In my daily column, I’ll occasionally mention a specific player does/does not pass the eye test. When I say a player passes the eye test, it means I’ve watched him play and he “looks” like a fantasy stud. If I say someone does not pass the test, I’ve identified some worrisome factor.

In other words, I believe scouting has value in fantasy baseball. Unfortunately, I am not a scout. Nor am I a quant. I have a little of both skill sets due to my playing career through college, intense training program, thousands of hours of baseball watched, and academic background in Economics and basic Statistics. So it makes sense for me to try to combine both skill sets to better my fantasy rosters.

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Episode 114

The latest episode of The Sleeper and the Bust is now live! Jason Collette and Eno Sarris discuss Anthony Rendon, Ian Desmond, Marcell Ozuna Jason Heyward, Dee Gordon, Billy Hamilton, Jesse Chavez, Collin McHugh, Trevor Bauer, Josh Tomlin and Michael Fiers.

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 59 minutes of joyous analysis.  

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Today’s edition is really short. I was working on a detailed analysis to see how Kershaw may produced with a fastball around the 89 to 91 mph range. Basically I ran out of time. So I will finish up the analysis later tonight and write it up and we will run it tomorrow.  But the short answer is …. he looks like he will be fine.

• Clayton Kershaw’s average velocity in his last minor league start was around 90 mph

89-91, touched 92 a few times. RT @gq2scoops: Anybody know how Kershaw’s velocity was tonight?

— Dustin Nosler (@DustinNosler) May 1, 2014

With him expected to start Monday, how will the loss of velocity effect him? Wait until tomorrow for the details, but he should be fine.

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With about a month of baseball played so far, let’s take a look today at some of the players hitting into an infield shift. Some players have always been shifted like David Ortiz and Ryan Howard, but other hitters are seen the shift deployed against them for the first time. Today, I will look at some early season trends on some players and the effects they may be seeing.

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On Wednesday, Tony Cingrani put forth another disappointing outing, the third of his in 2014 in which he failed to complete more than five innings. Two of those starts have come against the Chicago Cubs, for whatever that’s worth. He’s expended more than 20 per pitches per inning in each of those three semi-clunkers, and each has resulted in a sub-50 Game Score.

The fact that he might labor through some starts isn’t surprising. No one expects him to lead the league in quality starts. He’s allowed seven earned runs total in the first stanza, one in the second and four in the third in 2014. I figured I’d try to discern what the particular problem or set of problems is when the folks at “MLB Tonight” on MLB Network threw a graphic on the screen comprised of those tallies. Such exaggeration doesn’t seem to have existed in his splits last season, according to info from Baseball Reference.

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Agenda

1. One month in the books
2. Thin Thursday Stacks
3. Tomorrow
4. Table

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I’ll be filling in for Blake this week, so you’ll have a little more of my sometimes good, mostly mediocre advice instead of his informative breakdowns of scoring.

The past few days have been a mess. Rain has wreaked havoc on a number of schedules, and on my charts I use for probable pitchers. Fortunately, forecasts look better today. Unfortunately, the solid forecasts are accompanied by a rather lax schedule. Thursdays are the worst, sometimes. They’re good for your work week, but they usually leave a little to be desired as far as baseball in concerned.

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The Milwaukee Brewers are the surprise team of the first month of the season. After an 88-loss season a year ago, they currently lead baseball with a 20-8 record, which includes a 5.5 game lead over the reigning NL champion Cardinals for first place in the Central division.

The team success may have come as a surprise to many, but fantasy owners were optimistic about the production of several Brewers before the season, especially in the outfield. Perennial fantasy first-rounder Ryan Braun was back from his suspension, and concerns over the effects of his banned substance use were not enough to push him out of the top two rounds in most drafts. Early returns had rewarded the owners that invested in him in spite of his persistent thumb problems, but an oblique strain has his return on hold for the time being.

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It’s updated tier week! As usual, these rankings represent my fantasy value expectations over the rest of the season. While I am not completely ignoring what has happened so far, its effect on my rankings is to merely expand the body of work by a pitcher from which to analyze. Unless there is a dramatic change in underlying skills that looks sustainable or an injury, there shouldn’t be a whole lot of movement after just 30 to 40 innings pitched.

While the preseason tier rankings were technically in descending order of my projected value, most pitchers within a tier are so close to each other that you could basically consider them interchangeable. An extra win, an additional 10 strikeouts, a .290 BABIP versus .295 BABIP are all pretty much random, but can shift a pitcher’s value by a couple of bucks. I didn’t bother moving players around within a tier, which is something I used to do, but provides little incremental value.

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Happy May Day, Roto Riteup readers, whatever that’s worth.

On today’s agenda:
1. Nathan Eovaldi strikes again
2. Felix Hernandez moved back
3. Matt Garza’s boo-boo
4. Alex Cobb throws
5. Fun with arbitrary endpoints
6. The Fab Five

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