Is there a more disappointing player in fantasy baseball (non-injury division) this year than Starlin Castro? Okay, Josh Hamilton, maybe. Perhaps Matt Kemp, though anyone who didn’t expect some amount of negative impact from his shoulder surgery wasn’t really paying attention.

Remember, Castro was a guy ranked by Yahoo! as the #39 overall fantasy player (and #3 shortstop) entering the season. This was a guy who was placed in the elite top tier of fantasy shortstops along with Jose Reyes & Troy Tulowitzki right here by Erik Hahmann in March. I point that out not to embarrass Erik, but to show that everyone thought Castro was among the best of the fantasy best at the position — myself included, since I drafted him on more than one team.

Three months into the season, I now own Castro on zero teams. In one case, I simply dropped him for Jhonny Peralta, and I haven’t looked back. But 90% of Yahoo! teams and 97% of ESPN teams are still holding on. What went wrong, and is there a reason to hold out hope?

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Today’s Roto Riteup was written while enjoying the sounds of the (now defunct) Chicago pop-punk band Three Cent Cinema.

On today’s agenda:
1. What to look for when streaming against the New York Yankees
2. Juan Francisco’s power
3. Update on Dylan Bundy
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-With fans and fantasy owners on the edge of their seats, Red Sox skipper signaled for “new” closer Koji Uehara to close out the Blue Jays in the top of the ninth frame at Fenway today. The 38-year-old veteran needed just 16 pitches while facing the minimum to induce two strikeouts and a ground out en route to his second save since being named Andrew Bailey’s replacement last week and his third overall save on the season. The Japanese right-hander has now made eight consecutive appearances without surrendering an earned run and has lowered his twenty-thirteen ERA and WHIP to 1.97 and 0.81 respectively. Additionally, Uehara’s K% spiked to 37.4% after fanning two Toronto batters in today’s contest. Going forward, I’d consider Uehara a borderline top-ten closing option.

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“In every life, a little rain must fall.” — My Blue Heaven

In honor of the above statement, we’re going to piggyback Michael Barr’s Definitive Guide To All Things Depressing here and make it catcher specific. While those who made the investment in Buster Posey, Yadier Molina and Joe Mauer are resting easy in the comfort of an all-star catcher’s mitt, there are many of us who saw a golden opportunity this spring to go a little cheaper on our backstops and still land some high-end production. The position seemed unusually deep this year, so really…how bad could it be? Well, there’s an air of disappointment that surrounds many of the catchers we thought we were getting and now we’re all left wondering if any of these guys are actually going to produce. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 31
Today’s episode is a very special edition of The Sleeper and the Bust as it not only stars yours truly and features RotoGraphs editor Eno Sarris, but also ESPN’s Senior Fantasy Sports Analyst, the Talented Mr. Roto himself, Matthew Berry. We discuss his upcoming book Fantasy Life: The Outrageous, Uplifting, and Heartbreaking World of Fantasy Sports From the Guy Who’s Lived It available on July 16 and for pre-order now at FantasyLifeTheBook.com.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @mikepodhorzer or @enosarris on Twitter and tweet us any fantasy questions you have that we may answer on our next episode.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the feed.

Intro by DJ Sinton (no, contrary to popular belief, I do not moonlight as a rap star)

Approximately 36 min of joyous analysis.

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Today, I am mainly going to look at new metric, SLOW. It looks for hitters who are having problems hitting fastball in the strike zone. Besides SLOW, just a few other quick looks at Scott Kazmir, Jeanmar Gomez, Ryan Zimmerman and Felix Hernandez.

• I have read and heard many experts state a player has a slow bat and/or can’t catch up to fastballs. Finally, I have come up with an initial stab to see if a player is having problems hitting fastballs. To keep it easy, I am going to name it SLOW.

The basic parameters for the pitches examined are:
1. Pitches thrown into the heart of the plate (I don’t want to look at a chase rate)
2. Fastballs >=92 mph (looking for fastish fastballs)

I created the final metric using a weighted combination of:
1. Contact% (contact with the pitches)
2. Foul% (In play contact)
3. Pull angle on line drives and ground balls (is the hitter hitting the ball late)

The SLOW value may change a bit (I will probably put it on a 100 scale where 100 is league average) as I tweak it a bit here and there over the next couple of weeks. I have included two leader boards. One with the 2013 value. Another with players who have slowed the most from 2012 to 2013. Let me know if anything seems out of place.

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There’s potential for a wide range of outcomes when an owner picks up a prospect. Recent breakout performances from Mike Trout, Bryce Harper and Matt Harvey have caused fantasy owners to take notice whenever a top prospect gets a shot. But few prospects get off to blazing starts, and owners are more likely stuck with a guy like Kevin Gausman, who still has loads of potential, but struggled in his first taste of the majors. The Nationals boast one prospect who got started slowly, but has racketed things up a notch lately, and another non-prospect who is expected to make his major-league debut soon. Both Anthony Rendon and Taylor Jordan could end up playing a role on fantasy teams this season, but are they worth a pickup right now?

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Gavin Cecchini started the 2013 season where he ended it, in the Class-A (short season) New York Penn League, with the Brooklyn Cyclones. But the Penn League was not a proving ground in 2012, as he only played in five games, starting just one, and pinch running in the other four.

The shortstop, 20, has begun the season productive, consistent, and was noticeably bulkier than last year; he approximated he put on about between 10-12 pounds, in a conversation in early June. Regularly hitting second or third in the lineup, he’s had a hit in six of the eight games the Cyclones have played. He put together a five-game hitting streak, collecting three multi-hit games in that stretch.

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Last week, I examined unlikely minor league stolen base leader Micah Johnson, whose 58 swipes in the Low-A South Atlantic League have propelled him past some better-known base thieves (Billy Hamilton, Rico Noel, Byron Buxton, Roman Quinn, and Delino DeShields Jr., just to name a few) to a double-digit lead in the category. By now, Johnson–ranked among Chicago’s top 30 prospects by Baseball America entering the season and also sporting a hefty batting line–has started to gain publicity. It is less known, however, that the SAL also houses the current minor league home run leader: Hickory’s Ryan Rua, who has amassed 24 blasts, one ahead of highly-touted teammate Joey Gallo and well-traveled minor league slugger Mauro Gomez.

As with Johnson, Rua’s ascent to the top of the homer leaderboard was tough to foresee. He was a 17th-round pick in 2011 out of Division II Lake Erie College, where he had 27 homers in a three-year career. In 126 career professional games before 2013, all at short-season levels, he had just eleven homers. He had a very good .191 Isolated Power in rookie ball and a more pedestrian .136 in short-season-A play.

That lack of a track record, as well as Rua’s somewhat advanced age (he’s 23), may lead some to dismiss him as irrelevant for prospecting purposes, let alone fantasy ones, if not for one very important fact.

He plays second base.

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I feel strongly that the work of Bill Petti and Jeff Zimmerman on Edge% is one day going to give us a more complete idea of how pitcher’s attain success.

Right now, we know that elite Edge% pitchers, those who hit the edges of the strike zone (especially horizontally) with the highest frequency, are, at the very least, some of the best at limiting walks. We know that the better the Edge%, the better ERA and FIP tend to be, even though BABIP tends to be higher.

Perhaps most importantly for daily fantasy, what Edge% doesn’t tell us is who strikes out the most batters – the top 10% in Edge% do better than the next couple of groups, but it’s the pitchers between the 25th and 50th percentile, for whatever reason, have the highest strike out rate (and the highest walk rate, less surprisingly).
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