For me personally, it feels like offensive surprises and busts are harder to evaluate during the year because we have fewer tools to analyze. Power is one skill that is difficult to decide how real a spike or drop is, but Jeff Zimmerman has been mentioning a tool at Baseball Heat Maps that gives you the distance of a hitter’s batted balls, which may really help in this type of analysis. In the past, I have used the ESPN Home Run Tracker site to help determine how flukey a change in HR/FB ratio is, but I think looking at the raw average distance is a less flawed method. I looked at the five hitters whose HR/FB ratio has increased the most this year and then added their 2011 and 2012 average home run plus fly ball distances to the table.

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These tiers are a bit later than the rest of the crew, as my vacation delayed my writing. All can breathe easily now as they have finally arrived! You can check out my June update here. A quick note: I have removed pitchers who were demoted to the minors since I have no idea when and if they will be returning to the Majors.

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Welcome back Self! If you didn’t realize it (admit that you noticed immediately that my highly informative and entertaining posts were suddenly missing from your life), I have been away on vacation for the last 2 weeks. And yes, it was a great time, thanks for asking. Anyway, due to the wonders of the iPhone, I was actually able to keep up with all the baseball happenings for the first time on a vacation. Joining the 21st century is a nice thing. As a result, I found two free agent gems for you deep leaguers!

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On Saturday, I identified a couple of players who fantasy owners might consider buying high on. I purposely ignored players who were expected to be top guys to begin with, but were having even better season than projected (David Wright, Adam Jones), as I preferred to look at more of the cheaper players with surprising performances. Similarly, the sell low guys will be players that were expected to generate high dollar values. I think it’s tougher to recommend selling low on a player than buying high, because we always preach patience and believe that a player will bounce back to his established level of performance, rather than weight the first 3 months of the season so heavily. At the risk of being very wrong…

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We are all familiar with the practice of buying low. Over the first couple of months of the season, nearly all of my trade offers involve attempting to acquire a player who has started off slowly. But have you ever bought high? Did the thought even cross your mind to target Jose Bautista in 2010 after he finished the month of May with 16 home runs? Probably not. But sometimes it could be a good idea because the other owner may be thinking he is selling high and you still get the player for cheaper then he is ultimately worth. But of course, this is a much riskier type of trade and so most shy away from it. If you have the cajones, here are some players who may be worth buying high.

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Injuries and or ineffectiveness always leads to lots of turnover in starting rotations. Since new pitchers are always getting an opportunity to perform, there seems to be an endless stream of guys to consider picking up, especially in deep leagues. Here are a couple of the pitchers who have either just returned to the Majors or are getting their first taste.

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It’s official: this is the most boring deep league waiver wire to date. The combined age of the recommended players is an elderly 71. <cliché>But these guys still have some gas left in the tank!</cliché>

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Last week, I decided to compare the SIERA marks of starting pitchers over the last 30 days with what they posted in April. The idea here was to identify potential RoS breakout candidates whose ERAs still might be hiding major improvement over the last month. Today I will look at the opposite side of the coin, those starters whose skills have declined over the last month. These pitchers might still have good ERAs and may still command a nice return in trade.

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A week ago, I looked at the 10 pitchers with the largest difference between their ERA and SIERA marks; those whose ERAs have outperformed their SIERA. These were the pitchers you can expect to disappoint in the near future. Today I look at the opposite end of the spectrum, the potential improvers whose ERA has underperformed their SIERA marks.

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Though I have no math to back this up, anecdotally (is that a word? the red underline of death is appearing underneath it as I type!) it seems as if pitchers suddenly improve mid-season much more frequently than hitters. In other words, the light bulb goes on and a pitcher’s skills will surge in a hurry. I decided to compare SIERA over the last 30 days with SIERA in April for all starting pitchers (this was originally meant to only include American Leaguers, since I’m the AL SP man, but my mind was apparently elsewhere and I forgot to filter, oops) to see who has enjoyed the biggest declines in the metric. This is a great way to identify RoS breakout candidates by looking beyond just the ERA leaders for the month.

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