Fantasy Baseball: 2006 Edition

I have started picking up players for my fantasy baseball team, called the Chaotic Wavefunctions. (Our logo is a \Psi with a nervous tick.) The league in which I play has a salary cap (and moving salaries during the year based on how much a player is bought and sold). I have been using my baseball knowledge to find sleepers. One example is Brad Wilkerson, who is a great player coming off a subpar year who has been traded to a team with a much better lineup and a much more offensive-minded ballpark. He's cheaper than many rookies who have only had a few at-bats in the majors!

I haven't done so well the last couple years, although I have finished in the 50s once (out of about 225000) and # 20 (out of about 25000) once. (I also one my individual league, but with a poor year overall, one time. I got $50 for that. It had cost me $18 to enter.) The 225000 and 25000 are really about the same level of difficulty because each of them contained roughly the same number of players (around 20000 or so) who actually played the game seriously (using all their trades and keeping track of things the whole year). When I finished in the 50s, I got a PC video game of baseball that I never played. When I finished #20, I got an autographed Nolan Ryan baseball that I've been proudly displaying every since. (Nolan Ryan is one of my favorite players of all time, so I was very pleased with that prize.)

One of my friends from grad school keeps kicking as at this game. He didn't play in 04, but he's done well every year he played. We always coordinate to be in the same league and in 2005, he managed to finish 1st overall! (He knows less about baseball and the players than I do, but he's far, far better at coming up with an optimum strategy for this game.) He got $5000 for that. His teams have finished close to the top 10 in both baseball and basketball before (I want to say he actually broke the top 10 another time in baseball), so his strategies have been consistently successful. (There are a couple years in which things blew up in his face, but I have had that as well and his top performances clearly outshine mine.)