There was a two or three week stretch in the offseason where the Rotographs crew split up as many starting pitchers as we could cover and gave them some individual attention. Today I want to revisit one of the guys I covered, Jordan Zimmermann.

In my offseason post on Zimm, I noted how consistent his numbers had been from 2011-2013 aside from his win total. His ERA, WHIP and strikeout rate had essentially been stagnant, but a spike in win total last year to 19 helped him have the best fantasy year of his career. The problem was that he’d be hard pressed to repeat that win total, and, sure enough, he only has six wins at the break.

The 19 wins pushed him into to the top ten starting pitchers according to ESPN’s player rater last year, but he had been more of a top 25 guy prior to that point. To be a top ten guy again, or really even to crack the top 20 again, Zimm was going to have to find a way to offset a lower win total. My theory was that he needed to throw his changeup more. As I detailed in the original post, Zimm has the high fastball velocity and changeup movement to make his changeup one of the rare changes that can generate grounders and whiffs at a good rate. If he’d throw it more than 5% of the time, maybe he could increase his strikeout production while maintaining his excellent rate stats. So has he? Read the rest of this entry »

The guys who write our daily posts on consecutive days have a tough gig. I write one per week and it’s hard enough to come up with new general thoughts on playing daily. But since I’m filling in for Mr. Jones, I’m having to come up with something for the second day in a row. To make things easy, I’ll piggyback on what I discussed yesterday which was using super cheap starting pitchers like Scott Carroll and hedging against them.

Carroll’s price was only $2,700 yesterday, and he delivered massive value by allowing just three base runners and zero earned runs over 6.2 innings with five strikeouts. He also got the win which pushed his point total for the day to 12.92. To put in terms of value, Carroll only cost you about $209 per fantasy point he got you. Getting that kind of value from any other spot on your roster is virtually impossible. The last time a hitter hit it big for me was Steve Pearce at the end of June when he hit two home runs and scored 17 points. At his price he cost you $461 per fantasy point. That’s still an excellent number, but it’s more than double what Carroll did yesterday.

More importantly, Pearce was one of 350 or so hitters to choose from that day and was the only one who hit two bombs. Sure, maybe only 100 were really capable of going yard twice, but that’s still impossible to predict. But Carroll was the only insanely cheap starter yesterday. Sure, the odds of him producing that kind of value weren’t great, but you knew one guy was capable of producing that kind of value, not one of a hundred you could choose from. When the only risk is how the player will perform and not which player will perform well, you have a much better chance of getting that insane value.

As for hedging, the more I think about it, the more it only truly makes sense with a super cheap starter. What I mean is it only makes sense if you’re only disappointed with your pitcher play if he doesn’t score at least three or so points. If the starter musters less than two points, it’s unlikely your hedge stack didn’t do anything for you. It doesn’t mean they went off and won you a GPP, but they likely return some value in that scenario. If you were hoping the value play pitcher would get you eight or nine points, it’s much easier to envision a scenario where he disappoints and a hedge stack also disappoints. So on those days when someone super cheap is out there, take a flier on them and hedge.

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A week ago today, in this very space, I devoted a couple hundred words convincing y’all to start Joe Saunders at the low, low price of $3,658. Saunders gave up  four home runs, seven runs total and has since been released by the Rangers. So yeah, good call by me. But I can live with being very, very wrong in a public forum because I hedged against the Saunders call, stacked some Orioles in a GPP lineup, and ended up winning the $2 GPP last Friday. Give me money over being right any day.

Obviously I wasn’t the only one who stacked Orioles against Saunders, and some other things had to go my way for me to hit. But the results have me wondering if hedge plays are the way to go in GPPs. To give another example from personal experience, I ended up pretty Brewers-heavy in my lineups for the July 4th $50K Big Score, and they mustered just two runs on six hits. Despite having the Brewers in roughly half my lineups, I did not have the opposing starter, Alfredo Simon, in a single lineup. It would have been nice to have his 8.33 points in a non-Brewers lineup.

To be fair, I was also pretty Dodgers-heavy in my lineups, and I wasn’t about to throw Jair Jurrjens into a lineup. But Simon has had success this year, albeit success not backed up by peripherals. Anytime you’re heavy on a lineup and there’s at least some reason to think the starter could be decent, you should probably throw the him in at least one other lineup. In fact, once your lineups are drawn up, look and see if you’re heavy on any particular play and try to hedge it in one spot. And for clarity, this only applies to GPPs. Which, by the way, I think may be the way to go unless you’re a shark/grinder. But that’s another conversation for another day.

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A few weeks ago I took a look at the best fantasy relievers of this season, but since then I’ve looked at the best fantasy hitters and starters over the past calendar year, and I wanted to complete the series. The series started because I wanted to give out my All-Star picks and make the point that we should base our All-Star votes on what has happened since the last All-Star game, not just what has happened so far this year. So below I’ve got the seven relievers from each league I’d have on my ballot. But first a few caveats.

First, I’m aware that the past calendar year split includes some games that were pre-All-Star game in 2013. Second, I’m aware that fantasy value doesn’t necessarily equal All-Star. And finally, I’m not exactly using the traditional categories to calculate fantasy value. I prefer using quality starts to wins, so I’m only using four categories for relievers. And I hate saves and have always wished shutdowns minus meltdowns would replace saves. So I’m using SD-MD along with strikeouts and the normal ratio categories. Here are my All-Star picks followed by some token fantasy advice to qualify this post for the Rotographs blog. Read the rest of this entry »

Nine teams currently have a wRC+ over 100 for the season. Anytime you’re looking to stack hitters from the same team, it wouldn’t be the worst idea to just pick a team or two out of that group of nine with the best matchup for the day. But this is just a quick reminder that some of those top offensive teams are much better against pitchers of a certain handedness.

For example, the Blue Jays are tied with the Angels for the best wRC+ in the league at 112. But the Jays have a 116 wRC+ against right-handed pitching, which they see two-thirds of the time, and have just a 102 wRC+ against left-handed pitching. The simple fact that the majority of pitchers are right-handed is what makes them the best offense in the league. If the majority of pitchers were left-handed, the Jays total wRC+ might be something like 104. Long story short, they’re not as good of a stacking option against lefties. Which makes sense because their lineup features left-handers Adam Lind, Juan Francisco and Colby Rasmus as well as two switch hitters who are better from the left side of the plate in Jose Reyes and Melky Cabrera.

Here is a chart showing you how the top nine offensive teams fare against pitchers of either handedness.

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Last week I took a look at the best fantasy hitters over the past calendar year by running the results of that split through Zach Sanders’ z-score method for calculating fantasy value. The motivation for that post was to make an argument that when voting for All-Stars the second half of the previous season should be considered. I understand that the “Past 1 Calendar Years” split on the leaderboards includes stats that were pre-All-Star break 2013, but…close enough. And I also realize fantasy value doesn’t necessarily equal All-Star, but, again, close enough. I quickly want to highlight the starting pitchers I’d vote into the All-Star game (ten per league) based on their performance over the last 365 in the image below. After that I want to discuss a few guys whose ownership percentage is out of whack with their performance in the past calendar year. Read the rest of this entry »

After a nice first two months of the season, June is killing me. Much of the gains I made early in the year have been given back over the last three weeks. My double up success rate has deteriorated, and I’ve hardly sniffed a cash in GPPs. I’m frustrated, but I have to fight the urge to mail it in. I’ve still had success on the whole, even if I haven’t been able to continue to multiply my bankroll like I had hoped.

I can’t be the only one feeling like this. If you’re on a bad run, I encourage you to stick with it. I’m hoping things improve as the season drags on and the data I use on a daily basis becomes more reliable. Each year I compete in the FantasyPros.com weekly football ranking contest, and I have performed much better in the second half of the season in each of the last three years. I attribute this to the data I use simply being more reliable as the season goes on. My approach to baseball DFS is almost as dependent on data, and it stands to reason that as it gets more reliable, my performance will improve. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

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Yesterday Dave Cameron posted his early picks for the AL All-Star Roster, which got me thinking about how I’d vote for the All-Stars if I bothered to do so. I’ve always been of the opinion that All-Stars should be selected based on who has performed the best since the last All-Star game. It’s usually just perennial All-Stars and guys who got off to a fast start in the first couple months of the season. But the guys who killed the back half of 2013 will get no love. So I took all the results from the past calendar year and ran them through the Zach Sanders z-score method for calculating fantasy value to see who has been the best in the last 365 days.

Let me point out a few things to preclude any trolls from doing so in the comments. Yes, I know that the past calendar year includes games that were pre-All-Star break in 2013. But because we don’t have a “post-All-Star break to present” split on the leaderboards, I’m using 365. Also, I’m unsure of the exact roster construction rules, if there even are any. I’m picking twenty hitters per league with at least two players at each infield position but no more than three at any infield position. Finally, I’m aware that fantasy value doesn’t necessarily mean All-Star. But this is Rotographs after all, and after I post the would-be rosters, I’m going to do a quick bit of fantasy discussion based on the results so that this post somewhat belongs under the RG banner. So without further ado, here is what the All-Star rosters would look like (hitters only) if you simply chose the teams based on fantasy value above replacement level over the last calendar year. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday Dave Cameron had an excellent piece detailing how good rest-of-season projections are at, you know, projecting what will happen in the rest of the season. In the piece, Dave cited the work of Mitchel Lichtman at length. Go read the piece and you’ll see convincing evidence that if you want to know how a player is going to perform from here on out, you should just go look at his rest-of-season projections. Throw out what the player has done so far this year. Just look at the projection.

This topic is one of the utmost importance to daily fantasy players. This research tells us that, on the aggregate, the projection systems can tell us with virtual precision what’s going to happen the rest of the way. How is that not valuable to a daily fantasy player? The problem is, of course, that little qualifier I used: on the aggregate. The projection systems can take a group of players and tell us what they’re going to do on the whole. They can’t tell us which players are going to over-perform and which are going to under-perform so that the group reaches the expected average. And they certainly can’t tell us what each player will do on each specific day along the way. But the good news is that if you trust the system throughout, you’ll receive the positive results along with the negative results to bring you to the expected result, which is what you wanted all along.

I’ve mentioned several times that I use rest-of-season projections as the basis of my DFS system. I use the knowledge I have that the projection system doesn’t from time to time, but for the most part I just go with what the numbers tell me. And the evidence tells me that’s a good idea.

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Saves are king when it comes to the value of relievers in fantasy baseball, but in the right type of league, top middle relievers can be very useful. In leagues with start limits, top middle relievers can help with ratios and, maybe more importantly, they can help you rack up strikeouts, which is a category than can be a tight race in start limit leagues.

To determine who the most valuable relievers have been so far, I took the top 100 relievers from ESPN’s player rater and stripped out the categorical contributions from wins and saves. I took out saves because most closers are owned, and you probably don’t need help chasing saves. I took out wins because they’re even harder to predict for relievers than they are for starters. Below is a list of the relievers with the greatest combined contributions in ERA, WHIP and Ks on the player rater so far this year along with their ESPN ownership percentage. Read the rest of this entry »