Agenda

1. Advantages, disadvantages to stacking
2. DFS plays
3. Wednesday picks for the normal guys
4. A table with which you are familiar

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Over at Viva El Birdos, SBNation’s Cardinal’s blog, author Craig Edwards has a great post on Matt Adams and the shift. In the piece, he notes that Adams hits almost all of his home runs to right field or right center, showing that his best way to beat the shift has been to just bash one over the fence. This season, things have started off a bit differently.
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We’re a little over a week into the season at this point, and while it’s still much too early to draw any meaningful conclusions from the games that have been played, we might as well have a little fun.

If you had asked me at the beginning of the season which teams I’d be inclined to choose opposing pitchers against. I likely would have chosen: Miami, Houston, Philadelphia,  & Minnesota. San Francisco wouldn’t have made the cut, but I wouldn’t have been terrified to plug in a pitcher against them. Here we are, after 8 or so games, and those offenses are ranked first, twenty-third , eighth, fourth, and second, respectively, in runs scored. At least I would have been correct on the Astros? I’m not sure that counts for much, though.

Going forward, I’m not betting on any of the five above offenses to continue producing at a high level, except for San Francisco. The Giants offense can be scary when Posey and Co. are hitting on all cylinders, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they were a well oiled machine for most of the remaining season. Although, I’m pretty sure Brandon Hicks won’t do his best Babe Ruth impression all season.

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Week 1 is in the books, and with the tiny sample size comes the emergence of several deep league options, overlooked on draft day, who are providing hope that they can help owners in the immediate term.
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Yesterday, I analyzed the five players most added in CBS leagues. Was the juice worth the squeeze? For the most part, no. Are fantasy owners also dropping players too hastily? It follows that if fantasy owners love to chase the hot player du jour, they also get too trigger happy when jettisoning players from their rosters. Let’s discuss the five most dropped non-injured players in CBS leagues. Are fantasy owners justified for their decisions and if these players are now available in your league, should you pounce?

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Today I’ll be at my first live major league game of the year. assuming we’re not counting spring training. Look for me in the crowd in Chicago as the Pittsburgh Pirates take on the Cubs.

On today’s agenda:
1. A.J. Ellis to have knee surgery
2. John Lackey’s strong start
3. Matt Moore’s elbow soreness
4. The Daily Five

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While we’re generally quick to throw out early-season performance as a matter of small sample size, doing so universally risks throwing the baby out with the bath water, to shoehorn an expression into a place it doesn’t really fit.

While small samples generally aren’t very predictive or revealing of true talent – the quickest metric to stabilize is strikeout rate, which requires about 60 plate appearances to cross the 70 percent reliability threshold – they do matter. An 0-for-20 stretch can doom a player, a 12-for-20 stretch earn him a great deal of leash with a manager. Small sample sizes have meaning for many players.

A week into the season, a handful of players are seeing far more playing time than was expected. How they are performing in these small samples could very well determine the fate of the rest of their seasons.
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• Sonny Gray has me perplexed a bit. First, his velocity is down compared to last season.

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Nathan Eovaldi followed up his 2014 debut — three runs, six hits, eight strikeouts, no walks in seven innings — with another strong performance Sunday. He lost the game, but eight strikeouts against no walks in seven innings is impressive, even when set against three earned runs on six hits. Is he a must-acquire suddenly? After all, he’s averaging over 96 on his fastball.

I remain skeptical, but I’m always willing to admit I’m wrong, so it is without biases that I try to appraise Eovaldi’s 2014 arsenal.

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On Mondays during the season, I generally focus on the second base position, whether that’s highlighting a specific player or breaking down my tiered rankings for the position. The tiered rankings ran last week and it’s too early in the season to meaningfully analyze individual player performance; however, I have noticed a couple things I wanted to touch on as we begin the second week of the season.

One of the more interesting aspects of the 2013 fantasy baseball season was the realization that the second base position was actually quite bad. It didn’t dip below the anemic level of shortstops, but its collective .305 wOBA wasn’t far behind and was worse than the league-average catcher. When discussing position scarcity and the shortstop position, fantasy owners should lump second base into the same group. In deeper leagues, the second base position can get ugly rather quickly.

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