The team that won the most games in real baseball, the Giants, won 66 percent of their games in spite of having no hitter score more than 79 runs and no pitcher win more that 14 games. Somebody do a search through major league baseball history since 1950 (not counting strike-shortened seasons) for every team where the leader in runs had 79 or fewer and the leader in wins had 14 or fewer. I’d say that the chances are more than 99 percent that within that set the maximum winning percentage is less than 55 percent, and the average winning percentage is less than 45 percent. My expected value for the winning percentage in that set would be 35 percent, barely more than half of what the Giants managed to pull off.

On the other hand, the core of the Blue Jays offense stayed healthy, which worked well for me in fantasy. On one of my teams, I “settled” for Guerrero, Bichette, and Hernandez when I was outbid on players who for whom expectations were higher before the season started. As a result, that fantasy team averaged almost 33 home runs and 10 stolen bases per player.

Both of my teams finished with 91 points, out of a maximum of 120. One finished in first and one finished second. Of all of the factors, I would rate luck the highest. That is characteristic of what I call a shallow league–12 owners, each picking 23 players from all of the major league teams.

In this format, it pays to churn your team a lot. Adding and dropping players is like taking more shots on goal. Although I was guilty of doing this, I am somewhat offended by it. I would prefer to see the auction matter the most, since that is the phase where you can at least try to use skill. But fantasy baseball is never going to be a game like chess, governed almost entirely by skill. Dare I say that it is more like finance?

On both teams, I had the most profitable player in all of baseball (meaning the one who did the most relative to expectations): Marcus Semien. The previous year, he had no fantasy value. I only outbid others for him because I was in danger of having no one at second base with any upside.

On one team, my pitching was salvaged by Julio Urias, who was expected to win 8-10 games and wound up with 20. On the other team, the salvation came from Robbie Ray, who was so bad the previous year that nobody drafted him. Somehow, in that league I was the first one to pick him up on waivers. He might win the Cy Young Award.