It’s time for the 2017 JLB Schedule, a little later than usual, but hey, I’ve been busy prepping for a draft.
This year, I’ve decided to mix it up a bit.
In the past, we’d play stretch of league games, then interleague, back for a pair of league, before hitting a long stretch of interleague and then back for three league series to end the season.
Now, it’s more spread apart in the beginning, and then we go heavy Interleague and heavy League play.
I love it. We’ll end the season with five straight weeks of League play where you will play everyone in your division once to close out the season.
It will really make the race for the playoffs interesting. That’s preceded by six straight weeks of interleague play.
Here’s the complete breakdown of the schedule makeup:
- · Interleague for first 2 weeks
- · League play for 2 weeks
- · Interleague for 1 week
- · League play for 2 weeks
- · Interleague for 2 weeks
- · League play for 1 week
- · Interleague for 6 weeks
- · League play for 5 weeks
That great mix in the beginning of the schedule will be really nice, but let’s talk about Week 1.
I love Week 1.
It’s going to be an interleague blast. I have themes/reasons for every matchup.
For starters, the big spotlight matchup is the two-time champion Outs going up against another two-time JLB champion, Gameday Gamblers. Both won League titles last year, but only the Outs made it through the playoffs, winning the NL pennant and eventually the World Series.
I was tempted to go with Choo-Outs as Choo was the ONLY team to beat the Outs last year, but I had to go two-time champ vs. two-time champ.
As for the next matchup I set up...
As for the next matchup I set up...
“I welcome all challengers,” Crox responded, confidently.
Strangely enough, I had already scheduled these two to face each other. I knew the personal rivalry they have with each other, and it was further proven in the texts, so it was funny that I had already set them up for a Week 1 date.
If they can contact Tim and Parker, maybe they can set up a double date?
Keeping with the themed matchups, we have Ol’ Country vs. Lebowski, the two newest JLB members. Country has the year head start on Lebowski, so it’s his turn to show someone new who is boss. With all the big trades Country made, he really hopes to start 2017 off on the right foot after a last-place finish in his first year in the JLB.
Potentially headed for last place this year are the rebuilders, Bombers and Vandelay, and they face off in Week 1. I’m not saying they’re going to end up there, but boy did they go all in on rebuild in the draft and it will be interesting to see which one will out-prospect the other in Week 1.
In the Choo-Steroid matchup, we find a team that traded away all his good pitching — Choo — going up against a team that didn’t bother to get any pitching. Choo has four-fifths of the Cardinals starting rotation and Steroid has four-fifths of a starting rotation period.
Lastly, we have the household nightmare that is the JimmyJam Slammers vs. the Sex Panther Plates. Gina really does enjoy fantasy baseball, and there’s a good part of me that believes it’s solely because she likes to beat me in our matchup and then jump on Twitter to brag about it to Mike Ferrin and Jim Duquette. Not cool, Gina. I'm glad we'll get the first of our two matchups out of the way right away.
So as you can see, I created quite the opening week with themes. I hope you all enjoy it.
As for the rest of the season, Week 15 is the long All-Star Break matchup which is where every team plays their “counterpart” in the opposite league. We have the World Series rematch between Crox and Outs, both the Gamblers and Steroid matchup as they lost their respective league championship series, and Choo and Steaks battle in the matchup of wild card losers. The other three matchups pit fourth place vs. fourth place and so on.
The last week could potentially have some pivotal matchups, too, as the Slammers and Steaks meet up, as do Crox and Ol’ Country.
But let’s not get so far ahead of us. How about that Week 1!?
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