There’s been a good deal of talk on these pages (especially on the Fangraphs side) about trusting in rest of season projections of late. Brett Talley talked about this a little on Monday, and despite Justin Verlander trying his very best to shred Brett’s point to pieces, it still stands – ROS projections are a very effective tool, and using them with a little bit of your own analysis (match ups, weather, and so on) can provide real value.

Should we be less trusting when it comes to young players, though? It seems that projection systems would struggle more in translating minor league stats than major league ones. I don’t have the data chops to determine to what degree that’s true, but it certainly makes sense logically – there’s a lot more noise happening at the minor league level, and the difficulty gets turnt up in the majors.

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Life is hard. It comes with a lot of tough decisions and a lot of tough questions that don’t have easy answers. We are humans, and we will make mistakes, and we should forgive ourselves for those. I’ve been dealing with a lot of this philosophical life stuff recently, and it’s been difficult.

I’m talking, of course, about Brad Miller, and it seems I’m not alone, as the baseball community remains puzzled by an important visceral question: is Brad Miller any good?
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Happy Sunday, and happy father’s day, if you happen to be one of those. If not, well, way to play safe.

There are no off days for any MLB dads today, as we’ve got a full 15-game slate, with 10 of those starting at 2:15 of earlier. That means when rosters lock around 1:05, you should have a large enough pool of will-play players to avoid the risk of surprise off days. Sundays are great for that (although, as always, I have to write this well before that point, so be sure to check the recommendations are suiting up).

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We’ve lightly discussed in this space before the utility of rolling out a relief pitcher for daily fantasy.

In short, the cost per point can be favorable and some of the best value available, but the risk of posting a zero is high –the most heavily used closers, Cody Allen and Mark Melancon (31 appearances each), have appeared in fewer than half of their teams games (not to mention each started the year as a setup man – Francisco Rodriguez leads full-season closers with 30 appearances, 46 percent of his team’s outings).

Whether you choose to deploy a closer or not will largely depend on your risk preference. To try and help out, the table below shows how often closers have pitched with certain rest (it includes seasons since 2010 in which a pitcher notched at least 10 saves).

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J.J. Hardy entered the season as the No. 14 shortstop on the consensus rankings, has ranked 28th in production to date and yet still ranks No. 15 on the latest shortstop consensus rankings. Obviously, then, there’s a fair amount of optimism that his slow start is going to turn around.

Because, well, yeah, Hardy has zero home runs to date despite having spent the last seven seasons as one of the more reliable power producers at the position. From 2007 to 2013, Hardy ranked fifth at the position in WAR, sixth in plate appearances, third in home runs, ninth in runs and fifth in RBI; the average and OBP were never great, but save for a down 2009-2010 pairing where he was limited by injuries (and a demotion), he’s been a rare and steady source of home runs and RBI at a position devoid of them.

And this year, he has gone deep exactly zero times, adding just 15 RBI in 222 plate appearances (he missed a handful of games with minor back and thigh ailments). So, what gives?
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In the past week or so, we’ve looked at a couple of different ways to evaluate an opponent from a starting pitcher’s perspective. First, with an offense’s fantasy output as the measure, and then with a rough approximation of a pitcher’s output against an offense.

For today, I had the time to actually pull all of the game logs so far in 2014, allowing me to break down the actual, not implied, production of pitchers against each offense in baseball. Those tables are after the jump, should probably be bookmarked and will probably be updated in this space once a month moving forward.

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There are, naturally, two ways to look at every match-up. A pitcher in a good situation to produce generally means hitters on the other side have a bad match-up, and the same goes for pitchers with a bad match-up. However, the differences in the ways hitters and pitchers are scored is important and can mean the degree to which a match-up is favorable for one side isn’t necessarily proportional to how bad it is to the other side.

On Sunday, I looked at how many daily fantasy points per 38 plate appearances the hitters from each team have produced against right-handed and left-handed pitching. This can be a quick shorthand for “how dangerous is a team against a pitcher handedness,” useful for deciding when to select stacks and when to target or fade certain starters.

The table below re-produces those stats (excluding stolen bases and caught stealing) but now also includes the fantasy points produced by an opposing pitcher per 25 batters faced, the league average for a starter (it excludes points from results, like wins, losses and saves).
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Disclaimer: After watching Randy Wolf throw six good innings on Monday night, I’m no longer sure I know anything about baseball, so what follows may just be gibberish.

And, of course, there’s no turning back from my early-May proclamation that Troy Tulowitzki is now in a tier of his own at the shortstop position. Four weeks later, the Rockies slugger has cooled some – he “only” had a wRC+ of 172 in May, compared to 211 in April, and he’s off to a horrid 1-for-4 in June – but he’s still producing far beyond what any player at the position could even dream of.

Having said that, the resurgence of Hanley Ramirez, the continued success of Alexei Ramirez and the staying power of some early-season surprises, the position remains an interesting one.
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Oh, hi. Happy Sunday. I hope today finds you well and the week in daily fantasy has been a profitable one. Unless we played heads-up at any point, in which case I hope you’re miserable and broke. But let’s be friends today, it’s better.

Often in this space, we’ll reference a team’s hitting performance against a handedness of pitcher – the Braves can’t hit righties and strike out a lot, for example. That’s obviously useful and something you can find easily here on Fangraphs in the sortable leaderboards. What’s also helpful, though less readily available, is looking at how that translates to fantasy points for opposing pitchers.
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The Toronto Blue Jays have hit 44 home runs at home this season, six more than any other team and 33 percent more than any other American League outfit. Somewhat surprisingly given their success, they also rank tied for second in home runs surrendered at home with 30, just four behind the league’s leader. Add it up and 77 home runs have been hit at Rogers Centre, even though the Jays have split their games evenly between home and road.

Relevant to those statistics is that the dome was open for three of the past five games, during which 10 home runs were hit (19 percent more than the dome-closed average this season). Except…the status of the dome doesn’t really matter.

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