2/15/19

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 19, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER19!

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• @sporer – Host
• @justinmasonfwfb – Producer/Co-Host

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Catching Up:

Josh Bell (4:30)

Positional Previews: Second Base

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Over the last several weeks, I have been writing about the closer picture for teams who are unlikely to contend, but are likely to deal an incumbent closer before the trade deadline. While this year’s Hot Stove season has generally moved slowly, there have been a number of moves and announcements involving relievers lately, so I’m taking the opportunity to update some of the situations I have written about recently. I am also tossing in a couple of closer conundrums from teams that I have yet to address this offseason (including one from a clear contender). Both situations are already starting to vex owners getting ready for drafts.
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It’s 90 degrees in Austin so I’m in a great mood, let’s talk some baseball!

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A couple weeks back, I unveiled my Public Trade Negotiations format. It’s begging to be included as a module in a league that encourages trading. But it’s rather heavy handed to simply say: thou shalt make trades. Instead, the league design should be such that certain resources are only available via your rivals. By George, I’ve got it!

Previous entries in this series covered 2×2 Roto, Split Auctions, Roto-to-Head, Rotating Divisions, WAR wars, Category Wars, and Public Trade Negotiations.

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This marks the sixth consecutive spring for tracking new pitches at Fangraphs. In 2014, the series was launched with a piece featuring both a retired and current pitcher and their insight into adding new pitches during the offseason and/or in camp. The 2015 tracking was done at RotoJunkieFix where I serve as the CIO which is just a fancy title for the guy that keeps a 20+ year old fantasy community up and running in his spare time. By popular demand, the 2016 New Pitch Tracker gained front page real estate here and I updated it throughout the spring with help from Jeff Zimmerman and others scraping the stories from the web and the crew at BrooksBaseball helping validate the pitches. There was quite a bit of activity on the 2017 New Pitch Tracker, but it there was not as much news in 2018.

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Welcome back to my annual off-season series that has a quick-and-dirty review of all 30 minor league systems around baseball. This feature began way back in 2008.

If you were perusing the series last year you would have read this:

The Riser: Ryan Mountcastle (SS): Selected 36th overall in the 2015 draft, Mountcastle has done nothing but hit in pro ball. He batted more than .300 in rookie ball during his debut and then followed that up with a respectable performance as a teenager in full-season ball this past season. The big question is around how much patience he’ll show at the plate after walking just 5.1% of the time (25-95 BB-K) as a sophomore. If he can continue to make adjustments then Mountcastle has a chance to be a better-than-average hitter — although his defensive home is also up in the air. He’s currently playing shortstop but could end up at a slightly less demanding position due to modest range. He has a chance to reach double-A at some point in 2017.

And now on to the new stuff:

First Taste of The Show: Cedric Mullins, OF: Mullins wasn’t a heralded prospect early on in his career but he took some big steps forward in late 2017 and into 2018, which earned him a big league promotion. He reminds me a bit of Rajai Davis, as a player who has speed and athleticism to spare but is a little behind the eight ball in terms of baseball instinct. His ceiling is limited not only by that (which could improve) but he has issues with same-handed pitching. Mullins also isn’t the biggest guy and really struggled to drive the ball with authority against big league pitching. He’s probably a solid-but-unspectacular platoon player who has a small chance to bust that projection and be an everyday guy.

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2/14/19

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 19, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER19!

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• @sporer – Host/Producer

GET THE SLEEPER & THE BUST T-SHIRT FROM ROTOWEAR!

Paul’s Valentines from his SP Ranks

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For the fourth consecutive year, my friends at RotoBaller invited me to participate in the RotoBaller Friends and Family mock draft. The draft room was, in a word, terrifying:

1. Vlad Sedler, Guru Elite
2. Nick Mariano, RotoBaller
3. Pierre Camus, RotoBaller
4. Todd Zola, Mastersball
5. Tim Heaney, RotoWire
6. Heath Cummings, CBS Sports
7. Howard Bender, Fantasy Alarm
8. Nando Di Fino, The Athletic
9. Scott Engel, RotoExperts
10. Alex Chamberlain, RotoGraphs
11. Ray Flowers, Guru Elite
12. Real Talk Raph, RotoBaller

I drew the #10 pick (as shown in the draft order above), immediately understanding I might have a difficult decision to make very early in the draft.

This doesn’t need much preamble, but I do want to say one thing: I maintain that a good way to improve as a drafter (for lack of a better word) is to try something you might not ordinarily try or force yourself into an uncomfortable position you might not normally get into. I embraced this discomfort with my first two picks, assembling a base from building blocks I might not normally use given the options available to me. As you’ll see in my concluding remarks, I think I did pretty well.

Also: we were all on a 30-second clock. I don’t know about everyone else, but I was stressed. My internal monologue was utter chaos.

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It’s Prospect Week. And it’s Valentine’s Day. So I’m here with five underhyped prospects who could provide sexy fantasy stats. ADPs are from FantasyPros. There’s no further need for introduction. CHARGE!

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Time now to take our annual look at players on whom, as we measure it, fortune smiled or frowned last season. Our theory is that fortune, as is her habit, will turn that smile (or frown) upside down this season, and accordingly that forecasts for these guys based on last year’s stats will miss the mark.

What we do is simple, and readily undertaken by novices with just a few ingredients easily found around the house. We look for pitchers whose BABIPs and Home Run/Fly Ball Ratios weren’t aligned with their Hard-Hit Ball Percentages. We figure that a guy who didn’t get hit hard, but gave up a lot of hits and home runs, was unlucky, and that his luck will change this season. And also that a guy who did get hit hard, but…you get the picture. It’s not infallible—sorry about Luke Weaver, folks; we got burned too—but it works pretty well for something so straightforward. Last year, for example, it steered you toward Trevor Cahill and away from Dylan Bundy. Let’s see who it turns up this year. Read the rest of this entry »