The Cubs have new pitchers, yes, but do we care? They opted for the better prospect bat as they traded away their two best pitchers, and it doesn’t even look like the best arm they got back — Dan Straily — is going to be promoted to the big leagues right away. So what’s going on in the Cubbie rotation, and should mixed leaguers care?
At the end of a long weekend that went by much too fast, as another absurd week of paper-pushing, traffic, and tension quickly closes in, I re-read The Stranger. In closing, Albert Camus writes, “I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a ‘fiance,’ why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again.”
Reading that, I was suddenly able to burst through my Sunday night anxiety. So here we are for another edition of Fantasy Baseball Existentialism. Last week, I read Joshua Ferris’ novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. The novel relates here because there are elements of existentialism and baseball. The main character is a Red Sox fan who is struggling to stay in love with the team after they’ve disappointed him by winning two championships, which creates nostalgia for a lifetime of the club’s familiar letdowns.
Agenda
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Coming off a .289 season with a 139 wRC+, Belt was an attractive later round target for 1B and UTIL in standard redraft leagues. To me he was a poor man’s Eric Hosmer, who could be drafted much later. I went pretty much all in on Belt in any leagues that I had the availability to draft him. Thankfully he got off to a monster start but unfortunately he broke his thumb and missed a good portion of the season.
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A week ago today, in this very space, I devoted a couple hundred words convincing y’all to start Joe Saunders at the low, low price of $3,658. Saunders gave up four home runs, seven runs total and has since been released by the Rangers. So yeah, good call by me. But I can live with being very, very wrong in a public forum because I hedged against the Saunders call, stacked some Orioles in a GPP lineup, and ended up winning the $2 GPP last Friday. Give me money over being right any day.
Obviously I wasn’t the only one who stacked Orioles against Saunders, and some other things had to go my way for me to hit. But the results have me wondering if hedge plays are the way to go in GPPs. To give another example from personal experience, I ended up pretty Brewers-heavy in my lineups for the July 4th $50K Big Score, and they mustered just two runs on six hits. Despite having the Brewers in roughly half my lineups, I did not have the opposing starter, Alfredo Simon, in a single lineup. It would have been nice to have his 8.33 points in a non-Brewers lineup.
To be fair, I was also pretty Dodgers-heavy in my lineups, and I wasn’t about to throw Jair Jurrjens into a lineup. But Simon has had success this year, albeit success not backed up by peripherals. Anytime you’re heavy on a lineup and there’s at least some reason to think the starter could be decent, you should probably throw the him in at least one other lineup. In fact, once your lineups are drawn up, look and see if you’re heavy on any particular play and try to hedge it in one spot. And for clarity, this only applies to GPPs. Which, by the way, I think may be the way to go unless you’re a shark/grinder. But that’s another conversation for another day.
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Y’all are stuck with me through Thursday this week with no interruption from Wiers, so I suggest you prepare your diddly-holes accordingly. Here’s Monday’s Roto Riteup.
On today’s agenda:
1. Brandon McCarthy to the Yankees
2. Jeff Samardzija dominates in AL
3. Chase Headley to the Blue Jays?
4. Rubby De La Rosa to start Wednesday
5. The Foolhardy Five
Extremely brief notes in a pinch-hit effort this evening:
With the potential tying run in the on-deck circle for the Tigers in the bottom of the ninth, Joe Maddon pulled starter David Price in favor of flamethrowing Jake McGee to finish the game. And McGee did just that, fanning Austin Jackson on five pitches to notch his fifth save of the season. The 27-year-old southpaw now owns a 1.16 ERA to go along with a ~31% K% in just under 39 innings on the bump. We’ve discussed McGee and the possibility of the Rays wanting to keep him from notching too many saves to keep his arbitration numbers down — which could still be the case — but don’t let that keep you from adding him in your mixed leagues. Jake McGee is available in 64% of Yahoo! leagues at the time of this writing and will bring the heat in the ratio and strikeout categories while picking up the occasional scab win even if the Rays’ brass plays games with his role out of the bullpen.
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Episode 138
The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is now live! Jason Collette and Nicholas Minnix discuss, among other things, the fallout of the Jeff Samardzija et al. trade; the Brandon McCarthy trade; the loss of players in mono leagues after crossover trades; the pending returns of Bud Norris, Dillon Gee, Jeremy Hellickson, and Francisco Liriano; more on the injury front, including the expected departure of Edwin Encarnacion; and the official naming of Santiago Casilla as closer.
As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us or comment with fantasy questions so that we may answer them on our next episode.
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One of the areas of baseball I’ve been able to find some success with beyond daily fantasy is betting on five-inning lines. Betting on a five-inning line works the same as betting on a full game, except, well, the game ends after five frames.
Basically, a bettor “knows” more about a five-inning game, because far less is left up to bullpens and managerial decisions. While there are obvious exceptions and other elements to consider, a five-inning line is largely a bet on starting pitching. Because we “know” more, the lines generally tend to vary less, but they can be instructive for the purposes of daily fantasy by narrowing in more closely to a starting pitcher’s set-up than a full-game line.
Those lines don’t replace a full-game line or a run-line in terms of value, but they’re worth a comparison.
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Welcome to the final week before the All-Star Game! Time to make moves to win now or rebuild for next year.
On today’s agenda:
1. My affection for Christian Yelich grows
2. Thoughts on David Freese
3. Tommy La Stella is hitting
4. Quick thought on Odrisamer Despaigne
5. The daily five