10/11/16

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

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Notable Transactions/Rumors/Articles/Game Play

• Andrew Miller usage – will it impact the league in ‘17? (4:44)
• Jose Ramirez staying hot in playoffs; where to draft in ’17? (23:00)
• Is Conor Gillaspie a first-rounder in ‘17? (36:00)
• Favorite young Cub for ‘17: Javier Baez, Addison Russell, Jorge Soler, Willson Contreras? (39:31)
• Andrew Benintendi vs. Byron Buxton (50:00)
• Carlos Beltran will be back in ‘17 (55:10)

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Joe Camp won his league, probably because he reads us and listens to our podcasts here, I dunno, but that’s my guess, totally not because he’s an Associate Professor of electrical engineering. Anyway, he won his league, and his leaguemates started chirping about a couple trades he made that year that may have appeared lopsided at the time — my personal opinion is that vetoes suck, and are a dampener on league activity, and we should all be active and talking to each other as much as possible, so if you were on it, you would have made that lopsided trade first — and so Mr. Camp set out to prove he would have won the league anyway.

The way he did it? He took the worst team in the league and replaced everyone on the team with the best free agent pickups of the year. He then compared that team with everyone’s originally drafted teams. The free agents easily won — 96 points to 87 for the best drafted team.

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I like trade analyses. And I assume most people reading fantasy baseball content in the middle of October are similar to me. While there is no shortage of content about trades as they happen, it’s rare to see retrospective reviews of how deals turned out. With that said, let’s take a gander at an entire year of dynasty trades in the industry league The Devil’s Rejects.

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Let’s continue the strikeout rate theme by reviewing my list of starting pitchers my xk% equation deemed holding strikeout rate upside in 2016. In the original article, I expressed that the list of names was rather boring, so let’s see if that turned out to be the case or if any gems were uncovered.

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A week ago, I was able to hold on a win to win my first Tout Wars league. The extremely gratifying experience was the culmination of too many years of managing fantasy baseball teams. From the early auction to the results coming down to a Christian Yelich at bat, the season was great. I am not going to talk about the team in detail because no one wants to hear about someone else’s fantasy team. Instead, I will stay away from the details and go over some of the keys to winning the league.

Know and exploit the rules

This idea is hard to implement in leagues which have the same set of rules for years, but in new leagues with unique rules, this is the biggest key to winning. Since it was my first year in Tout Wars, I was added to the lower/experimental league. Tout Wars has four other leagues, AL-only, NL-only, mixed-draft, and mixed auction. If any rule is being considered for any of the other four leagues, like moving from batting average (AVG) to on-base percentage (OBP), it is done first in this league. The league got hit straight on with new rules this year with net steals, net Saves, K/9 vs strikeouts, and a head-to-head format (detailed in a previous Rotographs articles).

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Welcome to the annual series that provides both a review of your favorite teams’ 2016 season, as well as a early look toward 2017. It also serves as a helpful guide for keeper and dynasty leagues.

The Graduate: Jefry Marte (IF-OF): I can remember writing about Marte five or six years ago back when he was in the low minors as a Mets third base prospect. Three organizations later and the raw-but-toolsy prospect finally made The Show and had a nifty little season. Playing multiple positions for the Angels (1B, 3B, LF), Marte produced with the bat and hit 15 home runs in just 258 at-bats. He’s still overly-aggressive in his approach (15-59 BB-K rate) but the power will play and he produced a 114 wRC+ — above league average at some offensively-demanding positions. Just 25, Marte may have earned himself some more playing time in 2017 — especially if he can handle third base — but I think he’s better suited to a part-time role.

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I had a bad year on FanDuel. An embarrassing year really. For a time, it was going well. But like every foolish gambler, I tried to leverage my winnings by scaling my entries. Predictably, it backfired. I sat down this morning for a bit of a postmortem, and I noticed a few things.

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I have a total of 28 preseason prediction type articles I need to review, so let’s get rolling! Fingers are crossed that these recaps don’t make me look like a fool. Let’s begin by reviewing my spring training starting pitchers strikeout rate surgers and breakout candidates. The idea here was that underlying skills posted during spring training do carry em>some predictive value, so perhaps those starting pitchers that enjoyed a strikeout rate spike would see a jump in rate during the regular season as well.

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These were fun. I usually just say crazy things to my friends and when one of them is true, try to remind them about it and they usually don’t care because they have lives that involve things outside of baseball. Losers. Anyway, here is my initial Bold Predictions article along with my midseason review where a few of my colleagues and myself were so impatient, we had to see where we stood. My goal was to bat .300, so let’s see if I was able to hit my mark. Then laugh at all the ones I was terribly wrong on.

1.) Chris Carter will break 100 R.B.I.

This was the prediction I felt most confident about going into the midseason review and I came very close to nailing this one as Carter ended up with 94 RBI Coming into the season, I really felt strong about Carter having a strong season because of opportunity and how he closed out the 2015 season. He hit 41 HRs and had a wRC+ of 114, so I’d say his season was a success and the spirit of this prediction was pretty spot on. I didn’t account for the Brewers trading away Jonathan Lucroy, which maybe could’ve accounted for another 6 RBI? To be fair, I also didn’t think Jonathan Villar would have the type of season he did and that certainly gave Carter more RBI opportunities than anticipated.

Since I am going to be struggling to find hits with these other predictions, I am going to give myself the every-so-common half a hit. Trust me, it will not help my batting average too much.

0.5 for 1

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