Reviewing my Bold Predictions each season involves a little bit of back-patting, and a whole lot of laughing at what an idiot I was just a few months ago. The sweet spot for these predictions is getting three or four of them right per season. How did I do this year?

In short, not great, but not terrible. Only two of the following predictions happened, but the majority got close, or at least still look reasonable in hindsight. On the other hand, prediction No. 5 might be my worst-ever in three years of Bold Predictions…

10. James Shields is not a top-65 starting pitcher.

Shields was the consensus No. 40 SP by our experts heading into the season, and I was not about to agree. Shields’ 2015 saw him post his best-ever strikeout rate, but also his career-worst walk rate. After a hot start in April and May, the bump in strikeouts vanished, and his walk rate soared.

With this prediction, I was betting on the continuation of Shields’ June through September 2015 production, and I bet correctly. According to Jeff Zimmerman’s end-of-season rankings, Shields was this season’s second-worst pitcher. The only pitcher who damaged his fantasy owners more than Shields was Alfredo Simon.

We’re off to a good start here.

1-0

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Yesterday, I reviewed my 2016 bold hitter league leaders and was ecstatic for even getting just one correct. Today, I’ll check in on my bold pitcher league leaders. Let’s see if I could match my hitter success. Check out my original article with full reasoning behind my choices.

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My goal over the next few weeks will be to reexamine some of the seasons of third basemen throughout Major League Baseball. We’ll start with the bottom tiers, in the form of a couple of groups, working our way up to individual performances that are actually worth discussing.

Since WAR isn’t necessarily a fantasy element, we’ll use something at least a little bit more relevant to our purpose here and organize our 3Bs by their Off rating. And since the objective is to observe the results and performances of the position overall, we have to start somewhere. That ‘somewhere’ just happens to be at the bottom of our 24 qualifying third sackers.

The good news is that no third baseman finished on the negative side of the WAR game. However, there were some that provided negative offensive value to their club, based off of that Off rating alone. The following represent that group, with the exception of Yunel Escobar, who represents the only “league average” player among these seven, if we’re using Off to determine that.

There certainly isn’t a whole lot within this group that will surprise anyone. The strikeout and walk rates fluctuate a bit, depending on the hitter, but the on-base and power numbers are relatively consistent across the board. The wRC+ column gives you a pretty good idea of where this hitters stand, in terms of being considered “league average”, if Off didn’t already do that for you.

With numbers like this, most of this group isn’t terribly interesting to delve deep into, especially because this was largely expected from the majority of the names on this list. But a pair worth exploring just a little bit deeper, and two that we profiled earlier this season, are Maikel Franco and Travis Shaw.

Franco is interesting because he wasn’t supposed to be here. He was expected to take the next step forward as an offensive player and a potential building block for the Philadelphia Phillies. Instead, he ended up providing negative offensive value overall. There’s some power there, to be sure, as he hit 25 homers and notched the second highest ISO among this group of 3B. In that column earlier in the year, I noted Franco’s increase in swing percentage from his tendencies in 2015, particularly against offspeed and breaking pitches. Turns out, that was a trend that continued throughout the year, as he experienced a near 10 percent increase against offspeed and one of about eight percent against breaking.

This is where things get interesting. Turns out, those trends aren’t necessarily indicative of his overall struggles. Even with that in mind, he still only swung at less than two percent more pitches outside of the strike zone, and experienced a swinging strike rate of 11.8%, only a 0.7% increase. His contact rate was also up about a percentage point. And even those figures can be somewhat deceiving, as his 52.0% overall swing rate was a five percent increase (and the 21st highest rate among all qualifying Major League position players). His penchant for swinging at the first pitch crept up near 40%. That’s absurd. And while he was still able to make decent contact (30.7% Hard%) at a reasonable rate (77.1%), he’s going to have to find an appropriate balance between a legitimate approach and the aggressiveness that he’s become known for. That’ll be the challenge with the new hitting coach in Philly.

Shaw is disappointing just because of the start off to which he got in 2016. He hit .314 in April and a still quality .275 in May. Unfortunately, the writing was on the wall that a slump was on the way and, boy, did it come. His next four months saw averages of .214, .246, .167, and .203, respectively. His OBP over those final four months was just .270, while the power dipped from a solid .213 ISO in the first two months (including a .239 mark in May), to just .160 for the rest of the year. In three of those months, he posted a wRC+ at 50 or below.

Given that his BABIP in April came in at .410, followed by a .347 mark in May, there wasn’t any doubt that a slump was coming. Especially since his hard hit rate dipped in the second half by about seven percent, following from about 35 percent to a mark more around 28, finishing just into the bottom half of the third base group in that regard. While luck certainly played into it in both regards (within the hot start and the frigid finish), there’s reason to believe that Shaw can be a serviceable player in Boston. He’s a versatile player with some pop. If he can solidify the approach, as his strikeout rate did rise above 25% in 2016, there will be a place for him.

The place for the remainder of this group, however, remains to be seen. Escobar, Suarez, and Garcia all maintain relative insignificance because they’re merely stopgaps on bad teams. Headley is past his prime and showed some pop towards in July, but was decidedly average for the remainder of the year. Cuthbert was merely a fill-in for Mike Moustakas and will attempt to become more versatile this winter in order to maintain some semblance of value. In any case, Franco and Shaw remain the only intriguing options for this group moving forward.

Next week, we’ll take a look at the middle-of-the-road types before subsequently moving onto those third basemen worthy of individual attention. And visuals.

Like much of the Rotographs’ staff, I made some BOLD predictions to prior to the start of the season. Like fellow Rotographer Alex Chamberlain, I was also impatient and also did a midseason review of them. Unlike Alex, I do know how to use brackets. 

1) Everyone will regret drafting Bryce Harper in the top 3.

At the beginning of the preseason, I wrote an article arguing against drafting Bryce Harper in the top three of standard leagues. It outlined his extreme jumps in many of his underlying statistics and my belief that many of these were not sustainable.

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2017 Preseason Assessment: Jonathan Villar (Fantasy MVP)

Villar was a generally not sought after in most leagues since many people expected him to struggle and get replaced by Orlando Arcia around the Super 2 deadline. I picked him up in Tout Wars as a fill in for Jung-ho Kang since Kang was expected to miss a couple months after having surgery on his leg. To say Villar filled in just fine is an understatement. He had 19 HR, 62 SB, and a .285 AVG. In the final rankings, he ended up with being the 4th highest ranked hitter.

For next season. I expect some heavy regression from the 25-year-old, but I don’t expect him to fall off a cliff. His batting average has been fairly steady the last two seasons with a .284 value in 2015 and .285 in 2016. With his speed, I could see him continue to post BABIP around .350 so I will go with a .270 AVG. For his walk rate, a 10% value will work so a .345 OBP seems reasonable.

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This was my first year publishing my bold predictions, and I have to admit that it was difficult to balance making truly bold predictions while still offering useful insight for fantasy owners. Let’s take a look and see how my predictions look now:

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Every season, in addition to posting my standard bold predictions, I up the ante with my bold league leaders. If you thought nailing a bold prediction was tough, the bold league leaders is even more difficult! Just getting one right is worthy of celebration. So let’s see how I did this year. Refresh your memory of my initial reasoning behind my choices here.

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There were big expectations for Marcus Stroman coming into last season on the heels of a strong rookie campaign that saw him throw 130.7 innings of 3.65 ERA, but a very impressive 2.84 FIP. A heavy groundball focus, 4.0 K:BB ratio, and stifling homers (0.5 per 9) laid the foundation for the lofty expectations before a torn ACL in Spring Training put all of that on hold. To his credit, he returned in time to make four starts in the regular season and three more in the postseason which rejuvenated the hype to the point where he was the 26th starter off the board this past draft season.

I don’t need to a deep breakdown of his season to show that it didn’t live up to said hype. His 4.37 ERA says it all. However, he did have a 3.71 FIP and the breakdown of his season might actually be enough to yet again foster some hype heading into his age-26 campaign. He likely won’t go as a top-30 arm again, but those who look beyond the surface stats will see a tale of two halves, the second of which saw a surge in strikeouts unlike anything he’d done before and at no expense to his league-best 60% groundball rate. This jump in strikeouts will be our focus today.

(By the way, I’m splitting the sample right down the middle – April through June, July through September.)

In the first half, he pitched to a 5.33 ERA in 101.3 innings with just a 16% strikeout rate – worse than the passable-but-modest 20% rate he’d posted in 2014-15. His fastball was the biggest issue, netting a 7% strikeout rate that stood 94th of the 96 qualified starters. This folds in both his four-seamer and sinker, but neither were anywhere near the 16% league average strikeout rate for fastballs. Adding in the cutter boosted him to 10%, but he still slotted just 81st. The soft stuff had a passable 31% mark, just over the 29% average, but the slider, curve, and change accounted for just 30% of his plate appearances, muting the impact of those strikeouts.

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I usually get three or four of these Bold Predictions right every year, and I’ve grown comfortable with that level of success. Any more and they aren’t bold enough, any less, and they’re useless. That said, wait till you see number one. It’s a doozy. It’s *so* wrong that it should probably invalidate all my hits. It’s *so* wrong that I’m questioning why any of you are here right now. It’s *so* wrong I want to throw crap.

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As our regular readers, assuming optimistically that we have any, probably know, it was a disappointing Fantasy season for us. But are we discouraged? Not we! Rising on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things, we have embraced the challenge (despite the punishing vig) of the NFBC Post-Season Contest.

Contest rules, predictions, and entries in a moment. But first, allow us to note that we’re a bit better at predicting outcomes at the team level than at the individual level. Thus, aside from the virtually-infallible Brett Talley, we alone among 55 Fangraphs writers predicted that Seattle would make it to the wildcard game. That’s right, spoilsport; they didn’t. But they came close. And, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, we now know the exact difference between having Lloyd McClendon as your manager and having someone else as your manager. (10 games.) We also envisioned that new manager Dave Roberts would assemble a bullpen that would enable the Dodgers to get from the fifth or sixth inning to Kenley Jansen, and we were right, although (except for Joe Blanton) we were wrong about the guys he’d assemble it with. And finally, our proudest accomplishment: we were four-for-four in our preseason over-under predictions, and the spiritual succor we derive almost offsets the fact that it did us no financial good whatever.

Back to the contest. It entails picking a lineup for the first round of the playoffs, resetting for the second round, and resetting again for the World Series. Rosters consist of ten hitters and six pitchers, with at least one guy and no more than three from each of the playoff teams in the first round. The big gimmick of the contest is the “Scoring Multiplier”: a player’s points total in a given week doubles if he’s on your roster the next week; his point total for the first round triples if he’s still around for the World Series. Since there’s a premium on picking players who make it to the succeeding rounds, you want to be right about which teams win. It also appears to us that the rules favor home runs unduly, and tilt slightly in the direction of starting pitchers and against closers (forget about non-closer relievers). And of course, to the extent it comports with what you actually think might happen, you want to be contrarian.

So here’s how we see the playoffs: Read the rest of this entry »