I chose a bad day to write about shifting projections in a very marginal way by examining a day’s lineup. Thursday has 11 games, but you’ll be hard pressed to set a lineup where you know for sure who is playing and who is hitting where. That’s because there are six early games with slightly staggered start times – you may be able to see lineups for five of them by the time rosters lock – and then five late games, only four of which you’ll probably know the lineups for at roster lock.

Anyway, I pulled the numbers, so bookmark this one for a day when you’re selecting rosters from a largely “known” lineup pool.

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Brad Miller is no longer taking walks or getting hits. That’s obviously a problem, because it means he’s killing your team in average, failing to drive in runs and not getting on base to score runs or steal bases. Entering the seasons as the Fangraphs consensus number nine at shortstop and not ranked by a single person as outside of the top-10, Miller has instead repaid owners with the 24th-best performance at the position, providing net positive value only in home runs (he has three).

The .187-7R-7RBI-3HR-0SB line is obviously troubling. The realities underneath it – specifically, his suddenly-anemic walk rate and sky-high strikeout rate – are even more troubling, though hopefully they represent a short-term issue.
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You can look at parts of Martin Perez’ profile and find yourself salivating over the upside. At the same time, there are parts of his profile that can make you question whether he’s a major sell-high candidate. Ranked around the 100-mark entering the season, Perez seems closer to proving doubters wrong but hasn’t yet validated believers.

To wit: Perez isn’t striking many batters out, but he’s not walking many, either; He’s improved his ground ball rate, but he’s also been gifted a 0.0 percent HR/FB mark; and he has a 1.86 ERA, one that’s surely helped owners early, and it’s backed by a healthy 2.42 FIP and 3.20 xFIP, but ZIPS and Steamer don’t like him any better than a 4.38 and 4.68 ERA, respectively, for the rest of the season.

The good-and-bad profile gets even tougher to figure out when you dive in deeper.
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It’s Sunday, which means a couple of things: 15 baseball games, wonderfully staggered throughout the day; weekly lineup decisions; and that you’ve probably killed a few brain cells over the past few days, so maybe you’ve forgotten some things you learned this week.

Because of that, I’m going to trial the Sunday daily beat being home to a “week in review” for the tips, charts and research our daily fantasy team does throughout the week.

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Anybody had enough rainouts (and snow-outs) yet? Yeah, me too, but hopefully it provided a bit of opportunity in daily leagues for those of you who set their lineups at the very last minute. Those who can’t were likely burned.

If you do have to set your lineup early, DailyBaseballData is always a valuable resource. But guess what? Today it shows zero games with more than a 10 percent chance of rain. So let’s baseball, weather free.

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I get it – Dee Gordon probably burned you in 2012, when you took him as the 10th shortstop off the board, expecting 60-plus stolen bases and a Billy Hamilton-esque layup in the steals category.

Coming off a 24-steal performance in just 56 games the year prior, it was easy to look past the fact that Gordon only sporadically showed a good discipline profile in the minors. This guy can run. ZIPS wasn’t quite as friendly as public opinion but still saw a .271 average and a .310 on-base percentage that was good enough to afford Gordon 74 stolen base opportunities.

He failed. He stole you 32 bases, sure, but scored just 38 runs, appeared in only 87 games and had a pathetic .228/.280/.281 slash line.

It’s time to forgive him.
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We know very little this early into the season. Your Roto position matters little, your sleepers struggling doesn’t mean a great deal (unless it can impact playing time, and closers, well, we know about as much now as we did in the preseason: zilch.

However, the “small sample size” caveats will, eventually, begin to fade. And in fact, there may actually be some information we can glean from the early going, at least as it pertains to pitcher strikeout rates.

Strikeout rates are among the first statistics to stabilize. “70” is not a magic number, but after about 70 batters faced, a majority of the future variance (R2=0.5) in strikeout rate can be explained by strikeout rate to date. That is, after 70 batters faced, pitcher strikeout rate has begun to “stabilize.”
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Sundays are the best. Not only is the afternoon filled with baseball, today MLB has graced us with a well-staggered schedule, meaning there will be a handful of games on at any given time.

Unfortunately, staggered start times can make daily fantasy plays riskier, because it means less certainty when setting your lineup. Sure, weekdays bring that concern too, but there are normally enough 7 p.m. starts that, if you’re risk-averse in that regard, you can structure your team such that you don’t have roster spots subject to the whims of managers.

Today, that’s less apparent, and zeroes are the worst. But there are ways to work around it.

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Striekouts rule in DraftStreet. Find a hurler who can rack up 10 punch-outs, and the baseline he needs to reach with the rest of his performance shrinks significantly. Gamble on a power hitter who ends up whiffing multiple times, and you could be looking at a big, money-sucking negative in the points column.

So identifying strikeout potential is key, and once we have a little more data about each team, we’ll be able to attack them appropriately. Strikeout rates cross the 50-percent stabilization threshold (that is, half of future performance can be predicted by performance to date) earlier than any other stat – 60 plate appearances for hitters and 70 batters faced for pitchers.

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For the second time in two days, I’m going to build off of Mike Podhorzer’s quick hits about the most added fantasy players through the season’s first week. Hey, this is a shortstop beat, it’s week two, and he touched on two of the buzziest shortstop names going.

One of those names was the second most added fantasy piece last week, vaulting from five percent ownership to 31 percent in CBS leagues. It’s been slower in Yahoo formats, but Adeiny Hechavarria is up to 13 percent ownership there, too.

I’m asking you today to throw him back.
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