With many leagues now using saves plus holds (SVHD) as a category, some people now spend less time on the hellish closer carousel. I’m in a 15-team FSWA league that uses SVHD and very much enjoy not having to race to the wire to add someone newly named to the closer’s role or agonizing over how much FAAB to spend on someone that may not hold on to a newly acquired ninth inning gig.
Episode 29 – The Monologue Episode
The latest episode of “Field of Streams” is live!
In this episode, Dylan Higgins discusses feeling insane by talking to himself, making an obligatory mention of garlic fries, attempting to label lineups that you can use to “fill in” holes in your DFS lineup, the downfall of The Eraser, Kris Bryant being a bona fide power option already, appreciating early podcast feedback, and not shying away from a team after they disappoint in a big matchup.
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Agenda
I have essentially stripped the terms “buy low” and “sell high” from my vocabulary, so I now prefer to call the former buy low guys acquisition targets. One would think that offering for a player off to a slow start would have to come at some sort of discount, even if a minor one. And since slow starts are usually just that and have little predictive value for the rest of the season, getting anyone at a discount to his pre-season value should yield a nice profit.
As usual, the easiest way to identify your targets is to calculate the difference between a pitcher’s ERA and SIERA and then sort. Those pitchers with SIERA marks most below their ERAs are typically your targets, though that’s not automatically the case. Often times a pitcher could be carrying an ERA over 7.00, but still sporting a 4.50 SIERA. Sure, he’s been unlucky, but he also hasn’t been very good either! So you still don’t want him on your team.
Congratulations to Juventus! After dispatching Real Madrid they now get the honor of most likely getting crushed by Barcelona in the UEFA Champions League final. They could certainly upset Barca, however it’d take a herculean effort from the Italian club.
On today’s agenda:
1. Justin Turner, starting third baseman?
2. Marlon Byrd heats up
3. Bad news for Drew Smyly
4. Streaming Pitching Options
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• Well, we suspected that A.J. Ramos was the odds on favorite for saves in Miami, and he got the first crack at the ninth inning in the post-Steve Cishek era. It went swimmingly, with Ramos fanning two of the three batters he faced in a perfect final frame. Ben covered these guys in depth last night, but Ramos’ 2.78 2015 xFIP paints the picture of a guy who can certainly take the ninth inning and run with it. The one possible chink his armor Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes it is hard to remember that Tim Lincecum used to be one of baseball’s best pitchers. The back-to-back Cy Young Award winner in 2008 and 2009 enjoyed two more excellent seasons immediately after with Cy Young finishes in both, but fell off a cliff at age-28 and has remained in the canyon with Wile E. Coyote ever since with a 4.76 ERA in 539.3 innings over the last three seasons.
The early returns have been Vintage Lincecum from a results standpoint (2.00 ERA, 1.19 WHIP), but is there change we can believe in or is this just a solid run for him? After all even in the midst of a 4.74 ERA in 155.7 innings last year, he still had a random six-start run of 1.49 ERA in the early-summer. Of course it did feature his no-hitter and another outing against the offensively-challenged Padres (15.3 IP of 3-hit, 1-run ball in those two outings alone).
Are we seeing something different or is this something that would barely hit our radar if it came in mid-June as his run did last year? Let’s see what we’re dealing with here.
When a player goes out and has themselves a truly putrid start to the season, small improvements are typically lost unless you happen to follow whatever team they play for or they exist on your fantasy baseball team. I happen to have many fantasy baseball teams, and therefore I track many players, for better or for worse. My wife thinks worse. Regardless, although your standard small sample size warning applies, I’ve gotten production out of some surprising sources recently.
In my constant search for stolen bases I tend to hit the waive-wire pretty hard. As such, I often find myself picking up players with sub 10 percent ownership. While some of these names are being pressed into service due to injuries to teammates, some have the potential to stick around for the season. Their rate stats may not be pretty, but most fantasy teams can survive one poor batting average or on-base percentage without losing too much ground. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I introduced xISO, a metric that calculates a player’s expected isolated power based on his batted ball profile (per FanGraphs’ recently added batted ball data courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions). Having looked at a handful of underachieving National League outfielders for its induction, I’ll expand the analysis of xISO here today.
I’ll reiterate some key points. I used all 12 years’ worth of batted ball data for all player-seasons in which a hitter qualified for the batting title. The OLS regression specified pull rate (Pull%), hard-hit rate (Hard%) and fly ball rate (FB%) as explanatory variables and produced the following equation, which I deliberately omitted last week: