It all began with a comment by Jason Bulay, aka The Stranger, on a post I published in January pitting two popular snake draft strategies against each other — best player available and position scarcity:

I posted this as a comment to Cwik’s article yesterday, but I really want to see everybody put their money where their mouth is with all the draft strategy/player valuation theory. Do a draft (or multiple drafts, because small sample size) where everybody will be scored using 2014 stats (or 2015 projections if you prefer). After the draft, add up everybody’s roster using standard 5×5 scoring. See who wins, and what kind of draft strategy really gets the best roster. See who loses, and mock them without mercy.

Not that I disagree with you – your points make sense. But I think this is something we can actually test and I’d love to read about the results, so why not give it a shot?

His idea was intriguing. We’re all very familiar with the various projection systems and know that the masterminds behind them continually strive to improve them. They are also tested every year and we learn which performed best. But valuation systems get none of this treatment, as there has seemingly been little to no progress made on properly valuing players since the original systems were developed and shared.

Jason eventually followed up with an email and after many back and forth messages, we finally settled on exactly what we wanted to test and how we would accomplish our goal.

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Welcome to the first of many Roto Riteups this season! Zach Sanders and I are still in spring training too, so until the season kicks off, the RR will be here thrice weekly.

On today’s agenda:
1. Adam Lind is looking good
2. Yasmany Tomas to the outfield today
3. Zack Wheeler’s elbow issues
4. A broken collar bone for Ramon Santiago
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The Roto Riteup is back for 2015, baby! David Wiers and I will be your hosts for yet another year, providing white hot baseballing content on a daily basis during the regular season. For the next couple weeks leading up to Opening Day, we’ll be publishing on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to keep you up to date on news of interest around the fantasy baseball universe.

If you have any suggestions for the 2015 RR — other than replacing Wiers with someone who doesn’t love My Little Pony — please do leave them in the comments.

On today’s agenda:
1. Jake McGee on the mend
2. Drew Smyly to miss first turn through rotation
3. Rusney Castillo coming back slowly
4. Jake Smolinski making his case

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Episode 204

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Jason Collette discuss some Spring Training injury news surrounding Drew Smyly, Zack Wheeler, and Addison Reed and finish the news by discussing Kris Bryant’s soaring cost.

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Weekly update:

• Add a bunch of times to first.
• On batted ball, I am trying to correctly combine categories batted ball categories. With categories combined, it will take less time for a hitter’s batted ball profile to stabilize. I hope to have a major update on this area in the next week or two. After that, I can start getting some real values for the stats begin to stabilize.
• Here is a link to the data in an Excel format. For some reason I can only embed OpenOffice files.

Pitchers’ Approach Attacking Hitters

Robert Arthur at Baseball Prospectus has shown pitchers will change their approach depending on the hitter’s talent level. Here is a complete list of the number of fastballs (including sinkers) thrown to each hitter of the past two years divided into half seasons. Also the number of pitches in the strike by half season is included along with the fastball percentage in the strike zone. I will begin adding 2015 information as it becomes available.

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To atone for time missed due to the Arizona trip, I figured I’d fire up a quick hitter about where we’re at with the BP Kings Scoresheet draft.

As many of you may well know, I’m in year four of this league which originally sprouted via the Baseball Prospectus family — hence the BP. It’s a very competitive league, and one I finally found myself at the forefront of with a 90-plus win season last year thanks to a very strong rotation.

This year, well, I’m already snakebitten.

It’s a 24-team, AL and NL league with a slow draft that is roughly half done rounds-wise — maybe more like one-third done picks wise — as we slog through the 16th round today.

I have a few questions to crowdsource, but here’s where I’m at right now. Please keep in mind that my keepers list was submitted in February. Big league keepers cost you front end picks (up to 10) while minor league keepers cost you picks counting back from round 30 — which is the length of the original draft. Every two months we have a two-round supplemental, including after the MLB draft in June.

You field essentially a 25-man roster — you can roster more guys but it’s a full MLB roster concept — so that means you need backups, bullpens and so on.

Keepers (in no real order):
1. Jose Abreu 1B
2. Xander Bogaerts 3B
3. A.J. Pollock CF
4. Jason Heyward RF
5. Chris Sale SP
6. Masahiro Tanaka SP
7. Yu Darvish SP (ouch)
8. Marcus Stroman SP (ouch 2.o)
9. Sonny Gray SP
10. Yasmani Grandal C Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of Quick Look changes for Spring Training. I am going to be doing more players, but with less information. Some pitchers I watch will only throw an inning or two. Also, some broadcasts don’t have radar readings. Finally, the camera angles are horrible to be kind.

Another change I will be implementing is grading the players on the scouting scales of 20-80. I will Kiley McDaniels scale he discussed in this article.

I will give a value for where I think the pitcher could currently fit in on the average team (CV=current value) and where they could end up (FV=future). I am sure I will disagree with some grades from others, but I am only looking at one game.

Note: If I say a pitch moves 11-5, it is from the pitcher’s perspective.

3/8/15 Padres vs Rockies (no velocities)

Tyson Ross (60+ CV/65 FV)

• He was the reason I picked this game. He has talked of the expanded the role of his change-up.
• He throws very over the top.
• His fastball was had some downward motion.
• His slider had a sharp 12-6 down breaking action.
• Now to the change. It looked to be same speed (I checked previous speeds and it was the same) and broke the direction as his slider. The break was less and not as sharp. It was basically his slider, but worse. I can see why he hasn’t used it.
• I wonder if he could add a cutter to give himself a third pitch.

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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 Atlanta Braves made quite the splash this offseason, but it wasn’t the type of splash that resulted in fans walking down Georgia streets chanting and waving tomahawks, it was more of the eyebrow raising, head scratching, guess we’re retooling a bit splash. And this is not me saying one way or another that I like or dislike the moves that were made, just noting that the roster looks completely different than a year ago.

Catcher

Christian Bethancourt
A.J. Pierzynski

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Sorry for the week-long hiatus. I actually found myself in Arizona with the Fangraphs crew last weekend, and I’ll be honest with you: I sat at a table with my fellow nerds and started working on this, but found the conversation too interesting to finish it before we left for Talking Stick to see the A’s take on the Diamondbacks. A million apologies.

You’ve already been subjected to Ottoneu Fangraphs League II banter from Scott Spratt, Brad Johnson and Chad Young, and now I’m going to subject you to just a little bit more.

Here’s a rundown of what we’re working with here:

Roster Spots Filled: 40/40
Dollars Used: $335/$412 ($400 + $12 trade)
Linear Weights

I’m aware I broke the cardinal rule of not spending all or nearly all the money. Part of that is my methodology — I love having free agent flexibility — and part of it was a few guys I targeted that came in under values. Ultimately, I have a 40-man roster that I rather like — not likely a contender, but interesting nonetheless — and even as a revisionist, there aren’t too many players I’d retroactively wish I had won. Carlos Santana comes to mind, and that’s about it. Read the rest of this entry »

This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

There aren’t many more spots left to cover in our Depth Chart Discussions. It’s not surprising that the Rockies rotation was one of the last areas claimed. Even in the very capable hands of RotoGraphs writers (yours truly excepted, of course), there’s not much to get excited about when thinking about pitchers pitching half their games at Coors Field. No one has really seemed to crack the Coors Code yet when it comes to pitchers. Since the team’s inaugural season in 1993, qualified Rockies starters have put up an ERA under 3.00 exactly once: Ubaldo Jimenez did it in 2010. There are three other three qualified pitcher seasons under 3.50.

Jeff Sullivan recently wrote about how Jorge de la Rosa has figured out how to pitch at Coors Field; in fact, he’s been better there than in other stadiums as a whole. De la Rosa is actually a deep sleeper for me going into 2015, so let’s just dive right in and talk about him since he’s the undisputed ace of the staff (for now).

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