Injury replacements is the theme of this week’s waiver wire. It was probably the theme of last week’s too. And the week prior. Basically, if you don’t own the guy who got injured, injuries are good! Opportunities!
Yesterday, I discussed five players whose early season home run totals have like totally shocked the world. Clearly, I missed a couple of obvious names and some of you commented reminding me of such. So let’s get to the rest of those shocking hitters sitting on home run totals we never expected at this point in the season.
Contrary to what you might assume given my status as a veteran RotoGraphs writer and member of the Tout Wars and LABR leagues, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to players on none of my fantasy teams. So every so often, I express surprise, or perhaps even shock, when I peruse the day’s box scores and notice a batting average or counting stat from a player at a level far off from our expectations. “Player X has 15 homers already?!?!” is how I will frequently react. Let’s discuss some of these players.
Throughout his career, Danny Duffy has shuffled between the Royals starting rotation and their bullpen. Let’s compare his underlying skills in each role:
| Role | K% | BB% | LD% | GB% | FB% | IFFB% | SwStr% | BABIP | LOB% | HR/FB | ERA | SIERA |
| Starter | 18.6% | 9.7% | 21.6% | 36.3% | 42.1% | 15.1% | 8.3% | 0.288 | 75.5% | 8.7% | 3.89 | 4.48 |
| Reliever | 31.2% | 7.1% | 21.7% | 43.4% | 34.9% | 10.3% | 15.0% | 0.298 | 79.2% | 3.4% | 2.08 | 2.48 |
Deep league waiver wire, when injuries are your friend. As usual, injuries have opened up playing time for this week’s candidates.
About a week and a half into this season, I decided to have a little fun with small samples and statistical anomalies. Anything could happen over a tiny number of games, and indeed anything did. We stress here not to overreact to performances over the first couple of weeks, so let’s see where things stand for the players I highlighted. Did that early start hint at things to come?
Last week, I took Alex Chamberlain’s xBABIP equation for the first drive of the 2016 season, identifying those hitters whose xBABIPs most exceeded their actual BABIP marks. That was your potential BABIP surger list. Today I’ll check in on the flip side, those hitters whose BABIP marks greatly exceed their xBABIP marks. These hitters are at serious risk for BABIP, and resulting batting average, regression.
It’s that time of year again, American League starting pitcher tier update time! I still pay no attention to ERA, as it’s not a metric I use for evaluation and ranking pitchers for rest of season performance. Player movement between tiers will only occur when there’s a change in underlying skill, pitch mix, or velocity.
Tiers are named for the best characters on the brilliant FXX show, Man Seeking Woman.
If you were dying to roster a Michael, today’s deep league waiver wire gives you two options. Given that Michael is the world’s best name (I’m obviously not biased), then why wouldn’t you be racing to the free agent pool to dive in and catch one?
It’s hard to believe that we’re now about two months into the season and this has been my first post on xBABIP all year. Well, here it is. While I developed my own xBABIP equation back in early 2015, the availability of new data since my formula was published allowed Alex Chamberlain to create an equation I prefer and use instead. Not only is the r-squared slightly better, but all the metrics are available here on FanGraphs. When I’m looking to buy low, the most attractive targets are hitters whose power is fine, but are simply suffering from an unfortunate BABIP. Below is that list of hitters.
For the first time, I have included all the components of the xBABIP equation so we can get a better sense of which component(s) each hitter is excelling in and where he could improve.
