It is much easier to get excited about a player than it is to see the negative. Sure, if a guy has a rotten injury record, it is pretty easy to knock him down. But most fantasy players are eager to identify to the next set of sleepers or breakouts or whatever term you feel is adequate to describe middle-round guys who will explode into early-round assets. What about looking at some of the flaws of those early-to-mid round guys we’re all so certain will explode this year? There are certainly reasons to love these guys (and several of them are guys I’m quite high on coming into the season), but let’s at least be aware of the shortcomings and what could possibly hold them back from that big time season we’re banking on.

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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 Giants may have won the World Series last year, but before they got to the postseason, their rotation was not the strength of the team. In the regular season they ranked mid-pack at 16th in ERA and near the bottom in WAR at 28th. And it was primarily just Madison Bumgarner that was the strength of the team in the postseason as he threw almost a third of all innings for the Giants in the playoffs. Aside from mid-season acquisition Jake Peavy, the Giants have not added anyone to the staff. That should probably concern fans of the defending champs. Of course, three titles in five years helps ease some concerns. But for fantasy owners under-performance the year prior sometimes leads to value on draft day. Read the rest of this entry »

Our quest for deep sleepers continues, and as former academics now seeking the Fantasy Baseball equivalent of tenure, we know the value of using as much of other people’s research as we can get away with.

Thus, first came Robert Arthur, an inhabitant of sabermetric Valhalla by virtue of his ability to combine meticulous and microscopic analysis of baseball stats with enjoyable prose. He demonstrated—we’re dumbing this down a bit, but it’s substantially accurate—that sluggers see fewer fastballs than other hitters. He noted that “fastball frequency normally varies according to the pop of the batter, so that when it changes, it may be indicating a change in the skill level of the same batter.”

Beloved Fangraphs editor Eno Sarris then built upon Arthur’s research. He observed, as Arthur had, that “the more we know about a player’s major-league work, the less powerful a change in fastball percentage is for prediction.” In other words, if we want to use fastball frequency to find players who might start hitting home runs in unexpected clusters, look at guys who don’t have much in the way of established performance. So Eno looked for hitters who (1) had fewer than 800 career plate appearances through the end of 2014, and (2) saw fewer fastballs in the second half of the season. This produced a list of power breakout candidates for 2015: Corey Dickerson, Rougned Odor, Kolten Wong, Nick Castellanos, Travis d’Arnaud, Scooter Gennett, Marwin Gonzalez, Mike Zunnino, Yasmani Grandal, and Jon Singleton.

As Eno points out, this is a group of striplings (average age 23). The thing about young players, though, is that they may be seeing fewer fastballs because pitchers have deduced that they can’t hit anything else, or perhaps even that they can’t hit anything else and swing promiscuously at anything-elses that aren’t in the strike zone. So, we wondered, how can we identify which hitters are true candidates for a power burst? We thought of a study of our own that we introduced in our second Fangraphs post. For those of you who haven’t been taking notes: We looked for hitters who saw fewer strikes and took fewer swings at bad pitches in the second half of the 2014 season, on the theory that this betokens increased wisdom for both the hitters in question and the pitchers who face them.

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of evaluating expected strikeout rate (xK%) in the context of each pitcher’s respective histories. In other words, xK% on its own can only tell you so much about a pitcher’s chance and magnitude of regression toward the mean.

And last week, I refined the expected walk rate (xBB%) metric for pitchers by adding a proxy for pitch sequencing in the form of percentage of counts that reach 3-0 (“3-0%”). This helped better explain the model’s fit with respect to the data, as pitchers who worked into more 3-0 counts tended to walk more batters. (Who knew?)

The logical next step is to combine the two aforementioned analyses: 1) comparing xBB% to BB% 2) for each pitcher over time. I’ll reiterate a couple of key points. Calculating a pitcher’s xBB% can give us a decent idea of how lucky or unlucky he may have been during a given season. Calculating his xBB% and comparing it to his actual BB% on an annual basis can give us a better idea of truly how he typically performs against his xBB% — that is, if he consistently outperforms his xBB%, perhaps the difference between his xBB% and BB% is not a matter of luck at all but a skill or characteristic not captured by the variables specified in the xBB% equation.
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Friend Eno explored the world of punted statistics yesterday. For those of you not in the know, “punting” occurs when a fantasy owner does not attempt to score in a specific stat. It’s most commonly seen with stolen bases and saves. Eno’s findings confirm that those are the optimal categories to punt.

Eno also discusses when to punt, noting that it’s a much more viable strategy in an H2H league than Roto. He explains the details, so check it out. If you’d like to discuss why H2H and Roto leagues are treated differently, let’s chat in the comments.

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The Cubs biggest move of the offseason may have impacted the rotation, but there are still plenty of questions on how the other four players will perform. The Cubs won the Jon Lester sweepstakes, but the rest of the rotation remains intact. Even Jason Hammel can back after a brief departure to Oakland. While Hammel and Jake Arrieta have plenty of upside, the team will still have to depend on a shaky back-end. Aside from Lester, who can you really trust moving forward?

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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.

By our projections, the Dodgers have the second best starting pitching staff in baseball. That makes for quite an attractive rotation. Let’s discuss these lads, shall we?

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Episode 201

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris start their positional previews with catchers. Behind the dish they discuss:

• Strategy
  • Do you ever pay up for Posey?
  • How much do you boost Cs who won’t C this year?
  • What about Cs who play a good bit elsewhere to boost their PA?
  • Favorite Strategy Outside of Stars?
    • Two mid-level guys
    • Two $1 guys
    • One mid-level, one $1 guy
    • End-gamer catchers

• Player Talk
  • Is your first tier just Posey or does LuCroy get to stay?
  • Who comes close to a repeat? Mesoraco or Gomes?
  • Better defense-first bet: Molina or Perez?
  • Is McCann done as AVG asset?
  • How does Wieters return from the TJS?

And then it cutoff randomly!! My computer deleted Skype in the middle of the podcast. We didn’t get a chance to rejoin because we were on a tight schedule as it was, so we just cut it there.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us or comment with fantasy questions.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the feed. Please rate & review the show in iTunes letting us know what you think!

Thanks to Ian Miller, aka Teen Archer, for the intro music. Approximately 44 minutes of joyous analysis.

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If you knew of me before I started here at Fangraphs, it was probably because of the Starting Pitcher Guide that I release yearly. I have joined forces with Doug Thorburn in recent years, too. He is a pitching mechanics guru who lives and breathes baseball. He’s also an avid fantasy gamer so it was a perfect marriage.

We released the 2015 version this past weekend and you can get it at thespguide.com now. Eno was kind enough to allow me the chance to share a sample with y’all so you can see what we are all about. Doug and I have decided on Gerrit Cole as the profile to share. This year we tackled 380 pitchers across the 30 organizations and wrote up 412 pages and 154,735 words about them. That is an average of about 400 words per player. Of course, some got many more and others aren’t in need of that many just yet. By the way, my writing stops at the mechanics report card and then it shifts to Doug’s work! 

Without further ado, our thoughts on Cole:

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It’s a tale as old as fantasy sports: pay attention to nine of the ten categories on draft day and you can dominate those categories and win. There are some accepted tenets to this strategy, called ‘punting,’ but as it is with all these things we hold for granted, it’s useful to look at what the numbers think of our Conventional Wisdom.

For one, which stats to punt?

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