When the Milwaukee Brewers selected Taylor Jungmann with the 12th pick in the 2011 draft, he was seen as a polished prospect with an advanced feel for pitching who would move quickly through the organization. If everything went to plan, Jungmann would be in the major-league rotation by late 2013, with a long career as a mid-to-back of the rotation starter ahead of him.

At the time, I wholeheartedly agreed with these sentiments. I saw Jungmann pitch several times during his college career at the University of Texas, and it was easy to see why he was viewed as such a sure thing. He had a mid-90s heater with a sweeping curve that projected as a plus pitch, and a change-up that seemed plenty good enough to avoid nasty splits.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ll hear a lot about strikeout rates stabilizing sometime in April, anywhere from about 60 plate appearances to 110 depending on who you trust and who you reference. It makes sense we talk about this, of course, what with the small sample size police on patrol across Fangraphs. From a fantasy perspective, we try to be patient, but there’s nothing worse than holding a turd any longer than you really have to. Because, well, gross.

Read the rest of this entry »

Agenda

1. How do you set your lineups?
2. DFS Stacks
3. Saturday Selections
4. Sur la Table

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece looking at the other warning signs that surrounded Matt Moore. Velocity was just one of the many areas where Matt Moore was showing decline heading into the 2014 season. Moore’s rates were in a two-year decline (from 2012 to 2013) in each of the following areas:

• F-Strike%
• O-Swing%
• O-Contact%
• Z-Contact%
• Contact%
• Swing%
• Zone%
• SwStr%

Read the rest of this entry »

So, remember that time I recommended stacking Giants versus Paul Maholm? Yeesh. Oh well, perhaps you’re nice enough to let me slide on that one. Hell, I can’t be the only one who thought he’d get hit pretty hard. I thought the match-up itself had tremendous blow-up potential, considering Ryan Vogelsong was on the other end of the bill. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way. The Giants I happened to pick performed alright, but they weren’t winning you any money. So hopefully, we have a little better luck today.

Read the rest of this entry »

We always hear our not-so-favorite broadcasters mentioning a player’s stats against a certain pitcher. Well, I think we are all hopefully smart enough to not take the results of 15 meetings between a pitcher and hitter seriously. Instead, we split samples into larger groups like right-handed hitter vs. left-handed pitcher. I have decided to cut the difference and create a spreadsheet which takes a middle ground. I grouped pitchers by handedness, velocity and groundball tendencies and found how hitters performed against the different pitcher groups.

First off, I wanted to have this Excel-only spreadsheet available online before the season started. Well, I got it done and working in time. Since Visual Basic macros were used in the final view, it doesn’t have a online option which I wanted. So today, I am going to make it publicly available, but at some point I hope to have it working in all spreadsheet formats and/or online at a place like Google.docs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s Roto Riteup was written while listening to my brand new vinyl of Illmatic. Tomorrow will be the 20th anniversary of Nas’ debut album. You can grab the album + MP3 download from Amazon for less than 22 bucks plus shipping. Order it now, thank me after you listen to it. For what it’s worth, Nas did a reddit AMA earlier in the week as well.

On today’s agenda:
1. Corey Hart in right field again?
2. Michael Brantley, RBI guy?
3. Kansas City (Outfield) Shuffle
4. The Daily Five

Read the rest of this entry »

–Jonathan Papelbon notched his 4th save of the young season on 14 pitches as the Phillies clipped the Braves 1-0. Pap induced a fly ball to center field off the bat of Braves’ first baseman Freddie Freeman, then fanned both Justin Upton and Chris Johnson to finish off Atlanta in the top half of the ninth.
Read the rest of this entry »

Selling high is generally a misnomer these days. Most of us are in competitive leagues, the kind where all the owners read or write for a reputable site. We learn how to use sites like FanGraphs to do statistical analysis. As a result, it’s really hard to find people to snooker with 15 days of fluky data. However, certain types of players can remain marketable even though everyone is looking for the pitfalls.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 108

The latest episode of The Sleeper and the Bust is now live! Jason Collette and Eno Sarris discuss declining velocities, rising prospects, and ailing pitchers.

As usual, don’t hesitate to 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.

Thanks to Ian Miller aka Teen Archer, for the new intro music Approximately 34 min of joyous analysis.  

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS