The Understanding Statistics Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Mike Podhorzer

Bar Mitzvah Talk

• Coke & Pepsi

Projections

• Pod Projections
• Manual vs. automated projections
• Where do automated projections fail / blind spots?

In-Season

• At what point in the season should you rely on in-season statistics vs. pre-season projections?
  • Francisco Lindor 2021

Understandings Statistics Section

• Hitting Statistics
  • BA
  • OBP
  • SLG
  • OPS
  • BB%
  • K%
  • HR/FB%
  • Barrel%
• How can you tell if a YOY increase in a statistic is real skill, or if it was a fluke?
• BABIP
• Using Statcast to identify pockets of value / undervalued players
• What in-season statistics should you use when setting waiver wire pickups for hitters?
• Pitching Statistics
  • ERA
  • WHIP
  • Swing Strike %
• How to adjust for a potential universal DH in 2022?
• Strand Rate (LOB%)
• ERA Estimators
  • FIP vs. xFIP vs. SIERA
    • Descriptive vs. Predictive
• What in-season statistics should you use when setting waiver wire pickups for pitchers?
  • K% is superior to K/9
  • K-BB% or K% – Which is more valuable to track in-season?
• What statistics should one track to tout relievers for saves in 2022?
• Scouting for saves in 2022
• Other important statistics to track
  • Plate discipline metrics
    • O-Swing%, Z-Swing%, O-Contact%, Z-Contact%, etc.

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The latest episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Jeremy Hefner, New York Mets

Interview

• Highlight of career
• Game preparation
  • Preparing players for the mental & physical aspects of the game
  • Is game planning more about having players pitch to their strengths, or about exploiting weaknesses of your opponents ?
  • In-game management
    • 3rd time through the order
  • Use of an “opener”
  • How “first-in” and “next-in” pitchers coming out of the bullpen are decided

• Health
  • Keeping pitchers healthy throughout the season
  • Extended rest between outings – good or bad?
• Analytics
  • How best to use analytics as a coach
    • Objective vs. subjective view
  • Analytics vs. Gut
    • Pulling Blake Snell in the World Series
    • Trusting analytics, and when to go with your gut
  • How are stats/analytics used to help players on the major league level?
    • Which are the key stats/indicators that you look at?
• Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
• Rule changes in baseball
  • Universal DH
  • 3 batter minimum rule for pitchers
  • Extra inning runner on 2nd base rule
• Position players pitching in baseball
  • Effectiveness of Ariel pitching in the major leagues

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The latest episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Trevor May, New York Mets

Interview

• Highlight of Career
• Game planning
  • Is about pitching to your strengths, or exploiting your opponents weaknesses?
  • Game planning team by team
  • Helping other teammates with game planning
  • Having a “default” game plan
  • Using MLB the Show
  • Learning from other teammates
• Health
  • Recovering from TJS
  • Switching from starter to reliever
  • Keeping healthy all season long
  • Extended rest between outings – good or bad?
• Injury Guru Trivia of the Week
• Analytics
  • Trevor’s own stat – Command Quality Ratio (CQR)
  • Trevor’s CQR and Ariel’s wPDI
  • Horizontal movement vs. vertical movement on pitches
  • Pitch velocity, spin rate, spin efficiency
  • Hanging out with the analytics staff
• Mailbag
  • Who do you NOT want to face with the bases loaded?
  • Why #65?
  • Day games vs. night games
  • Favorite inning to pitch in
  • Love of cats
  • Favorite podcast

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The End of Season Recap Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

The focus of this podcast is on fantasy baseball strategy.

Today, we look back at the topics and highlights of our season-long coverage, and give thanks to all those that made our show extraodinary this year.

Follow us on Twitter

• Ariel Cohen (@ATCNY)
• Reuven Guy (@mlbinjuryguru)
• Beat the Shift Podcast (@Beat_Shift_Pod)

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The Live Episode from First Pitch Arizona 2021 of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Derek Carty

What’s new in THE BAT X for 2022?

Strategy Section

• Risk
  • How to deal with injury risk
  • How to discount for binary risk
  • Low risk players / consistent players
    • Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
  • Categorical Risk
    • Who would you rather draft – Bo Bichette or Vladimir Guerrero Jr.?
  • Replacement Level Risk
    • The risk of paying up for a super elite catcher (Salvador Perez / J.T. Realmuto).
  • Ace Pitcher Risk – Should you draft pitchers in the first few rounds?
  • Stacking Risk – Doubling up in one league vs. spreading out in two different leagues
• Auction
  • Spread the Risk vs. Stars & Scrubs
    • League depth matters
    • Grab value in every price tier
  • The value at the corner infield position
  • The Joey Votto nomination strategy

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The Season Wrap-Up Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Ian Kahn

Most memorable moments of the baseball season

Strategy Section

• Which is more important at the draft – Having better knowledge of the players, or better valuation & auction/drafting skills?
• Which is more true?
  • Leagues are won on draft day vs.
  • Leagues are won with great in-season moves & pickups
• Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
• Do you have to walk away with speed in the first few rounds?
  • 1st Round Pick – Bo Bichette vs. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
• The Case for An Ace – Do you need to walk away with an ace (or two aces) in the first few rounds?
• Is it worth paying up for a super elite catcher (Salvador Perez / J.T. Realmuto)?
• Is it worth paying up for closers?
• Can you wait on corner infielders?
  • Should you disregard positions in the first few rounds?

Our successes and failures in 2021

Sandy Alcantara – Is he a top 10 pitcher for 2022?

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The full one hundred and sixty-two major league season has now concluded. After two whole tumultuous years, it is with great joy, that I am able to utter this sentence once again. After just a 60-game short season in 2021, completing the full schedule docket is a sparkling achievement.

It is now time to check back on how we fared during the past season. Here at RotoGraphs, that tradition starts with reviewing our pre-season bold predictions.

As always, I will remind my readers that we will never succeed in perfectly mining all of our bold predictions, nor should we. If this was simply a contest to obtain high precision, then we would have filled our lots with easy guesses. “Gerrit Cole will strike out 180 batters” – is an amazing baseball accomplishment, but it is far from bold. In fact, ATC was the low projection system on Gerrit Cole, and predicted an expected 257 Ks. Forget bold – the statistics may have suggested a probability of circumstance close to 60-75%.

Bold predictions are meant to be a far more remote event. They are meant to be unlikely.

At the other end of the spectrum, bold predictions are also not meant to be impossible. “Albert Pujols will steal 25 bases,” is not within the realm of any reasonable possibility. That is a prediction into the weird or absurd – which is NOT the purpose of these columns.

This author perennially suggests that bold predictions should lie in the 70^th to 90^th percentiles. In other terms, we should be boldly calling events that are 10-30% likely to occur. In return period speak – an occurrence that should unfold every 1 in 3.3 to 1 in 10 years. It should be a prediction that would happen once, twice or thrice a decade.

The point of the exercise is to highlight certain undervalued (or overvalued) players by choosing a few unlikely, but achievable outcomes. By doing so, the goal is for the reader to pay the player(s) in question a bit more (or less) attention than the market would suggest.

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Introduction

Well, we are down to the final week of fantasy baseball. After a short 60 game season in 2020, we are blessed to be approaching game 162 here in 2021!

We here at RotoGraphs, are hoping that you are right in the thick of the competition for your league’s fantasy championship title. For me – I am right in the middle of an intense battle with one of the legends of rotisserie baseball, Ron Shandler, as well as our own Jeff Zimmerman.

The league that I am referring to is the Mixed Auction LABR league. I was one this division of LABR’s inaugural members back in 2020.

Above is a photograph of some of the participants of the live 2020 auction draft from Tampa, Florida. Due to COVID, this year’s draft was held online. LABR is one of the longest running (if not THE longest currently running) expert leagues of rotisserie baseball. It is an honor simply to be invited to compete.

The Mixed auction LABR league is a very standard 12-team 5×5 rotisserie league. We use the standard scoring categories (R, RBI, HR, SB, BA, W, K, SV, ERA, WHIP), and standard rosters (14 B, 9 P). Scoring periods are weekly, trading is allowed, and the initial draft is of the auction variety. Last year, I went into great detail recapping my draft – a two-part article that can be found here and here.

As many of you might already know, as a risk management actuary – my day job consists of running simulation models to recommend purchasing decisions to the upper management of my company. I simulate possible fires, hurricanes, medical malpractice claims, and other liabilities that we may be on the hook for.

Borrowing several actuarial methods, I adapted some of these models in order to develop a proprietary in-season fantasy baseball tool. It is a probabilistic final standings simulator. Using the current league accumulated standings, a source of projected ROS statistics, a volatility and a correlation model – I run 4000 iterations of what might happen for the remainder of the season.

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The Final Week Decisions Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

League Updates

Strategy Section

• Final Week Strategies & Decisions
  • No fear of droping players
  • Categories categories categories
  • Players in a pennant race
  • Younger players
  • Hot hand
  • Projections vs. final month stats
  • Roster flexibility in the final week
  • Go with your gut
  • Rotation schedules revamped for playoff bound teams

Injry Guru’s Trivia of the Week

Waiver Wire

Pitcher Preview

Injury Update – Reuven gives us the injury updates.

Housekeeping

• Upcoming Episode Schedule
• Thank you for listening !!!

Follow us on Twitter

• Ariel Cohen (@ATCNY)
• Reuven Guy (@mlbinjuryguru)
• Beat the Shift Podcast (@Beat_Shift_Pod)

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The Mid-September Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Strategy Section

• Last 2 weeks of the season
  • No more fear of droping players
  • Specific team schedules in the penultimate week, and lineup decisions
  • Contending teams and playing time

Waiver Wire

Pitcher Preview

Injury Update – Reuven gives us the injury updates.

Live show announcement!

Follow us on Twitter

• Ariel Cohen (@ATCNY)
• Reuven Guy (@mlbinjuryguru)
• Beat the Shift Podcast (@Beat_Shift_Pod)

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