Injuries decimated the 2014 Texas Rangers. Injuries to Prince Fielder, Shin-Soo Choo and Jurickson Profar played a big part in Texas hitters amassing the fifth lowest WAR total in the league. Injuries to Yu Darvish, Derek Holland, Martin Perez and Matt Harrison led to the Rangers using 15 different starting pitchers. As a group, those starters amassed the ninth lowest WAR total of any rotation.

The good news is that Darvish and Holland, their two starters who were above league average according to xFIP when healthy last year, are expected to enter the season healthy. The bad news is that Perez and Harrison won’t be back until at least summer and potentially might not be back at all this year. That’s especially true for Harrison who has had three back surgeries in two years and considered retirement after his last surgery. But they’ve added a few new arms that will hopefully limit the number of Nick Tepesch and Nick Martinez starts that Rangers fans have to watch this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Humans are really good at pattern recognition. It’s what makes us who we are as a species. In some ways, we’re too good with patterns. We see them even when they aren’t there. There is an important phrase in statistics that not all of us take to heart – correlation is not causation.

Today, I want to talk about potential false patterns. Put another way, when we pick a player to outperform his draft position, we should have a reason.

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Along with the xK% formula I devised and updated last year, I also developed an xBB% equation. Unfortunately, it isn’t as good as the expected strikeout rate formula, as our community has really struggled to determine how the various underlying skill metrics should interact to result in an expected walk rate. That said, my version is still the best I’ve seen, so it’s better than nothing. But there are seemingly consistent underperformers and overperformers, so don’t take a pitcher’s xBB% as gospel.

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Episode 191

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live! It’s tough to let go, so this one runs a little long.

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Note: I usually try to pick the most recent game the player pitched. Sometimes the MLB video has issues and other games are picked. Also, if a say a pitch moves 11-5, it is from the pitcher’s perspective.

Marco Gonzales

Why I watched: The top ranked Cardinals prospect according to Baseball America deserved a look.

Game(s) Watched:9/14/14 vs Rockies

Game Thoughts

• The 22-year-old lefty had small amounts of movement on every pitch. Just enough to generate some weak contact.

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A chronically overworked bullpen experienced some considerable hiccups in 2014, as the Minnesota Twins saw the undoing of eighth-inning man Jared Burton as well as a late-season bout of struggles for closer Glen Perkins.

Perkins’ woes coincide pretty much directly to an arm issue that cost him a good chunk of September, but also provide a reminder that your great closer almost always already has one foot somewhat out the door.

Only three bullpens in baseball threw more innings than the Twins in 2014 — the Rockies, Cubs and Angels. No ‘pen struck out fewer batters than the Twins at 6.7 per 9. Worse yet was that the unit had the third-worst groundball rate at 40.1 percent. Sure, that’s OK in a big park, but not if you don’t have good outfielders, and not particularly if you don’t strike anybody out. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

The New York Yankees head into 2015 praying that their rotation will hold up. As nearly anyone can reasonably surmise, it won’t. Injury concerns abound in the Yanks’ top five, and there’s not much help waiting in the wings. If everyone stays healthy, this rotation will be very formidable. Unfortunately, there aren’t many bigger ‘ifs’ than that one.

CC Sabathia
Masahiro Tanaka
Michael Pineda
Nathan Eovaldi
Ivan Nova
Chris Capuano

Those six names are the only ones that we have projected to pitch more than 19 innings as a starter for the Yanks this season. Considering the team used a whopping 13 starters last year, that’s red flag number one. Let’s start with Sabathia and work our way down.

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This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, rotation, and bullpen) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

As fantasy baseball players, we often find discrepancies between a player’s value “in real life” and his value in fantasy leagues. Or even between his actual value and his role on the team. The best relief pitcher isn’t always the closer, for example, or a nominal ace is really the third best starter on his team. This latter example might very well apply to the 2015 Blue Jays.

Most depth charts are going to show you that R.A. Dickey and Mark Buehrle are the Jays’ number one and two starters, respectively. They are the grizzled veterans, they have fairly lucrative contracts, and they have some track record of success. They have thrown a lot of league-average-or-slightly-better innings over the last few years, and that has real life value.

But the Blue Jays have an exciting crop of younger starters, two of whom were probably more valuable than their elders last year, and certainly project to be more valuable going forward—both for their actual teams and for their fake teams.

For the 2015 Blue Jays rotation, the gap between nominal real life role and fantasy value coincides with a vast gap in age: those 36 and older, whose value in real life doesn’t cross over very well to fantasy leagues, and those 26 and younger, whose fantasy upside for 2015 and beyond is considerable.

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Welcome. We are two brothers, aggregate age 122 years, of which roughly 106 have been spent as stat geeks and baseball fans, probably in descending order of intensity. One of us, Michael, resides in Manhattan and is a former academic economist, self-described as an idiot savant in econometrics. He’s why you’ll keep reading, if you do. The other, Dan, resides in Albany, New York, the hub of civic virtue, and knows how to type. He also knows just enough about economics and statistics to translate for the multitudes when his brother is speaking in tongues.

Astonishingly, Michael was a Fantasy Baseball virgin until last year, when his brother tarnished his theretofore-unsullied innocence by recruiting him to replace an owner who went AWOL at the last moment in a $50 buy-in league. It might as well have been an introduction to freebase, and overnight, homemade multiple regression analyses started popping up like toadstools. We’ll share the results of one recent study with you next time: an attempt to identify hitters who were pitched to differently, and reacted to the pitches they saw differently, in the second half of the 2014 season, betokening (we surmise) a newfound respect among their opponents. You don’t need our help to figure out that you might want to draft Nolan Arenado or perhaps Jedd Gyorko. But how about Ender Inciarte, Ike Davis, and Delmon Young, all of whom we recommend?

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This 30-part series will look at the projected Top 5 freshmen contributors for each big league club for the year ahead. The rankings take into consideration a mixture of ceiling, readiness and potential playing time allocation, which is to say some players with lower ceilings may be ranked ahead of others with higher ceilings because they project to have a greater impact in the coming season.

In a Nutshell: The Rays have some interesting names ready to challenge for permanent big league gigs, but their ceilings are fairly modest and there may not be a star player in the bunch.

Steven Souza, OF: As the key return in the WIl Myers trade this past off-season, the Rays clearly value Souza as a potential impact player. However, the outfield prospect will turn 26 in April and has eight years of minor league experience under his belt as a late-bloomer. With that said, he’s shown the ability to hit for average, power and steal bases so it’s easy to understand the interest in his potential. He could have some 20-20 (HR-SB) seasons in his prime, but those years are just about upon him.

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