The baseball season in my 12-team ESPN “Baseball Stars” league came to an end yesterday, and unfortunately my team came in second after losing to the champion in finals week.

As I wrote last week, my team recovered from a semi-disastrous draft back in March in which I failed to draft any real quality starting pitching.

After making the playoffs as the #3 seed, I knocked off my opponent (#2 seed) in the semi-finals.  I had a chance to knock off my opponent (#1 seed) in the finals and I was ahead of him with about three days left, but he was able to pull ahead by a huge margin within the final couple of days. My strategy of streaming starting pitchers backfired when I started Henry Owens (SP-Boston) on Friday, who then incurred negative 16 points for my team.  Meanwhile, my opponent relied on his quality starting pitchers (e.g. Chris Sale, Stephen Strasburg) to carry him through the playoffs.

I should mention that my opponent in the finals was a peculiar characters simply for the fact that he was a chronic streamer, constantly adding and dropping players throughout the season.  By the end of the season, he had completed 216 acquisitions.  216!  By comparison, I was the next closest in terms of activity with 100 acquisitions.  I don’t know if I have ever had an opponent who was so trigger-happy on the waiver wire as I had this season.  Normally, that kind of activity will get you into trouble, but this time it worked out for him.

Anyway, it’s a relief to be done with this league since I always felt like I was digging myself out of a hole, trying to keep my head above water.  A bad draft will do that to you.  I’m glad that I was able to recover and make it into the playoffs, though, so overall it was a successful season.