I’ve done this before — compare similar players, one of whom is “name-brand,” the other “generic-brand,” using blind résumés — as have many others. Ben Kaspick carried the torch a while this year, but he credited Joe Douglas with the idea. So let’s say it’s a group effort to which I’ll contribute once again.

In anticipation of 2018 drafts, I wanted to carry out a “buying generic” style of analysis, borrowing in part from too-early mock draft average draft position (ADP) data. I do not intend to construe the following comparisons as rigorous analysis. I do, however, intend to highlight some potential bargains that, if the too-early mock ADP information is concerned, warrant your attention on draft day.

Comparison #1: Outfielders

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I had participated in a too-early industry mock draft that ended a couple of weeks ago. Then I attended First Pitch Arizona (FPAZ), which I reviewed and at which I participated in another arguably too-early draft. This post is about that latter draft. Sorry for all the reviews lately.

The draft, which took place live at FPAZ, is hosted by the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC). It’s a 15-team league, but instead of being a standard 30-round draft (seven bench players) with in-season transactions, it’s a 50-round draft-and-hold with no transactions (don’t worry, this only covers the first 23 rounds). I won’t say it completely changes the dynamic, but it does, or at least should, dramatically alter the plans of owners who take a lot of risks and plan to hedge them using their free agent acquisition budgets (FAABs).

What’s worse is I had, and still have, done virtually zero planning for the 2018 season. Accordingly, I relied on a strategy I outlined in the previously hyperlinked too-early mock draft review. I’m a risk-averse guy, so I typically draft player who are boring — boring because they’re old and/or you know what you’re getting. Low variance, things of that nature. This strategy inadvertently exacerbated this tendency of mine in these drafts, and the draft-and-hold nature of this league further compounded it. Without looking, the average age of my team must be, like, 33 years old.

But I like it. It’s so unsexy, so unapologetically (actually, very apologetically) boring that it’s almost not worth review. Except when I talk about boring, unsexy teams, I hear from guys like Jeff Zimmerman, Mike Gianella and so on — guys in the industry expert leagues such as Tout Wars and LABR — who say this is their jam, and that’s reassuring.

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This review was written with permission — I asked, not the other way around — and was not reviewed prior to publication.

There exists several gatherings for baseball enthusiasts every year, including, off the top of my head, MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, SABR Analytics Conference, Saber Seminar and Pitch Talks. However, I can’t name many, if any, conferences that cater specifically to fantasy baseball enthusiasts other than First Pitch Arizona (FPAZ). It’s not that the other conferences wouldn’t benefit fantasy baseball players — surely, they share sharp, illuminating content — but they don’t synthesize it specifically for the fantasy baseball experience.

Brent Hershey, general manager of BaseballHQ, invited me to speak on a panel with Greg Ambrosius (National Fantasy Baseball Championship, or NFBC), Dave Potts (RotoGrinders) and Brian Slack (BaseballHQ) about 2017 average draft position (ADP) musings. For an event in its 23rd year, I could find scarcely any reviews of the conference aside from these testimonials.

Accordingly, I thought it would be worthwhile to allow readers to learn (more) about the event. I’ll provide a brief overview of everything and then break down the programming by day, almost like I’m writing in my diary, except without the anxiety and self-doubt.

Overview

FPAZ occurs every year the weekend of the Arizona Fall League (AFL) Fall Stars Game (typically the first weekend of November) in Phoenix, Ariz. Registration costs $249 for early birds and $499 for late birds. The conference spans four days, four nights — for this year, the evening of Thursday, Nov. 2 through the morning of Sunday, Nov. 5 — and includes two tickets (or more, depending on availability) to any AFL games playing that weekend and, once available, all of BaseballHQ’s major publications. It also provides breakfast each morning and a buffet lunch on Saturday on site. Exact programming is liable to change from year to year, but a couple of panels (based on cornerstone BaseballHQ content) likely stay the same. Hotel fare is not covered, but the conference took place at the DoubleTree suites by Hilton, which is where most attendees stayed.

Thursday

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Fantasy owners participate in mock drafts to practice for their actual league drafts. Without the internet, neither mock drafts nor average draft position (ADP) data would be possible or available to us. The union of the two allow owners to understand approximately when they can expect players they plan to target and devise an appropriate plan of action.

What ensues when you draft for the next baseball season before the current season has ended and without ADP data and having not refined/run your 2018 projections yet? Chaos, namely. For the second year, the Honourable Justin Mason organized the Too-Early (#2early) mock drafts for me and a few dozen other analysts, the final ADP “data” (in air quotes, because a sample size of four drafts is not particularly strong data, and, as aforementioned, it is way too early to be mock-drafting) for which can be found here.

I drafted out of the 11th spot (of 15) in draft #4. I made a concerted effort to draft a good team, but I also deliberately avoided certain players just to see where other owners would draft them. (Had I drafted these players for my team, I would have a weaker understanding of how other owners valued them.) The lack of ADP data made it incredibly difficult to implement this plan. In a nutshell, my plan consisted of drafting the best player with a track record still available on the draft board (mind-blowing, I know), with a strong preference for hitting. There’s an objective basis to this that, rather than trying to explain, I’ll let reveal and define itself as I go. This plan served me admirably in all rounds of the draft.

Here’s my team, by round. “Rk” indicates a player’s draft rank within his assigned position. Columns labeled “All” and “Pos” depict players’ end-of-season values overall and by position, respectively, each of the last four years. These ranks come courtesy of Rudy Gamble, who concocts them for Razzball. If you’re concerned that these might somehow be inferior to ESPN’s Player Rater, know that Rudy won this year’s Tout Wars Mixed by a landslide, so I thoroughly trust his process.

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Masahiro Tanaka and Jeff Samardzija had perplexing, enigmatic, and ultimately bad seasons. Many attempts were made to ascribe reasons or causes for their struggles. I think both will bounce back for very simple reasons; accordingly, I think both will be undervalued in 2018 for equally simple reasons.

Masahiro Tanaka

Travis Sawchik and Eno Sarris discussed his various ailments, so to speak, long after I gave up trying to diagnose him. The heat maps are interesting, and the splits are interesting, albeit a bit of an archaism.

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For all intents and purposes, Kevin Gausman had a bad season. Like, catastrophically bad, such that has ERA was 10th-worst among qualified starters. That he was allowed to see enough innings to become a qualified starter should be construed as nothing short of a blessing for him.

On paper, sure. This narrative works on the surface, at the macro level. But Gausman had himself a season of two incredibly different halves. An aside: if you don’t pay attention to FanGraphs’ community research, you should. User jkved10 wrote a post about Gausman on July 24 — about the time I reluctantly convinced myself to roster him in my primary home league — in which jkved10 noticed a sudden change in Gausman’s release point. Kudos to the author for doing all the heavy lifting for me. Click through to familiarize yourself with the events that unfolded and the ensuing analysis, or dig around Brooks Baseball for yourself.

The results weren’t immediately promising at the time of his/her writing: a 4.94 ERA across six starts. Everything else under the hood, however, had changed: 12.2 strikeouts and only 2.6 walks per nine innings (K/9, BB/9), good for a 3.19 xFIP. Sure, everything else stunk; he was still allowing home runs and hits on balls in play at astronomical rates. But the peripherals very dramatically improved, having essentially doubled his K’s and halving his walks in that span.

Such success continued. In his 19 starts from June 21 onward, Gausman struck out 10 hitters-per-nine and recorded a 3.39 ERA despite a still-inflated rate of home runs to fly balls (HR/FB). A tale of two halves, indeed: prior to June 21, his 6.60 ERA was almost exactly doubly large. He was a second-half ace, and this was more than just regression to the mean — his success correlated, if not directly resulted from, his adjustment.

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In the two previous years I’ve curated the RotoGraphs staff picks, I evaluated them during the post-/offseason to determine which staff writer had the best time pickin’. What good are our allegedly “expert” picks if we don’t hold ourselves accountable?

You can find this year’s preseason picks here. The best pick in each category is an indiscernible blend of talent (duh) and uniqueness (like, Andrew Benintendi as a Rookie of the Year candidate is not very original, so I’d dock you points for that). Most correct (with air quotes) picks wins. Let’s go!

(Shallow) Sleeper (ADP 201-300, per NFBC ADP)

Pitcher: Robbie Ray (Brice Russ, Jeff Zimmerman)
Hitter: Domingo Santana (Al Melchior, Birchwood Bros., Justin Vibber)

There are three standout picks here, but one stands above the rest. I have written repeatedly (aka twice) about Ray’s rollercoaster career and baffling peripherals. He has delivered consecutive seasons of extreme outliers; his true self is probably a perfect blend of 2016 and 2017, which is roughly a mid-3.00s ERA with league-leading strikeouts and potentially league-trailing walks (and, also, league-trailing contact management). He is Yu Darvish’s stateside-produced clone, and early evidence (#2early mock drafts, henceforth) suggests he’ll be drafted as such.

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I talked a big game about my bold predictions this year spawning from research. Like, instead of just being gut instinct types of things, or just being bold for the sake of being bold. Truth of it is I didn’t do as much research as I would’ve liked. My rotisserie-league drafts were not particularly strong, and while I hit the trifecta (1st, 2nd, 3rd) in my three home leagues (I live modestly), I could simply feel my drafts, as well as my bold predictions, were inferior relative to what I hoped they’d be.

You probably don’t care, though, so this is all filler text, for all intents and purposes. You want to cut to the chase. I don’t blame you! Let me drag this out a bit longer. I’ll review each prediction from March with their corresponding midseason “probabilities” of being correct from July before finally reaching a verdict. I don’t remember half the predictions and I honestly have no idea how I’ll do until I reach the end.

1) Alex Dickerson is a top-30 outfielder. (Midseason odds: 0%)

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My favorite part of this year’s World Baseball Classic, aside from the baseball, obviously, was the television broadcasts’ frequent reference to players’ swing speeds. I was floored, even if only because I didn’t know (but should’ve known) we had the technology capable of measuring it. Regarding Major League Baseball and Statcast’s adoption of such a metric, a little birdy told me I shouldn’t hold my breath. Disappointed, I moved on.

Then yesterday, while fooling around in Baseball Savant’s Statcast database trying to diagnose the misalignment of Miguel Cabrera’s outcomes with his peripherals, I noticed the database query’s “sort by” function offered an option to sort by “estimated swing speed.” A quick Google search indicates to me the Statcast and MLB Advanced Media team(s) has (have) yet to formally announce this; sprint speed has been the more exciting recent development, apparently.

Not to me! I quickly got to work querying the data. I also quickly learned downloading the raw data files that underpin the swing speed summaries previously linked do not include swing speed, which is unhelpful. In other words, swing speed is not communicated to us from Baseball Savant’s organs on a play-by-play basis. I imagine this is by design. So, I was resigned to running a single query that summarized swing speed data at a high level: the average swing speed for every hitter with at least 100 at-bats in a given season, from 2015 through 2017.

Here’s what I found.

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I’m already thinking about 2018. It’s not that my teams are doing poorly; they’re fine, for the most part. It’s that the economist nerd in me, when thinking abut fantasy baseball, most often evaluates the disparities between perceived and actual values, and how long, if ever, it takes for the market (aka fantasy owners) to come to equilibrium, to use economic parlance.

For example: you may or may not be aware that Kevin Gausman, despite his atrocious start to the season, has been magnificent the last five weeks. In seven starts from July 2 onward, he’s posted a 3.24 ERA (supported peripherally by a 2.81 xFIP and 3.40 FIP) with 11.4 strikeouts and 2.6 walks per nine innings. The strikeout rate is fueled by a 15% swinging strike rate (SwStr%), which have come consistently, ascending into double-digit percentages in all seven starts (and in eight of his last nine). His strikeout-to-walk differential (K-BB%) by month: 2.0%, 8.8%, 9.2%, 23.4%, and, in one August start, 28.0%.

Meanwhile, he’s inducing ground balls almost half the time (49.5% GB). You could say he’s due for batting average on balls in play (BABIP) regression, and he probably still is. His BABIP constantly hovering above .349 does not inspire confidence, but few pitchers have ever been BABIP’d so hard in a single season — I discussed this phenomenon in regard to Robbie Ray. All said, while there’s no guarantee his BABIP regresses before October, Gausman still shows the promise we once expected of him — perhaps more — and it’s going largely unnoticed because of his downright repulsive first half. (He’s baseball’s #12 starter the last month.)

Such is the gist of this post, in which I’ll briefly touch upon players I anticipate to have average draft positions (ADPs) in 2018 that will lend themselves to relatively low-risk, high-reward opportunities in standard mixed leagues. Whether such expectations become reality is another story; that’s why I’m relying on ownership levels as a proxy for perceived value. All ownership levels likely retain some amount of draft day inertia, for better or for worse — in other words, leftover ownership (or lack thereof) in abandoned leagues — so take it all with a grain of salt.

Please note this is, by no means, an exhaustive list — just the first few players who come to mind, mostly because I’ve paid close attention to them all season.

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