Monday, July 24, 2006

My beef with Sportsline

On July 19, MLB changed the official stats of Greg Maddux. Rotoworld.com wrote: "A scoring change from a May 24 game against the Marlins has taken five earned runs away from Greg Maddux's record, lowering his ERA from 4.99 to 4.60. Scorer Ron Jernick said he made the change after the Cubs appealed the May 24 ruling to MLB. The reversal also takes a hit away from Hanley Ramirez and gives Ronny Cedeno an error."

Sportsline, however, refuses to make this change for the Irrational League or for any other fantasy-baseball league. This is ludicrous policy, astonishingly outrageous. I've asked twice, and the responses I get from the Sportsline reps amount to little:

Response (Commish Sam) - 07/21/2006 02:42 PM
Your league is automatically updated to reflect official MLB statistics corrections that occur up to seven days after the game has been completed. If the change is made any later, it will not be included in our statistics and your official Fantasy scoring will be based on the original statistic.

Response (Commish Herman) - 07/24/2006 09:47 AM
Also please understand the MLB does make corrections to stats, we have up to 5-7 days after the games is played to apply any corrections to stats from MLB, after this time the stats are official. This correction was made after the deadline so these corrections will not be applied to your league. I do apologize for this inconvenience.

In the meantime, those five earned runs are the difference between my team having a fantasy ERA of 4.63 and what should be 4.56. It will almost certainly make a difference in the standings, and may cost me hundreds of dollars. It may affect many other Sportsline customers as well.

I'm astonished at the disinterest Sportsline displays based on what seems to be an arbitrary deadline. The whole concept of fantasy baseball is to play pretend with real stats. If you don't even get the real stats, what's the point?

This is customers' money that Sportsline is toying with. Some enterprising sports journalist should take this scoop and run with it.

Bonus phone news:

Our phone line is back. Thursday night's storm apparently blew the phone fuse. I didn't know phone lines even had fuses in homes.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I had maddux pitching that day too for one of my sportsline leagues. I lost the league by one point. :(

October 2, 2006 9:20 PM  

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