I don’t know if y’all are familiar with Tanner Bell. He recently joined the RotoGraphs staff and has wasted no time churning out quality post after quality post. He performs analysis, but he also offers technical advice regarding the “offline” components of fantasy baseball such as building cheat sheets in Microsoft Excel. It’s good stuff, even for people who consider themselves proficient in Excel — I do and, alas, it never occurred to me to conditionally format my draft prep workbook to strike out players already drafted.

Similarly, it seems Tanner recently experienced an epiphany (or two) of his own in regard to player projections and valuations. I mentioned to him I wanted to respond, so to speak, to his post, not as a criticism but as an expansion. A validation, I guess.

Also, rarely, if ever, do we engage in back-and-forth call-and-response posts. I don’t intend for this to be one of those. It’s just that Tanner inspired me, but I have some thoughts of my own to add.

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I won’t bore you with introduction. You know how this works.

1) Nicholas Tropeano, Tyler Skaggs and Matt Shoemaker generate more value than Jered Weaver, C.J. Wilson and Hector Santiago.

My prerequisite Angels prediction that isn’t Justin Mason’s “Garrett Richards will win the AL Cy Young award,” this isn’t bold as much as it is irritated. One of Tropeano, Skaggs or Shoemaker will earn the #5-starter role, and injuries (namely, Weaver’s back issues) will affect the rotation at some point, too, so I would understand your reluctance to deem this bold. I anticipate, however, that some amount of poor performance will warrant the removal of one or more of the rotation’s key components of the past few seasons, thus opening the door for one of Anaheim’s younger, cheaper, more talented arms.

2) Jose Berrios will be a top-30 starting pitcher.

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Yesterday, I compared hitters’ FANS projections to their Depth Charts projections in order to identify the biggest discrepancies between the two. For more information on why I’m doing this or what FANS and Depth Charts projection entail, I cordially invite you to click here.

I’m here to repeat the exercise but with pitchers instead. Focusing on playing time (as measured by innings pitched), K/9, BB/9 and saves. I’ll mix in starters and relievers at my discretion or where obviously necessary, like for saves. Like I did yesterday, I’ll try to limit each blurb to three sentences.

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Last year, I performed this very exercise, in which I compared FANS projections — projections generated by fans — to the Depth Charts projections — a composite of Steamer and ZiPS with playing time allocated by generally informed FanGraphs staff. I intended to highlight the largest discrepancies and offer a quick take on them.

I explain my interest in FANS during the inaugural of this exercise. Said interest pertains largely to anticipated versus most likely outcomes for a player and how those disparities manifest themselves in price distortions on draft day.

This time around, instead of discussing five National League outfielders at length, I’ll focus on the largest differences between FANS and Depth Charts projections in playing time, home runs, stolen bases, wOBA and WAR for a couple of players per category. I’ve set a personal goal for no more than three sentences per player so I don’t spend all day doing this. Because I could, and nobody wants that.

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On Thursday I participated in my first ever industry mock draft, organized by Nick Mariano of RotoBaller (who reviewed it here) and which included our own Brad Johnson (who reviewed it here) and Justin Mason filling in for the ever-busy Paul Sporer.

Per FantasyPros’ playbook, which taps the site’s player projections, I — with a thousand air quotes — “came out on top.” Of course, a good draft is but one part of a championship season — thus, the many air quotes.

I never expected to do so well and had all sorts of excuses lined up for when I would rank dead last.

• I didn’t have my cheat sheet. (True, although I have my first six-or-so rounds memorized at this point.)
• I’m terrible at snake drafts. (Also true, at least in my obviously glowing opinion of myself. I adhere pretty strongly to the Studs and Duds strategy, and snake drafts, by their nature, tend to prevent it.)
• It’s my first industry mock draft. (Still true. My heart was racing, which made me feel pretty embarrassed as I sat in my office, alone, eating microwavable pad thai out of a pouch, waiting for the draft to start.)

But, shoot. I pulled it off.

Except… I didn’t actually want to.

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We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

(I guess we’ve been using that italicized intro for a while now and I never noticed. My bad, my bad.)

The Oakland Athletics project to be the American League’s worst team, per FanGraphs’ depth charts. When your first basemen project to hit for a slugging percentage less than .400, it hurts. Still, the bats aren’t too bad, and some oddly-timed offseason acquisitions make the Athletics offense at least minimally appealing.

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A few weeks ago, we introduced depth chart discussions in the form of playing time battles. RotoGraphs staff have discussed and assessed noteworthy battles for playing time and/or starting gigs for position players and, separately, pitchers, and such analysis will continue until the season’s commencement. Here, specifically, this author will investigate the Cincinnati Reds‘ position player situations.

The Reds don’t expect to contend, but it doesn’t mean you can’t! Actually, the Reds aren’t that bad. They have a sneaky-good, or at least a sneaky-upside, rotation alongside some interesting bounce-back candidates and buried prospects.

Catcher

The Reds expect Devin Mesoraco back for opening day, but reports indicate he’ll be eased into spring training. The former is a big deal, given Mesoraco missed almost the entire 2015 season due to a hip injury that eventually required surgery. He had a monster 2014 season, making him one of said bounce-back candidates.

Should he come close to 2014’s production — a 40% fly ball rate (FB%), a 15% HR/FB, a 35% hard-hit rate (Hard%) — puts him right at Steamer’s projection of 16 home runs in 400 plate appearances. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he pushed his playing time closer to 500 PAs given a clean bill of health and solid production, and robust playing time ain’t easy to come by from a signal-caller.

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A few weeks ago, we introduced depth chart discussions in the form of playing time battles. RotoGraphs staff have discussed and assessed noteworthy battles for playing time and/or starting gigs for position players and, separately, pitchers, and such analysis will continue until the season’s commencement. Here, specifically, this author will investigate the Milwaukee Brewers‘ position player situations.

This post would have been a lot less interesting had the author written it four weeks ago when he originally considered doing so. But after what can be conservatively described as a favorable offseason, the Brewers have some playing time battles with peculiar fantasy implications, especially for prospectors.

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A few weeks ago, I dug through some PITCHf/x data, courtesy of Baseball Savant, and calculated the BABIP (batting average on balls in play) on ground balls to the pull side by velocity for hitters by handedness in 2015. There are a lot of prepositional phrases in that last sentence, but instead of trying to further clarify it, I’ll summarize the findings: right-handed batters hit for a higher batting average on pulled ground balls at every batted ball velocity than did left-handed batters in 2015.

It’s a long time coming, and I’m here to present the same analysis but for ground balls to the opposite field.

But, first, some quick housekeeping. Following my recent ADP (average draft position) research, I asked readers to predict which players’ end-of-season (EOS) rankings would outshine their ADPs for 2016, given some certain conditions. Twenty-seven readers responded and the results are in, ranked by frequency of votes:

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I introduce to you today the third part of an ongoing and rather aimless series regarding my research on average draft position, or ADP. Yesterday, I reprised an earlier piece of work in which I look at how often players “busted,” on average, in certain points of drafts. A bust included both low production by (1) poor performance, (2) lack of playing time due to injury, or (3) both.

Before I proceed, I’d like to make a quick acknowledgment. I’ve been asked on multiple occasions how often busts are attributable to injury rather than poor performance. Unfortunately, I would have to comb the data and handle each red flag on a case-by-case basis. While it’s not totally unruly, I don’t really have time to tackle it right now. I was also asked how age might play a part in ADP. I don’t have an answer for that yet, but I do have future research planned that examines the upward bias regarding organizational (or universal) top prospects. Again, it’s something for a future post, but not today.

Lastly: scroll to the bottom for quick results on yesterday’s poll and for another pseudo-interactive segment.

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