon Sports, as stats and prices haven't been updated for either baseball game as of 11 am EST today. They are usually posted like clockwork shortly after 10:00. Hope this is just a minor hiccup.

Smallworld launched its 1999 football game yesterday. I haven't had the chance to thoroughly review the rules, but I did quickly notice the following changes from last season:

• A new roster slot has been added for kick returners, and punt and kick return points have been added to the scoring formula.
• Field goal points now differentiate by the length of the FG made or missed.
• Team defense scoring has been reconfigured to produce positive points, so that holding a bye-week defense will not be attractive.
• I don't see any mention of a weekly price change limit, but they may have just forgotten to list it.

While I will certainly provide full football coverage this fall, I don't expect to have anything for 1999 posted until at least the 3rd week of August. The first week of the regular season isn't until September 12th, and it seems ridiculous to even consider drafting a team at this juncture. (Besides, I don't see why I should devote any of my early August family vacation to producing football stats!) Last year's stats are still available, but with the '99 scoring changes, they'll be of limited usefulness. I'll eventually work up 1998 points using the 1999 formula; kickers and defenses will be a tedious exercise, though, since they'll need to be done kick-by-kick and/or week-by-week. In fact, if any of you football Gurupies want to give me an assist, why don't you work up '98 scoring totals for kickers and defenses, and send me the results. Hopefully, I'll get responses from more than one Gurupie, which will act as a cross-check control mechanism. This should definitely help me get a jump start once I return from my vacation on August 16th.

For those of you who just can't stand to wait until then, you can download a complete set of 1998 player stats from Yahoo!, and crunch through the formulas yourselves. For preseason talk, there's already an active football section at the message forum, and you can also use the "League Formation" section to recruit your own divisions, if you wish.

First, the SW price correction looks technically correct in most aspects. However, there are several irregularities which warrant my commentary, not for the purpose of embarrassing Smallworld, but because these issues have significant pricing ramifications in the next several weeks, and you should be aware of these ramifications.

1. First, there were 13 recent IPOs whose original draft prices have been inexplicably increased. Nine of the players had their prices bumped up by an even $1 million. The only two of the 13 that are likely to have any relevance to anyone are Ramon Hernandez and Chris Singleton. Hernandez got a $1 million bump, as his initial draft price was restated from $1 million to up $2 million. Since he just went on the disabled list today, if you owned him, you'd better drop him like a hot potato! Singleton only "suffered" a $180,000 price boost, which gave him a price increase of $540,000 when the formula should have only produced $360,000. If you were surprised by all of the "no name" players who appreciated by a full million, now you know why. I don't know whether these will be corrected at some point or not.

2. There is evidence in the posted trade flows which strongly suggests that the impact of trades after 7/21 have been included in the new prices. Pitchers who started on 7/21, like Maddux and Mussina, don't show the normal net buys that we've come to expect for Wednesday starters. Similarly, Friday starters like Schilling and Hampton do show significant net buys, which suggests that trades through Friday were considered. Additionally, three players who were injured after the 7/21 repricing show sell activity that almost certainly occurred on Thursday and Friday, including Lieberthal, Rolen, and Jones. While this selling activity wasn't severe enough to materially influence their prices, it does suggest that the trade window was open for part of the current "trade week", and this may have significant implications in anticipating the trade flows for next Wednesday.

3. Finally, although the application of the traditional price model seems to have been technically correct (aside from the issues noted above), I think SW should have compensated for the two week period by doubling the price sensitivity per trade. In the SW formula, price sensitivity is a factor of total trade volume during the period. When there are more trades, the value of each individual trade is proportionately reduced. The reported trades for the repricing showed 1,006,409 buys and 645,588 sells. This is almost triple the number of trades in recent weeks. With the heavy discounting of buys related to the drafting of midseason teams, a buy transaction turned out to have about one-fourth of its normal potency.

   To illustrate, consider Russ Ortiz, who was the most heavily bought. He had net buys of 23,000. If this had been spread out over recent weeks, he would have enjoyed total gains of $3 to 4 million (ignoring the weekly price change caps). However, his price only rose by $610,000. In the next few weeks, if he were to be sold 23,000 times, his price will probably drop by $4 million. Other players who experienced heavy net buys have the same type of prospective price risk, though the order of magnitude will be somewhat less severe.

   The best advice I can give is to be wary of these players. If they continue to produce, you're probably relatively safe. But their prices are now hyper-vulnerable to future selling.

Moving on to Echelon's Ball Park Dreams game, due to server outages last weeks, they have announced that points earned on 7/21-22 will be eliminated for all teams. Evidently, some users were able to make trades during this period, but many others were not. Echelon's position is that, since some managers could not make trades during this period, all points will be voided for those two days.

Frankly, I don't see this as a good resolution at all (even though it seems to have advantaged my team ranking by roughly 40 spots!). Clearly, managers who couldn't trade sustained a disadvantage relative to those who could trade. But this solution puts those who could trade at a decided disadvantage. Not only do they lose points for pitchers added during those two days, but those pitchers then produced nothing during the next several days, while managers who were previously unable to trade gained pitching starts. In fact, any team that had more than the average number of pitching starts over that two day period has been disadvantaged by this decision - which is probably about half of all teams. It seems to me that one disadvantaged class has been traded for another, potentially larger group.

I've relayed my concerns to Echelon, as I know many of you have. I don't think there is a simple resolution which doesn't screw some teams. But it seems to me like the solution chosen does nothing to promote greater fairness. It just shuffles the winners vs. losers from a "do nothing" position.

My bottom line, as usual, is that once you've made your complaints, you have to get over it and move on. It's unfortunate that this may have significant competitive ramifications among even the worldwide leaders. But Echelon ultimately has to make their own decisions, and they have to live with the ramifications of those decisions. In support of Echelon, their games have been notably free of technical problems in the past, and while this is an unfortunate situation, they probably deserve some slack given their track record. But I do understand that if your team got royally screwed, this is pretty tough to accept. (If you feel a need to continue to vent, feel free to use the message forum. I'm sure you'll have company.)

Once again, my posture is that I've relayed my concerns, and it is up to Echelon to deal with it from here. I'm not going to belabor this issue any longer.

At least the poll server seems to have recovered, although I had to restart the most recent poll from the start, so if you already voted, you'll need to do so again.

With any luck, tomorrow I'll just have baseball to deal with again.

As I understand it, today's repricing will effectively restate prices to what should have happened on Wednesday. Trading activity since Wednesday will not be reflected in today's changes. If you've not made any trades since the repricing and you do nothing, you'll be right back where you belong. If you've made some trades in the meantime, then it depends. But regardless of your situation, there are some opportunities for today's repricing that you should consider.

I updated the SW and CNN team rankings yesterday afternoon. I'll do it again after the price change, although the posting may not happen until Sunday.

David Cone couldn't repeat his weekend magic against the Tribe last night, although from a fantasy perspective, he was "fortunate" to surrender an "unearned grand slam", which Robby Alomar popped after Knoblauch graciously provided a fourth out. Ironically, the best game of the night was tossed by Cone's previous victim, Javier Vazquez, a 4 hit, 0 ER complete game win over Pittsburgh.

The best hitting performance came from Jermaine Dye, whose 2 doubles and a triple produced 2 runs scored and 3 RBIs. The Royals had a very balanced hitting attack in scoring 12 runs last night, as every starter had at least one hit, all but one scored, and all but one (a different one) had an RBI. In fact, Chad Kreuter was the only Royals starter with less than two combined runs and RBIs.

The top pitching effort of the day belonged to Joe Mays, a 23-year-old rookie righthander for the Twins who tossed 8-1/3 shutout innings against the ChiSox. It was the 2nd consecutive 200+ SWP outing for Mays, who I guess warrants some attention now.

Other notable pitching performances included Scott Erickson and Hideo Nomo, both who seemed to have solidly rebounded from their early season difficulties. Jose Lima also pitched well enough to deserve a better fate, but his teammates couldn't push more than one run across while leaving the bases loaded three times.

The best SW hitting day was enjoyed by Alex Rodriguez, who aptly demonstrated that he can hit even in Safeco Field. KC's Johnny Damon posted the best point total under the Echelon scoring system.

In addition to the subject of today's quote, another unusual thing occurred at Jacobs Field last night, when the wrong lineup was provided to the umpires, resulting in Cleveland losing the DH for the game. Charles Nagy ended up batting seventh, when the lineup card had the Manny Ramirez at DH and Alex Ramirez in RF, rather than the other way around. Although the name issue probably contributed to the confusion, it's not clear that was the sole culprit. If you want the full story, check out this morning's Akron Beacon Journal.

In internet land, the variety of recent technical problems seem to be working themselves out. Smallworld is trying to figure out the best remedy for this week's pricing problem, and has promised more details by noon today. Echelon's two baseball sites returned to life this morning, with promises to have all scoring up-to-date by Sunday. And the poll server is starting to respond again, too, although it's still not yet ready for prime time. I'll definitely update the Smallworld and CNN team rankings sometime over the weekend as well. The choice of day will partly depend on the nature of the pricing resolution. Sorry for taking so long to update these, but with the recent series of snafus, it always seemed like it was better to wait for normalcy to be restored.

I hope to begin providing Midseason rankings for the SW and CNN games next week. In preparation, if you want your midseason team(s) listed, please send me the user_id, team name, and site. Instructions for doing this are at the bottom of the regular season team rankings pages.

Until I get an explanation from Smallworld, I am going to withhold commenting further. While it is undeniable that the trade data and resulting price changes are inconsistent with recent trading activity, I need to understand whether Smallworld was the perpetrator or the victim. Stay tuned as the story unfolds.

To compound the frustration, Echelon's two baseball sites have been down for the last 15-16 hours as well.

And to further add to my morning aggravation, today's stats source was missing the NL Central teams, so I had to use backup sources for that data. I think the posted data is pretty good now, but I haven't yet gone through my full quality control process, so there may be some slight changes to come. Let me know if you see anything that looks off.

On the field, the most remarkable game was the duel between Villone and Jiminez. Each of them must have thought they were facing Randy Johnson. I'll let you look up the details.

I'll post an update if and when I learn anything more.

The Big Unit held the top spot in pitching yesterday, but there were a number of "close behind" pitching outings as well. I'll let you look them up yourselves. On the hitting side, no one had what I'd consider a real "bust out" game worth of comment.

Today we get new SW prices after a 2 week hiatus. With the probable strong influence of the midseason draft, today's results will be interesting to evaluate. Tune in tomorrow for my take on the situation. Or, check out the message forum this afternoon. Repricing generally stimulates plenty of action over there.

I had to take the poll offline for the time being, as the poll server seems to have gone on the fritz. I'll restore it when it works again.

On the other hand, a number of hitters had distinguishing performances. Scott Rolen led the parade with a double, 2 HRs, 3 R, and 4 RBI, anchoring a 16 run Philly outburst. Brad Fullmer took out Montreal's no-hit frustrations with a 4 hit (2 doubles, 1 HR), 3 RBI bombast. All told, seven teams scored in double digits last night.

With the exception of SW and CNN team rankings, I think the site is up to date now. In particular, I added several tools for Echelon's Baseball Market game (see new menu items at left). Stats are integrated into the regular sortable stats program (as a third game choice). Individual player pages have several extra columns for players who are listed in that game. And I added a separate Assimilator, which uses the Ballpark Dreams "slots" to hold Baseball Market data. (It's not a particularly elegant solution, but it will do, at least for now.) Note that where prices are expressed in thousands, so are dividends. Hopefully, this will help our understanding of the game - although there are still some mysterious price movements. For example, check out the most recent price change for David Wells.

By now, the superlatives and coincidences surrounding David Cone's perfect game have been chronicled over and over, so I won't add to the repetition. I listened to the entire game while driving home from the NJ shore - the first time I've heard every pitch of a perfecto. The Yankee announcers were talking about the possibility of a perfect game as early as the 3rd inning - so it was clearly in the mindset throughout most of the game.

At the other extreme, Pedro Martinez suffered through the worst start of his career, at the hands of the Marlins, no less. At the cheaper end of the pitching spectrum, John Halama came back to earth after more than a month of superb starts, demonstrating that Safeco field isn't always going to be a pitcher's haven. Curiously, Halama had done well in the Kingdome.

Off the field, I understand that the Smallworld server was acting up yesterday, disallowing player buys in the morning, resulting in a lot of invalid rosters at freeze time. I presume SW will allow points for invalid rosters, even though that isn't what's been done so far this morning. If you're really lucky, maybe the server glitch kept you from rotating into Pedro. In any event, you might as well calm down until the situation is addressed. No sense getting apoplectic over something you can't control. If you want to commiserate with others, the message forum is filled with tales of woe.

Changing sports, the British open also seemed to follow the extreme theme, with the leader blowing a three shot lead on the last hole, in a fashion that I'm sure many of us duffers easily recognized.

Now that I'm home again, it will take a day or two to get the site fully up to date again. Given yesterday's SW snafu, I think I'll wait until after Wednesday's price change to update the SW team rankings, but everything else should be fully restored within the next 24 hours or so. I also hope to have some preliminary stats for the new Baseball Market game, which I must confess is still somewhat of a mystery. Hopefully, sortable stats tables will begin to shed some light. Stay tuned.

And finally, thanks to Rich Paganelli for very ably providing blurbs during the past week. He did a great job, and it was nice to have the site maintain that "lived in" feel.

7/17 - I am pleased to report I am ranked #1 worldwide in Smallworld baseball, but only 4th in my division. I guess everyone was ranked #1 for a little while yesterday, leaving us to say, "it certainly was a nice dream, if only for a little while." At least we had no trouble logging into our teams yesterday.

I think we should start with hitting performances today, as I'm not sure we want to talk about our stud pichers' performances. Is it time to grab Mark McGwire? After hitting a pair of 3 run homers, perhaps I should have suggested that yesterday! True to form, the Cardinals lost the game 9-8. Mike Piazza continued on his torrid pace going 3 for 4 and 2 RBI, he is now 12 for 24 with 3 homers and 11 RBI over his last 6 games. Harold Baines showed a 40 yr. old can still play this game, going 4 for 5, hitting his 20th home run of the season. Since May 12th Baines is 59 for 147(.401) and 39 RBI's. Why don't I have this guy on my SW team? A guy who I'm sure is on many more of our teams, Slammin' Sammy, kept pace hitting his 34th dinger and going 4 for 5 in the game. The Cubs won, too. Magglio Ordonez, another of our popular holdings, made us happy with a double, homer and 4 RBI.

Do I have to mention pitchers? OK, let's get the worst over with first. Greg Maddux hurt us bad. A negative outing, OUCH! If you made the swap from Randy Johnson to Mike Mussina instead, congratulations. However I suspect because many of us had Maddux before the break on Sunday, we just held him, thinking we were so smart, essentially getting 2 starts in 3 days. Not just any 2 starts either, Greg Maddux starts no less. I honestly didn't like Maddux at Yankee stadium, especially after Glavine shut down the Yankees yesterday, but what could we do? Even the Guru would have frowned on swapping a pitcher ON their pitching day. I did manage to avoid Maddux in the Mid-season game. Russ Ortiz continued to leave us wondering which Russ Ortiz would show up on any given day. Perhaps you had Steve Woodard or Mike Mussina, then you feel a little better. Safeco Field is indeed proving to be a pitchers park, as San Diego's Sterling Hitchcock out dueled Jeff Fassero 2-1. Seattle, who leads the majors with 151 home runs, failed again to go deep. In fact, they have only hit the wall once in those 2 games. Maybe it is time for Griffey owners to make a trade.

Click here for prior daily blurbs, by month:

1999: June . . . . . May . . . . . April . . . . . March . . . . . February . . . . . January

1998: December . . . . . November . . . . . October . . . . . September . . . . August . . . . . July . . . . . June . . . . . May . . . . . April . . . . . March

RotoGuru is produced by Dave Hall (a.k.a. the Guru), an avid fantasy sports player. He is neither employed by nor compensated by any of the fantasy sports games discussed within this site, and all opinions expressed are solely his own. Questions or comments are welcome, and should be emailed to Guru<davehall@home.com>.