TSO Fantasy: Thinking Like Penske

After the disastrous beginning to my TracksideOnline Fantasy season, I decided I needed a little edge heading into Kansas. I ran to my hope chest big steel army surplus locker and grabbed my WWRPD booklet.

And I asked myself: "What Would Roger Penske Do?" The answer is obvious... he'd find a way to turn a limitation into an advantage through innovation.

So I took a look at TSO's Fantasy web page, and recalled a task I've found difficult to perform: selecting 5 drivers that stay under the $1.6M salary cap. Look and the 5 drivers selected below, and notice that you have no way to know how much you are over the cap:


If you click 'Enter Your Picks' at this point, you will get this error:


How much do I need to cut? Clearly, I needed to create my own tool. So I brushed off my HTML skills (kidding, I do this for a living) and created my own entry page which uses nothing but client-side javascript. In my selection tool, all the drivers are presented together:



As I select my drivers, the 'Total Budget' and 'Remaining Budget' numbers recalculate automatically, allow me to play lots of what-if scenarios. Once I reach 5 selected drivers, the rest of the checkboxes automatically disable themselves. Entering the same 5 drivers as I did earlier, I can now see that I'm over budget by exactly $210,000:



So how did this perform for me at Kansas? With some experimentation, I discovered that I could select Kanaan, Castroneves, Andretti, Scheckter, and Hunter-Reay -- a pretty stunning lineup in this league, but with the obvious drawback that I had to pass on the two Ganassi cars. It was a homerun swing which resulted in a strikeout, as Wheldon and Dixon finished 1-2 and Team Racemind had to settle for 183rd spot.

But even Roger doesn't win every time out. Staring up from the bottom of the league, I'll take whatever little edge I can.

TracksideOnline Fantasy Turns to Nightmare

What's that called, when you keep trying something and keep getting the same negative result, but you keep trying anyway? ("Insanity", my helpful wife shouts from across the room.)

Last year my experience with the Tracksideonline.com Indycar Fantasy game lasted all of about a week: I signed up, set my lineup, then forgot to do it every week thereafter. But this year, oooohhhh yeah baby... 2008 was going to be year that I kicked booty. ("Kick booty" is a term I learned from my 7-year-old, who proudly said he learned it from Alvin And The Chipmunks. It was only after they watched it twice that I realized it is rated PG for a reason.)

Well, I guess I'm discovering that I'm not much of a "check in every week" kind of player.

Wanna know how I discovered that? It's pretty simple, really. I entered my picks for Homestead, a brilliant slate of drivers that placed me solidly in the... well, middle of the league, something like 125 out of 266. But I had everybody right where I wanted them.

I tried to enter my picks for St. Pete right away, but the web page wouldn't let me -- apparently it was too early. No sweat, I thought; the league has a new system this year that will automatically roll my picks from one week to the next, as long as the driver salaries remain below the $1,600,000 limit.

Apparently one of my drivers suddenly became very expensive. Because I had no picks entered for St. Pete. Nothing. Zero points.

Ok, I can recover from this. Just gotta get my picks in for Motegi early. Um, except not yet, because the system won't let me enter them yet. And then once it did let me enter them, I seemed to keep picking drivers that were too expensive, which meant that I still didn't have a slate of drivers selected. No matter, I'll just figure it out Friday.

Friday, though, was not to be. Early deadline, you see.

So, forth time's a charm, right? I'm hopelessly mired near last place, and the season's shot. But I have a trick up my sleeve. We'll see if I can turn lemons into lemonade.