Yesterday, I discussed the April batted ball distance surgers. So naturally, today I’ll check in on the decliners. Because regression to the mean is such a powerful force, a distance decline sticks more often than a surge does. In other words, I would be more concerned about a decliner than excited about a surger.
I’m somewhat torn. On one hand, I linked to “Star Wars” and some of my childhood toys on May 4th. On the other hand, I neglected to mention May 4th was the 30th anniversary of my favorite John Hughes film, “Sixteen Candles.”
On today’s agenda:
1. A strong start from Nathan Eovaldi
2. Jay Bruce’s knee surgery
3. Thoughts on Seth Smith
4. The Daily Five
• John Axford did not pitch well last night and lucky for Cody Allen owners he did not pitch well this evening either, getting the loss against the Twins. Axford has a blown save and a loss in his last two outings and his seasonal ERA/FIP/xFIP is now 4.85/6.59/5.29. Not good. In the same game Cody Allen threw a scoreless inning with two strikeouts, continuing his great start to the season. We have known for a while that Allen is the better pitcher but it’s finally time that he starts seeing save opportunities. No switch has been made yet but my guess is that something is imminent. I can’t imagine Allen is still unowned in any active leagues, but he is a must have for any fantasy team. Allen won’t be sitting on your waiver wire but you still might be able to snag him in a trade, netting a possible top-ten closer at a discounted price.
Contract year. He got skinny. He’s 27 years old. This will be the Panda’s year. This will be the year Pablo Sandoval puts it all together.
So far, so not good. Sandoval’s power is down, his strikeout rate is up, his swing metrics are all messed up, and his owners are considering dropping him in mixed leagues. What’s up with this skinny sad Panda?
We’re a month through the season, and fantasy owners are already jumping to huge conclusions regarding the 2014 season. These tiered rankings attempt to capture the production from the first month of the season, moving some players up and down where I felt it was necessary, but largely, I attempted to refrain from getting too caught up in the ebbs and flows of single-month performance. There are five months remaining in the 2014 season. Lots will change, and I didn’t want to make the tiered rankings a simple “who is performing well right now,” as that’s not overly useful.
Anyway, here we go.
Agenda
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There is something to be said for guys who seem rather bland and become undervalued because of their seemingly averageness when it comes to fantasy baseball. To me, Todd Frazier is one of those guys. In whiffing on Chase Headley, I was able to grab Frazier on the waiver wire a few weeks back and have enjoyed the performance he has given me thus far. From looking a bit more in depth at his numbers, it seems like he should sustain a better-than-expect level of performance.
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Today’s preamble to the daily picks section of this post falls squarely in the “may not mean a damn thing” category. But I was running various subsets of players through the Draftstreet scoring system and eventually just decided to run the numbers so far this year for all hitters and all starters through the system. What I found was that hitters have combined to score 21,118 points this year, and starters have combined to score 5,993.6. When you divide those numbers by the nine hitter slots and three pitcher slots in a Draftstreet salary cap lineup, you see that hitters are averaging 2,346.44 points per slot, and starters are averaging 1,997.86 points per slot. If you add those two numbers up, you’ll see that hitters look to be responsible for about 54% of points, and starters are responsible for 46%.
This makes me wonder if 54/46 is a good split for how much money to spend on hitters and starters. It probably means nothing, but I’d be curious if any of you guys have any thoughts on the best split for your money or any way that might be good to research that issue. Ultimately, I think it just depends on where the value lies on a given day. Some days there are cheaper pitchers that are good value plays, and I can split my spending 60/40 for hitters. Other days I don’t feel safe with any starter under 15K, and I have to spend at least half my money on pitching. But I just thought the 54/46 split was interesting even if it probably doesn’t mean a damn thing.
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Now that we’re more than a month into the season, we finally have enough data to start taking batted ball distance numbers seriously. When developing my latest xHR/FB rate equation, I limited the player population to include only those who recorded at least 20 home runs and fly balls. At this point, the majority of the leaderboard sits between 20 and 25, so let’s dig in and start by looking at which hitters have experienced the largest increase since last season.