This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, rotation, and bullpen) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

Like their infield and outfield, the Red Sox’s 2015 rotation projects to look nothing like it did at the beginning of 2014. That’s probably not bad news: Red Sox starting pitchers were not very good in 2014. They placed 27th in FIP, 23rd in RA9-WAR, and 15th in fWAR. All told, the Sox gave starts to eleven different pitchers. Here’s a quick look at who started for them in 2014:

From that list, only Buchholz, Kelly, Workman, and Wright remain in the organization. At a glance, Buchholz seemed to be the victim of some bad luck. That might be true, too, of the starting version of Workman, though we might not see much of that version in 2015.

Joining Buchholz and Kelly in the likely “opening day rotation” are Rick Porcello, Wade Miley, and Justin Masterson. While the additions to the rotation are nowhere near as flashy as their signings of Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval, the Sox figure to feature an improved rotation in 2015. Between projected improvement (or more average luck?) from Buchholz and by replacing bad innings from Peavy, de la Rosa, Workman, and Webster with [at least] more average innings from Porcello and Miley, they’d be hard-pressed not to be better.

Unlike the outfield situation in Boston, however, there doesn’t seem to be much mystery in how the rotation will look to start the season (though anything can happen between now and then), so let’s look at those top five guys…

Read the rest of this entry »

This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, rotation, and bullpen) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

The Rays bullpen is confusing. It’s not that they don’t have good arms there—they have plenty of them;it’s just not clear whether management will deploy these arms in any predictable way to start the 2015 season. Things are further complicated by the fact that incumbent closer Jake McGee had arthroscopic elbow surgery to remove “loose bodies” in mid-December and projects to miss most of April. (Though he might return sooner than originally expected.)

Read the rest of this entry »

This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, rotation, and bullpen) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

As fantasy baseball players, we often find discrepancies between a player’s value “in real life” and his value in fantasy leagues. Or even between his actual value and his role on the team. The best relief pitcher isn’t always the closer, for example, or a nominal ace is really the third best starter on his team. This latter example might very well apply to the 2015 Blue Jays.

Most depth charts are going to show you that R.A. Dickey and Mark Buehrle are the Jays’ number one and two starters, respectively. They are the grizzled veterans, they have fairly lucrative contracts, and they have some track record of success. They have thrown a lot of league-average-or-slightly-better innings over the last few years, and that has real life value.

But the Blue Jays have an exciting crop of younger starters, two of whom were probably more valuable than their elders last year, and certainly project to be more valuable going forward—both for their actual teams and for their fake teams.

For the 2015 Blue Jays rotation, the gap between nominal real life role and fantasy value coincides with a vast gap in age: those 36 and older, whose value in real life doesn’t cross over very well to fantasy leagues, and those 26 and younger, whose fantasy upside for 2015 and beyond is considerable.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, rotation, and bullpen) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

As Eno examined a couple of weeks ago, the Red Sox infield has seen some changes this offseason. (The same would hold true for the Red Sox’s rotation and outfield for that matter.) But no team in the league has seen more changes to their infield than the Oakland A’s, whose 2015 opening day lineup projects to return exactly zero starters from the 2014 version.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

When rounding to one decimal place in WAR, the Royals and Yankees were tied for Best Bullpen of 2014. Both teams received dominant—historically dominant, even—breakout performances from set-up men. Both had excellent closers. The difference between the two teams going into 2015 is not so much one of quality, as both bullpens project to be among best in baseball again; rather, it’s a difference of roles. The Royals are returning all of their major relievers for 2015, with Greg Holland set to resume his role as closer. The Yankees, on the other hand, saw their 2014 closer leave via free agency, and brought in another excellent set-up man via the same method.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is an article about Luis Valbuena. What follows might be rendered moot if Kris Bryant wins the Cubs’ third base job out of spring training next year. Even if Bryant doesn’t do so, he’s probably not long for Triple-A ball, and should be up in the big leagues for good by midseason. So, unless something else happens — I suppose there’s an outside shot that Javier Baez tanks in spring training and Valbuena takes over at second base while Baez gets demoted for further seasoning — Valbuena might not have a regular role with the Cubs for much longer. It’s very possible, even probable.

But, despite other caveats, Valbuena has his merits as a hitter, and he’ll be eligible at second base and third base in almost all fantasy formats going into 2015, so let’s discuss—for the enjoyment of said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Will Venable broke out a bit in 2013, hitting a career high 22 homeruns while also stealing over 20 bases for the fourth consecutive season. His power/speed combo is bound to garner attention going into 2014 fantasy drafts and auctions. With a middling batting average—his .268 mark in 2013 was also a career high—and while playing for a team that is likely to keep both his Run and RBI totals in the 50-60 range, much of Venable’s allure will be tied up in whether owners think he’ll continue to be a 20/20 player going forward.

His stolen base potential is a matter for a different day (and probably a different person); instead I’ve compiled some information to try to determine from whence Venable’s 2013 power surge came, and whether we can expect it to continue.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since you read Fan/RotoGraphs, you’re probably in the habit of looking at any number of peripheral stats while searching for your next streamer or roster plug. Allow me to add to the noise as you attempt to talk yourself into taking a chance on certain pitchers, while talking yourself out of others.

You might look at K%, for instance, which is a much better indicator of a pitcher’s usefulness than K/9, though K/9 is a much more common stat in that a number of sites will list it, and is included in lieu of K% on the default leaderboards at FanGraphs itself. Because K% displays strikeouts as a percentage of batters faced as opposed to the number of outs recorded (essentially what K/9 does), it is a better indicator of how efficient a pitcher is at striking batters out.

Understandably, then, K% correlates with IP, W, ERA, and WHIP at a significantly higher rate than K/9 does. Because I am an obsessive baseball lout, like you, reader, I recently explored differences in pitchers’ K/9 and K% just for the hell of it; while the results where not surprising, they were interesting. The results can be found here.¹

What was slightly more interesting was when I went started fooling around with F-Strike% and saw how it correlates with certain other 5×5 stats. Generally, it correlates well with those stats, especially WHIP and IP. Eno Sarris explored the effect of F-Strike% on BB% last summer, and found that F-Strike% “explains almost half of the variance in walk rate.” This jives with the -0.401 correlation between F-Strike% and WHIP that I found.¹

Read the rest of this entry »