Rake · Self-initiated build
My fantasy baseball league runs $100 side bets on four categories. ESPN keeps those numbers somewhere — buried on desktop, gone on mobile — so every week I redid the math for eight teams by hand, in my Notes app. Rake replaced me.
Every stat existed. The one thing we had money on didn't.
ESPN is built to crown one champion. Our league was running four separate side bets. Three things made that painful.
I built it to stop doing math. It changed how I play.
ERA and Avg can't be added up — they rebuild from raw earned runs, innings, hits and at-bats. One roster move made every number I'd written down wrong.
So I kept my own file. Eight teams, four columns, every week — because not watching the categories meant donating money.
Once I could see where I stood, I started picking up players to move a category — not because they were hot that week.
If I'm nine wins behind, that $100 is already gone — no pickup fixes it. But if I'm one point off in batting average, one good bat can flip it. The board tells me which of the four is still winnable, so I spend the roster spot there.
There was no team. Just me, running this loop until it was live.
I gave Rake an identity before I gave it features — a mark, a palette, a type pairing, and a voice that sounds like the group chat it came out of. Then this loop ran until there was something to open.
