Now that the 2012 regular season is officially underway (for two teams, anyway), let’s round up some first base news from around the league. Here are my preseason 1B tiers from last week, just in case you missed it.

Mike Carp | Mariners | Owned: 24% Yahoo! and 74.3% ESPN

You might have missed it while you were sleeping last night, but we have our first regular season injury of 2012. The Mariners placed Carp on the DL yesterday with a shoulder sprain, adding Carlos Peguero to the roster in his place. Carp qualified as a 1B this year but was a much better value in the OF, so losing him shouldn’t create any 1B problems for fantasy owners. If it does, you likely have bigger problems in the first place. Peguero, by the way, is not rosterable.

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Thursdays in this time slot, we’ll have some of FanGraphs’ finest talk about ScoreSheet baseball, which some consider the “realest” fantasy baseball out there. There’s defense, lineups, simulations… it’s complicated like real baseball.

This faithful correspondent is a rookie at the format. So I may be asking you, from time to time, what y’all think about this or that. This week, I’m setting my first lineups. And I’m looking at this hook thing.

First, the results of my draft, in AL-Skeeter, the 12-team AL-only keeper led by the ineffable King Kaufman. Let’s represent them in the general lineup order, without going through and breaking them out by handedness like you do in the real game. Lefties have the asterisk.

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As a long-time ottoneu player, I have come to realize that the traditional waiver wire columns are great for leagues with 23-27 man rosters, but don’t quite hold up when you teams all go 40-deep. So from time to time this year, I will try to offer up names of players who are free agents in more than 90% of ottoneu leagues, but are worth keeping an eye on.

To differentiate from waivers, I’ll call them Watchlist Wonders — guys who are worth adding to your ottoneu watchlist and, depending on your team needs, worth starting an auction for.

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As Eno pointed out the other day, six of us from FanGraphs/RotoGraphs joined up with six writers from The Hardball Times to do battle in a 12-team rotisserie league for both bragging rights and charity.  The winner gets to donate the prize to the charity of his choice while the site for which he writes gets to reign supreme in the fantasy universe.  Sounds like fun?  Well, you weren’t there for the four-plus hour auction.

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After discovering on Monday that K% and BB% are indeed meaningful for pitchers during spring training, I looked at which starters might see a better K% than initially projected given their spring performance. Today I look at the opposite end of the coin, those who are in for a potential decline in their K% based on what they have done in the spring so far. Again, I compared their spring K% to their Steamer projected K% and looked at the largest differences on the negative end of the spectrum.

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Given that the true regular season hasn’t started yet, The Game still isn’t quite in full swing either. Instead, today’s Roto Riteup will highlight a couple players that may see action in the MLB opener. The Miami Marlins play host to the reigning World Champion St. Louis Cardinals on Wednesday, April 4th to open up baseball here in the Eastern Standard Time Zone.

Rather than focus on the obvious fantasy candidates, I’ll highlight some useful bullpen arms for each squad.

– Heath Bell is the obvious closer in Miami. No doubt. This of course presents the next biggest bullpen question: who will be the setup man? As of today, manager Ozzie Guillen is yet to announce it to be any single person, but some are inclined to believe it will be Edward Mujica. Given that Mujica already has two holds and a K/9 above 10.0 and hasn’t surrendered a single walk in Spring Training, it would be hard to argue against him. If you play in a holds league, setup men are worth almost as much as closers. A deeper glance at Bell would also suggest that he is on a three year downward trend. In 2011, Mujica had a higher strikeout rate and a lower strikeout rate than Bell. If Bell struggles repeatedly, expect Mujica to be amongst the first to be tried at closer. Mujica is owned in only 3% of Yahoo! leagues. He deserves to be owned in all but the shallowest of leagues.

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Brandon Morrow has always been an enigma to me. He has great stuff, but just can seem to put it all together for one good season. I am going to try to look at similar pitchers from the recent past to see if there is any hope of him breaking out.

Since the right-handed pitcher broke into the league with Seattle in 2007, here is where he ranks among the 156 starting pitchers with 400 or more innings.

K/9: 1st (10.0 K/9)
BB/9: 149th (4.5 BB/9)
% of PA that end in a BB or K: 1st (37.3%)

Brandon is a true outcome pitcher with most at bats ending up as either a walk or a strikeout. Besides being a true outcome pitcher, his career ERA has been significantly worse than his ERA predictors:

ERA: 4.37
FIP: 3.85
xFIP: 3.94
SIERA: 3.71

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As Eno mentioned earlier this morning, we here at Fangraphs are engaged in a fight to the death with The Hardball Times for supremacy in Fantasy Squared’s THT vs FG charity league. We drafted some 330 players last night, narrowly finishing before the beginning of the Mariners/A’s game — ok, that’s an exaggeration, but it did clock in at nearly four hours.

First, some of the nuts and bolts about how the draft played out. It’s a 12-team league with $260 budgets, of which just $48 was left on the table. Of the $3072 spent on players, $991 of it was spent on pitchers, which amounts to less than a third of all spending. While that may not seem like much, it is actually slightly more than would have been allocated to the nine pitching spots if the money had been evenly distributed, especially since some teams used one or more bench spots for extra pitchers. 138 pitchers were drafted with the average cost settling just over $7; interestingly, the median value was lower at just $4. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a question I have received a lot since we were made aware of Ryan Madson’s impending Tommy John surgery: who would I rather pick, Greg Holland or Sean Marshall? Some of my readers and twitter followers took my advice and picked up Holland when Joakim Soria went down, but saw that Marshall was available and wanted to know who I would rather have. Here is my take on both pitchers.

Greg Holland

Holland’s skillset and the likelihood of him being named closer has been well documented here on FanGraphs by both me and Jack Moore. Holland has received three save opportunities and came through with all of them this spring, which is at least somewhat telling of what Kansas City has in the plans for this season. He will most likely close, and he will also most likely be very effective with this opportunity. With a K/BB ratio of 3.89 last season and dominance against both lefties and righties, I have little doubt that Holland has what it takes to be a closer. His track record is slightly disconcerting however, as he only really has performed at this level in his lone Major League season. He was very effective in the minors, but not 1.80 ERA or 2.21 FIP good. He will probably walk more batters this season than he did last year, which is a slight cause for concern going forward. As I stated earlier, Holland definitely has the stuff to close and be very effective, but I don’t expect him to quite be Craig Kimbrel or John Axford right out of the gate.
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So a buddy of mine calls me the other day in need of a 10th team for his home league.  Apparently someone dropped out at the last minute due to work obligations and he needed to find someone competitive to fill the slot.  Shallow league, very basic.  10 teams, mixed, 5×5 roto, standard snake draft.  Happily, I obliged and decided that this would be a great opportunity to see just how long I could wait on drafting a starting pitcher while still maintaining a competitive staff in the league.

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