On Mondays I write about daily fantasy strategy. On Wednesdays I’m supposed to write about closers. To be frank, I enjoy the topic I have been assigned for Mondays much, much more. I despise chasing saves (as I discussed a couple of weeks ago), and the guys doing the Bullpen Report really have relievers covered. But a commenter on one of my recent daily fantasy strategy posts asked me a question that involved both daily fantasy strategy and closers. The commenter wanted to know how viable it is to use closers in daily contests.

Closers are usually the cheapest players available in daily contests. In today’s contests on Draftstreet, the 34 cheapest players are relievers and only 2 relievers have a price tag above $3,000 when the average salary of all non-relievers is just over $6,000. The obvious reason is that relievers are the only players that we don’t know whether they’ll play before their game starts. That uncertainty drives the price down and is why I’ve ignored using closers to this point. But I may have been doing it wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

At least not just deep leagues in the case of the first one. And they’re not just a couple of soft-tossing left-handers whose nicknames are spelled the same way, although that’s basically where the similarities end, besides the fact that both started out in Texas’ organization.

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Agenda

1. Observations from yesterday
2. DFS stacks
3. For the normal guys
4. Three guesses

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Jesse Chavez has been mentioned a lot on Fangraphs lately. Wiers mentioned him in the Roto Riteup yesterday. Cistulli dug a little deeper, and even added a few gifs later on in the day. Chavez’s start has been impressive, but I want to shed some light on Oakland’s rotation as a whole. The Athletics lost Jarrod Parker in spring training. A.J. Griffin will be back eventually, but his timetable is still a little uncertain. All told, the Athletics had to replace two pitchers that were firmly slotted into their Opening Day rotation. They’ve done that, and then some.

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Today’s deep league waiver wire might bring back memories of seasons yonder. Don’t rush over to the calendar, we haven’t time traveled back to the past. The two men in this week’s recommendations are the short-term beneficiaries of injuries to the incumbents. Often times, this is what a deep leaguer needs to do — follow injury situations closely and just play the carousel rotating in hitters getting full-time at-bats to fill a weak spot on your roster. Admittedly, I won both these players through FAAB in AL Tout Wars this week.

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To be defined as pizza, this intelligent and passionate man believes a food item must contain, at minimum, three key elements: a crust or breading of some sort; a sauce, whether it be red, white, buffalo, barbeque, or miscellaneous; and cheese. If your food item does not contain all three key ingredients, please kindly find something else to call it — “Italian Circle Dish” and “Bastardized Goodness” both seem to roll off the tongue nicely — but in the name of all that is holy, DO NOT CALL IT PIZZA.

This has been a public service announcement. Now back to your regularly scheduled Roto Riteup.

Today’s Agenda
1. Taijuan Walker scratched
2. Dustin Pedroia to return today
3. Ryan Zimmerman to avoid surgery
4. Manny Machado sprints
5. Rainouts skip David Hale and Drew Smyly
6. The Daily Five

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Episode 107

The latest episode of The Sleeper and the Bust is now live! Jason Collette and Eno Sarris discuss batters and pitchers with zeroes still in their stat line, some injuries, and a look at Jesse Chavez and Homer Bailey.

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 53 min of joyous analysis.

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You want deep? Then let’s drill, baby, drill, as injuries to a couple of established American League stars in Week 2 have opened up spots for some deep league fantasy options to get a chance to shine.
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Swinging strikes are half (more than half?) the battle. But you can use pitches for grounders, too.

Take Marco Estrada, for example. By whiff rates, his change (18.4%) is plus, but his curve (9%) is not. That’s okay! By grounder rate, his curve is plus plus (60.8%). That means he has two great secondary pitches and qualifies to be a Guy I Like.

In order to help you spot good grounder pitches, I’ve run the benchmarks on each pitch type below. Should pair nicely with a Cabernet and this post which shows the benchmarks for whiff rates per pitch type.

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I get it – Dee Gordon probably burned you in 2012, when you took him as the 10th shortstop off the board, expecting 60-plus stolen bases and a Billy Hamilton-esque layup in the steals category.

Coming off a 24-steal performance in just 56 games the year prior, it was easy to look past the fact that Gordon only sporadically showed a good discipline profile in the minors. This guy can run. ZIPS wasn’t quite as friendly as public opinion but still saw a .271 average and a .310 on-base percentage that was good enough to afford Gordon 74 stolen base opportunities.

He failed. He stole you 32 bases, sure, but scored just 38 runs, appeared in only 87 games and had a pathetic .228/.280/.281 slash line.

It’s time to forgive him.
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