Entering the 2014 season I knew my fantasy team was setup to succeed.  After all, I had just spent the entire 2013 season tearing it down and building it back up again, so I had the benefit of a full year of preparation, collecting as many assets as I could along the way to ready myself up for another shot at the title.

Unsurprisingly, at least three other teams in my league also appeared to be possible front-runners, so I knew it was going to be a hard fought battle towards the top.  My roster looked great on paper, but what I really needed was an edge, a small but real advantage that would work in my favor and help me outlast some very savvy Ottoneu owners.  So, I decided I would be obsessive about daily roster management…and I built a spreadsheet to help me track my team’s performance (by player) over the course of 180 days of baseball.  If I was going to win a tight race, I would need more than just excellent players.  I needed to know that I was effectively managing those players, too.

I ended up winning the championship in 2014 and owe a ton of credit to the daily roster tool I built to help me track it.  You can view the tool here.  I’m doing the same thing this year, so here are four roster management lessons I’ve learned that might be helpful for anyone playing daily fantasy baseball.

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• I am going to recomend a couple must-read articles for the week which look at the differences and “results” of stem cell and platelet rich plasma (PRP) injections. The first one starts with the Angels Garrett Richards and Andrew Heaney choice to use them, but ends up being a great overview of the entire subject.

On May 2, Steve H. Yoon, a physician at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic in Southern California, extracted stem cells from Andrew Heaney’s bone marrow and injected them into the damaged ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow. Fourteen days later, Yoon did the same with Garrett Richards.
Now the Angels’ two best, most promising starting pitchers are left to wait, and hope.

If the stem-cell therapy works, Heaney and Richards will be lined up to pitch for a full season in 2017 and may even be able to contribute toward the end of this very summer. If it doesn’t, they will undergo Tommy John surgery that, at this point, is certain to knock them out until the start of 2018.

The second article is a study by the American Journal of Sports Medicine which found “no significant” positive effect for using PRP injections.

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Episode 166 – Live With Brad Johnson Again

The latest episode of “Field of Streams” is live!

In this episode, Dylan Higgins and Brad Johnson do a live recording to discuss changing opinions on Matt Wisler, resurrecting faith in Luis Valbuena, the reverse bias involved in seeing a sleeper thrive and become too popular, making Brad guess Yoenis Cespedes’ ridiculous numbers against lefties this year, believing in Adam Duvall, Brad’s upcoming camping trip, and The Daily Grind Invitational.

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genda

1. Podcast and Weekend
2. The Daily Grind Invitational and Leaderboard
3. Daily DFS
4. SaberSim Observations
5. Tomorrow’s Targets
6. Factor Grid

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We’re back with another edition of the Prospect Stock Watch. Today — in honor of the upcoming 2016 amateur draft — we’re catching up with three highly-coveted shortstops from the 2015 draft.

Dansby Swanson | Braves | SS
ETA: late 2016
Value: Rising steadily

Arizona nabbed Swanson with the first overall pick in the 2015 draft but flipped him later that winter to Atlanta in the ill-fated Shelby Miller deal (Or is it too early to judge the deal this harshly?). The change in address hasn’t hindered the young shortstop at all. After opening 2016 in high-A ball, he recently moved up to double-A and he’s producing a triple-slash of .299/.382/.474 in 24 games. Swanson, 22, likely won’t be a power-hitter but he has the pop in his bat to hit 30-40 doubles and eight to 10 homers, with enough speed to add another base or two to 20-30 hits via the steal. Veteran shortstop Erick Aybar is having a down-right-terrible season at the big league level so don’t be shocked to see Swanson in some big league action before the year is out. Another talented shortstop, Ozzie Albies, is also in the system and playing at triple-A but he’s been overmatched at that level as a 19 year old.

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Jackie Bradley Jr.’s hitting streak came to an end at 29 games yesterday. Obviously, it’s a massive failing of John Farrell for changing his lineup position and not at all because getting a hit in 30 consecutive games is incredibly difficult. Nope, all Farrell. In any case, Bradley now owns the fourth-longest hitting streak in franchise history, and he hit .415/.488/.783 over that stretch. Not a bad month.

Xander Bogaerts is up next – he’s already at 19 games.

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Closer controversy in Houston, anyone? Maybe soon, but maybe not just yet. Ken Giles earned the nod in the ninth tonight with Luke Gregerson unavailable thanks to a combined 43 pitches in the last two evenings. Giles, who came over to Houston in the blockbuster offseason deal with Philadelphia, surrendered an earned run on a pair of singles but held on to notch his first save as an Astro.
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The transcript:

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I’ve been developing expected stats that attempt to objectively measure the true batting skill for individual players, and I’ve done my best to describe them over the past few weeks. Today is more about application. I’ve taken all players with 100+ plate appearances and sorted them based upon their difference between wOBA and xOBA. Here are eight of the biggest xOBA under performers for the season to date:

Alrighty, let me explain this chart a little. The xAVG, xOBP, xSLG, xBABIP, and xOBA are all stats I calculate based upon the velocity and launch angle of the batted balls. The Δ columns are the differences between the measured stat and the expected stat, for example AVG – xAVG = ΔAVG. The lower the number, the more the player has under performed their expected values.

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SaberSim Daily Projections

Daily projections require a great deal of context in order to project each specific game. SaberSim daily projections account for lineups, starting pitchers, and bullpens, as well as more nuanced factors like weather, umpires, park effects, home/away, handedness splits, and more. Even within these specific factors, there’s a tremendous amount of detail involved, and constant room for tweaks and improvements. For instance, the park effects are not applied broadly, but rather based on how they affect each individual outcome (BB, K, 1B, 2B, 3B, HR) for left-handed and right-handed batters.

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