Last Wednesday I took a look at the pitchers who have generated the most weak contact this year. Today I want to take a look at the other side of the coin and examine the guys getting hit the hardest. Let me start by saying I haven’t updated the data since I calculated it last Tuesday. Calculating the relevant data takes a whole lot of time, and I doubt it’s changed all that much after one turn through the rotation.

The reason the data takes so long to calculate is because I’m calculating sOPS+ for batted balls. You could find each pitcher’s sOPS+ on their b-ref page, but that takes walks into consideration, and walks obviously have nothing to do with batted ball quality. I have taken each pitcher’s sOPS+ for each specific batted ball type, factored in how often a pitcher generates each batted ball type and calculated their sOPS+ just on balls that are put into play.

If you’re unfamiliar with sOPS+, it is just the OPS allowed by each pitcher relative to league average. It’s similar to wRC+ or ERA-. In this case, numbers below 100 are better than average while those above 100 are worse.

The idea is that this is supposed to tell us more about the quality of the hits a pitcher is giving up. In this way the stat is much more relevant than something like BABIP because BABIP gives all hits equal weight. I like this stat for the same reason Michael Salfino likes ISO allowed. BABIP includes singles, which are the most common outcome and doesn’t even consider home runs. But sOPS+ considers all hit types and weights them. This means sOPS+ is much more likely to tell us if a pitcher has been ‘lucky’ than BABIP is. If you see a pitcher whose ERA is much lower than ERA estimators, sOPS+ will give you a much better indication of whether the pitcher is due to regress than BABIP will.

That said, here are the qualified starters with the worst sOPS+ so far this year. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday I touched on Tony Blengino’s presentation on contact management that he gave this past weekend at Saber Seminar in Boston. Tony measured the pitchers who were best able to manage contact by looking at HITf/x data, data to which us normal people have no access. But I theorized that something like sOPS+ (like ERA- but with OPS allowed) could be a replacement for the HITf/x data. I thought that sOPS+ might be able to tell us which guys are better at inducing weak contact and thus which guys can have an ERA that beats their ERA estimators.

When I say “tell us” I should clarify that could mean two different things. It’s the classic explanatory versus predictive problem. Yes, sOPS+ can explain why a pitcher’s ERA is lower than his ERA estimators in a given season, but, as it turns out, it can’t tell us whether he’ll be able to do so the next season. I spent some time last night looking at whether sOPS+ in year one correlated well with the gap between ERA and SIERA in year two. The answer is no. While the correlation was stronger than it was between ISO allowed (another weak contact indicator) and the ERA-SIERA gap, it was still far too small to be meaningful.

It’s obvious that things like sOPS+ and ISO allowed don’t stabilize quickly. And that should not come as a surprise given that we know certain batted ball data takes a long time to stabilize. That doesn’t mean it’s not a skill. It simply means you can’t look at any pitcher’s sOPS+ or ISO allowed in the offseason and rely on it too much in projecting them for the next season. But when I say you can’t look at “any” pitcher, I mean you can’t just look at any old pitcher. I do think there are some you can look at. Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending SaberSeminar in Boston. This is the second consecutive year I have been able to go, and I would highly recommend that you attend in future years if at all possible.

There were many great presentations, but one in particular stood out to me because of the potential relevance to fantasy baseball. Our very own Tony Blengino gave a spectacular presentation on the best and worst pitchers in the history of baseball at contact management (aka inducing weak contact). As far as I can tell, Tony took the HITf/x data, to which us normal people don’t have access, and calculated how each pitcher performed when allowing the various batted ball types. He then combined the performance on various batted ball types and scaled to 100 like we do here with things like ERA- and wRC+. I’m positive I’m simultaneously butchering the methodology while leaving significant portions of it out. Forgive me. For a little more insight, read Blengino’s recent posts on limiting hard contact for AL pitchers and NL pitchers.

This got me all fired up to get back home and see if I could calculate something like what Tony came up with so that we could use this as a fantasy tool. I was thinking this could be a new mechanism by which we could determine a player’s ability to induce weak contact. That’s a drum that Michael Salfino has long been beating by looking at ISO allowed. Salfino has rightly pointed out that hit quality (measured by ISO allowed) is more meaningful than the hit itself (measured by BABIP). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in a big money league that has no innings cap or start limit, which makes the race for the strikeouts and wins categories a feverish one. Finding a league average starter on the waiver wire is no small task given the lower-than-normal replacement level in this particular league. Last week I considered Chase Anderson’s viability but was outbid for him by a FAAB-hoarder. This week I want to find out if J.A. Happ (2% owned) is worth adding. Read the rest of this entry »

Agenda

1. SP Plays
2. Stacks
3. Weather

Read the rest of this entry »

Agenda

1. Alert
2. SP Plays
3. Stacks
4. Weather

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I gave up and decided it was finally time to cut Dan Haren and his 10.03 ERA over the last 30 days from my FSWA team. When looking for a replacement, I sorted by ESPN’s player rater performance over the last 30 days and found Chase Anderson as the best available pitcher according to that metric. I didn’t know much about Anderson other than the fact that he’s from Wichita Falls and played club ball with a friend of mine. So I thought Anderson was worth a closer look. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday I took a look at how hitters fare under different daily fantasy scoring models. With Draftstreet being bought out by DraftKings, I thought it might be beneficial to note the differences between Draftstreet scoring and a couple of other sites to which daily players might have moved their money. If you don’t want to bother clicking over to read the hitter article, the short version was this: guys who strikeout a lot get a boost on non-DraftStreet formats, and guys whose main skill is contact lose some value. There isn’t nearly as much movement among pitchers, but let’s take a look at how the hurlers are affected. Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you live under a rock, you’re likely aware that DraftStreet was recently bought out by DraftKings. Given that this time slot was previously designated for the discussion of daily strategy for Draftstreet contests, I’ve got to come up with some new material. But I’m going to milk the DraftStreet cow for all it’s worth and draw on it as a source of material for one more week. Because you can no longer play on Draftstreet, I want to take a look at how the scoring systems differ on the two sites you most likely transferred your money to, DraftKings and FanDuel. Today we’ll look at how the differing scoring systems affect hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not my day to do the daily fantasy post, but I want to touch on a daily fantasy strategy thought today. It occurred to me that when looking at the best matchups for hitters each day I only look at the starting pitchers the hitters will be facing, but relievers have thrown just over a third of all innings pitched this year. The starters are obviously the more important factor, but it could be informative to know who the best and worst bullpens are. The quality of the bullpen will never be a determinative factor, but it can be a plus or minus just like weather or ballpark can be. Read the rest of this entry »