Welcome to the annual series: ‘A Minor (League) Review of 2015.” This series is a great way to receive a quick recap of the ’15 minor league season for your favorite club(s), while also receiving a brief look toward the 2016 season and beyond. It can also be a handy feature for fantasy baseball players in keeper and Dynasty leagues.

The Graduate: Anthony DeSclafani, RHP: The 2015 season saw some impressive pitching prospects make their debut — such as Noah Syndergaard, Lance McCullers and Carlos Rodon — but it was the Reds prospect that led the pack in innings pitched at 184.2 and WAR at 3.2. A college reliever, DeSclafani has taken well to starting and has a chance to be a solid, innings-eating, mid-rotation starter for the Reds.

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As mentioned last week, ottoneu is a deep fantasy game that comes in a variety of formats (5×5, 4×4, and two flavors of linear weights based total points), but one thing that all ottoneu leagues share is the $400 salary cap and keeper process. While ottoneu may not be a dynasty league in the literal sense, it does function as a very flexible auction keeper league, where the only limit on how many keepers a team can have is the need to stay under the salary cap and 40 man roster limits.

History of the Surplus Calculator

Even before I started playing ottoneu, there was a process I went through for every auction keeper league I was in. With every team in the league entering the auction with keepers that theoretically are worth more than their salary, I wanted a way to compare my keepers against my competition. In order to do that I would go through each team’s roster and determine the players I expected to be kept, and using dollar values I created for the league I could tally each team’s projected keeper salary and keeper value. Ranking teams by how much surplus (total keeper value less total keeper salaries) they had would allow me to identify who had the best selection of keepers, and therefore went into auction with the best chance to build a strong team.

As I played in more and more ottoneu leagues, I quickly realized that I needed a way to automate my keeper ranking process, and that automation is what led to the creation of the ottoneu Surplus Calculator. Ottoneu is uniquely suited to making this calculator easy for everyone to use, as ottoneu owners can go to their league page and download a rosters.csv file that includes their entire league rosters by team that includes salary info and Fangraphs IDs. Having that exported roster file means not having to manually assign players to teams, and makes tying the player values to the rosters a simple matter of a vlookup function.

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As the founder and commissioner of my local fantasy baseball league, perhaps the most difficult part of my job is to police owner inactivity. That actually falls under the larger challenge of simply finding good owners. One of the traits that makes an owner a strong asset to the league is that he is active. By active, I mean that his lineup is always set with healthy players, he manages his DL slots, and he makes transactions that are logical, like dropping the guy just demoted to the minors who is clearly not going to accrue any value for the rest of the season. Every year, we have owners either drop out for personal reasons or kicked out because they violated my most important rule of remaining active. Why is it so difficult to find an owner that pays attention for the entirety of the season?!

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Episode 299

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

• Follow us on Twitter
  • @sporer
  • @enosarris
• Notable Transactions/Rumors
  • Justin Upton to DET (3:12)
  • Yoenis Cespedes and Dexter Fowler Markets (19:20)
  • Greg Bird likely headed to AAA to start (31:00)
    • Cashman: https://twitter.com/YESNetwork/status/689473517918617602

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Perhaps you’ve heard, we’re evaluating playing time battles in preparation for the 2016 fantasy baseball season. We’re still at the beginning of the process, but you can go to this post to catch up on all our previous analysis. Now, onto the Philadelphia Phillies whose pitching staff can be epitomized by a shrug.

The Rotation

After suffering through a miserable 2015 season, the Phillies look to be on the rebound. Their starters produced just 4.3 WAR – worst in the majors. Their 5.23 ERA barely outperformed the Rockies (5.27 ERA). Of course, the Phillies didn’t have to regularly pitch at Coors Field. In any case, they’ll be better this year.

Only three regular contributors will return, Aaron Nola, Jerad Eickhoff, and Adam Morgan. None of them have a guaranteed job. Let’s start with the two guys who are locks for a role.

Jeremy Hellickson and Charlie Morton are the staff veterans. Hellickson is a solid mid-rotation rebound gamble. After a tough start to his tenure in Arizona, he settled in to post a 3.61 ERA (4.14 xFIP) in the second half of the season.

Morton’s a ground ball specialist who has trouble staying on the field. When he’s right, he’ll produce a peripheral supported sub-4.00 ERA. Both Morton and Hellickson are merely innings eaters, but the team needs that more than an ace.

Behind the pseudo-veterans lurks Nola. It would take a minor disaster for him to lose his claim upon a rotation job, but it’s a risk. Nola, 23 in June, was the Phillies first round pick in 2014 (seventh overall). He made quick work of the minors and showed well in the majors through 13 starts.

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We know that strikeout minus walk percentage is the best in-season predictor, or at least we knew that the last time someone checked. We know that pop-ups are automatic outs, and that they have the same season-to-season correlation (.49) as strikes thrown, or at least we know that if you define pop-ups as infield flies per ball in play (PU/BIP) instead of just IFFB (which is PU/FB). And that means we know that these three metrics are three of the strongest by year-to-year correlation, at least among the metrics that the pitcher has the most control over.

Since we ‘know’ these things about as well as you can know things in baseball, it seems about right to combine them into a simple metric. Strikeouts plus pop-ups (the good things) minus walks (the bad things). It’s a quick and easy way to rank pitchers based on what they actually did last year, and it’s how I’ll sort my rankings the very first time I start working on them.

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Yesterday inaugurated what will likely several weeks of depth chart discussions in the form of playing time battles. RotoGraphs staff will discuss and assess noteworthy battles for playing time and/or starting gigs for position players and, separately, pitchers. Here, specifically, this author will investigate the Cleveland Indians‘ position player situations.

Third Base

As these keystrokes hit digital paper, FanGraphs and MLB.com list Giovanny Urshela as Cleveland’s primary third baseman. Outside of Rajai Davis, he projects to produce the least amount of value relative to his position; in absolute terms, second-least by a hair.

You would think the Indians have a better in-house solution, even if it’s merely a less-pathetic one. Lonnie Chisenhall, former third baseman of the future, looks to make playing right field a mostly full-time gig, with occasional spells from Colin Cowgill and others. This complicates things.

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Over the next several weeks, RotoGraphs will highlight intriguing position battles that could have implications both on the field and in your fantasy draft. This week, we focus on the AL East.

In case you’re wondering how to characterize the New York Yankees’ front office strategy, you need only ask GM Brian Cashman. “You want to get younger, athletic, and good…That’s what we’re trying to do.” The Yankees’ 40-is-the-new-27 experiment is coming to an end and while 2016 won’t yet be the Year of the Millennial in the Bronx, young talent at first base, catcher, and the outfield signal that time could be coming soon.

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Yesterday, I shared the fantasy relevant 2015 leaders in average absolute angle (AAA), one of the three components of my xHR/FB rate equation. If you don’t feel like clicking back to yesterday’s article, I will repeat what this mysterious metric is all about.

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Episode 298

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

• Notable Transactions
  • Chris Davis to BAL (3:15)
  • Ian Kennedy to KC (7:20)
  • Alexei Ramirez to SD (18:03)
• Strategy Section
  • Outfielder Ranks (23:50)
    • 2 guys you’re higher on
      • Chris Davis (30:15)
      • Kevin Kiermaier (33:50)
    • 2 guys you’re lower on
      • Adam Jones (39:48)
      • Christian Yelich (42:55)
  • Twitter/Email Questions
    • Mets SPs (48:46)
    • Shifting from Draft to Auction (51:15)
  •  Off-Topic
    • P&R/T-shirts nerds (58:25)

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