We’re back from a couple of weeks on the DL, and just like actual baseball players, we got ready for our return by playing catch, though in our case it was with a couple of 9-year olds. Then, in our quest for the sabermetric equivalent of extended spring training, we sought a nice, easy research project of no particular consequence. The results of this project are set forth below.

The occasion for this particular project is the imminent return of Daily Fantasy Sports to the State of New York, where we reside. The story of how DFS came to disappear from New York in the first place and how it came to return is one about which we harbor numerous and abrasive opinions, all of which we will keep to ourselves for the moment.

We aren’t ardent DFS guys—it’s too time-consuming, too hard. But sometimes, we grow weary of our life’s work of translating the plays of Corneille into Estonian, and like to unwind with a twenty-five-cent sporting flutter. And sometimes, more to the point, our Roto season goes so sour so early—that’s you we’re glaring at, Randal Grichuk—that we need a diversion beyond what our efforts to keep our teams from finishing last provide. So we’re glad to greet DFS upon its return.

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At the start of Moby Dick, Ishmael says that, whenever he gets so depressed that “it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off,” he goes to sea. As it happens, we, too, are depressed right now. What depresses us is contemplation of the charred, smoking ruin that is our 2016 Fantasy season, and the hats we want to knock off are those of the arsonists who populate our several pitching staffs.

When this happens to us, however, we don’t go to sea. Rather, we bury ourselves in stats that have nothing to do with the ones that are causing us heartache. Different strokes, we guess—a phrase, by the way, that assumes a whole new meaning when you get to be as old as we are.

Thus, we determined to investigate the effect, if any, of the raising of the fences at Coors Field. As you undoubtedly know, Coors is a notoriously hitter-friendly park, and as you probably know, before the start of this season, the Rockies raised the outfield fences in order, said their General Manager, to make the stadium “more fair to pitchers.” The fence down the line in left field is now five feet higher than it was, and the fence in right-center is nine feet higher. Read the rest of this entry »

Show of hands, please: Who thought, back in February, that we’d be approaching Memorial Day with the Baltimore Orioles in possession of the second-best record in the American League? Uh-huh; not many of you. Now: Who thought instead, three months ago, that the 2016 Orioles would be fortunate to end the season with 75 wins? A few more, and we are among you.

We won’t revisit our thinking, if you can call it that. We will point out, though, that the Orioles will certainly come partway back to earth. First of all, none of the other teams in the AL East are going to be pushovers. More importantly, the Orioles have been somewhat fortunate so far this year, just as they were somewhat unfortunate last year. Their record today is 26-17; their Pythagorean projection (we’ll assume you know what we mean) has them more like 24-19. Conversely, the 2015 Orioles finished 81-81, whereas their Pythagorean projection had them more like 83-79—which, over 43 games, makes for 22 wins. The small difference between the seasons can be fully accounted for by the acquisition of Mark Trumbo and the advent of Kevin Gausman. Read the rest of this entry »

For the Confetti among us—a more colorful term than “Streamers,” don’t you think?—Colorado starting pitchers are easy. You use them, if at all, when they’ve got good matchups on the road. For Rotisserians, it’s not so simple. Sure, if you’ve got a deep enough roster, your league has a liberal enough substitution policy, and the Rockies have a starter worth using under any circumstances, you can sit the guy when he’s in Coors and start him when he’s not. But that trifecta is hard to hit, and otherwise you’re asking for disaster.

Can there possibly be any exceptions to this? Maybe one: Chad Bettis. Everyone recognizes, in a general way, that he’s a pretty good pitcher. He’s owned in roughly 10% of Yahoo and ESPN leagues, which seems high for a Rockies starter. What may not be known is that he’s just about as good in Coors as he is on the road. On July 7, 2015, Bettis had one of the very worst outings by any starting pitcher during the past two seasons. He was in Coors, of course, and in 2 1/3 innings gave up 8 hits, including 4 home runs, 1 walk, and 10 earned runs. Why, having given up 8 runs in the first two innings, he was allowed to start the third inning and give up two more, we’re not sure. Read the rest of this entry »

Our quest for stolen bases now takes us to San Diego, where there may be some reason to tarry. New manager Andy Green seems a bit more willing to steal bases than his several predecessors last season were. This year, the Padres are attempting to steal 7.32% of the time they have a Stolen Base Opportunity. That’s 5th in MLB; the average is about 5.5%. In 2015, their SBA/SBO percentage was a below-average 5.3%.

Of course, just because you try to steal a base doesn’t mean you steal it. Last year, the Padres stole 74% of the bases they tried to steal. This year, it’s only 66%. But they try so much more often that their ratio of Stolen Bases to Stolen Base Opportunities is higher this season (4.80 vs. 3.92). Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a strange season for stolen bases so far, is it not? It seemed to us, just impressionistically, that there have been a lot more caught-stealings this year than last, and so it proves statistically. You don’t have to be Bill James to notice that last year’s success rate for stolen bases was 70% and this year’s is 68%–the lowest, if it persists for a full season, since 1999.

Other numbers paint the picture even more clearly. Teams are attempting to steal bases a tiny (and thus insignificant) bit more than last year—5.6 attempts per Stolen Base Opportunity in 2016, 5.43 in 2015. And the total number of stolen bases this season is exactly what you’d have expected, given last year’s numbers. But there have been way more caught-stealings—roughly one per day more, across all of MLB, which seems like a lot. Read the rest of this entry »

Let us not talk falsely now: Most of us Fantasy geeks know baseball stats better than we know baseball. We understand stats from the inside, but baseball incompletely and from the outside. And since everyone’s got full access to the same full set of stats and the predictions based thereon, we all know or think we know exactly the same things. There’s too much confusion; we can’t get no relief.

But what about the guys who are stat geeks, but also know baseball? Do their direct observations of the game itself, unmediated by statistics, offer a way out of the inferno of stat-geek parity? Do they have an edge over us, or would they have one, if they weren’t generously sharing with us what they see? Read the rest of this entry »

The term means “ambulance dogs.” It’s what the World War I Germans called the dogs they sent into No Man’s Land during lulls in the fighting to find the survivors. And that’s where we are and what we’re doing right now. Our draft and auction battles are over. (Don’t know about you, but it started to feel like a war of attrition to us.) The in-season strategizing hasn’t really begun yet. All the able-bodied players, so it’s thought, are on someone’s roster. Meanwhile, No Man’s Land is littered with the corpses of the guys that nobody wants—the 25th men, the back-of-the-bullpen mop-up pitchers, the mid-level prospects, the 5th starters on bad teams. Can there possibly be, sheltering in some muddy and verminous shell hole, somebody who doesn’t just have a pulse, but is actually fit enough to be on the front lines of tomorrow’s combat?

How about Matt Wisler? Wisler is owned in only 2% of Yahoo leagues and 2.3% of ESPN leagues. Fewer than a quarter of NFBC standard-issue leagues (30 rounds, 15 owners) got around to drafting him. Even on the surface of the stats, it’s a little hard to explain why he wasn’t taken more often. Wisler’s a 23-year-old right-handed pitcher who was universally recognized as one of the top 50 or so prospects in baseball a year ago. He’s got a full repertoire of pitches, though he’s mostly a fastball-slider guy. Originally drafted by the Padres, he was the key to the Craig Kimbrel trade at the start of the 2015 season. He began that season in the minors, got called up to Atlanta in June, and performed creditably if not Fantasy-usefully in 19 starts (8 Wins, 5.94 K/9, 4.71 ERA, 1.46 WHIP), including 4 Quality Starts in his last 5 outings. It’s a no-brainer to project improvement across the board. You like Anthony DeSclafani? What round did you take him in? The 16th or 17th round, we’re guessing. If you got him at an auction, what did you pay? $3, are we right? Well, Steamer projects about the same season for Wisler as it does for DeSclafani. Read the rest of this entry »

Since we share Oscar Wilde’s view that moderation is a fatal thing, and believe that Moore (Ray Moore, 1957, 11 Wins, 3.90 ERA, 1.355 WHIP) is Moore (Matt Moore, 2012, 11 Wins, 3.81 ERA, 1.348 WHIP), more or less, we filled out our already-crammed dance card on Sunday with an on-line auction in the Bluefish Blitz League. The BBL features among its owners some well-known Fantasy figures, and provides motive, means, and opportunity to be predatory if that’s your weltanschauung. It also has rules sufficiently different from anyone else’s to make preparation-from-scratch essential, even if you’ve already done so many drafts, auctions, and blogs that you can’t remember which leagues you’re in, much less which players you’ve got in each of them.

The rules: 20 teams, each with $250 in play money to spend on 9 hitters (i.e. a full lineup, including a UT guy), 11 pitchers, and a 5-man bench that can include pitchers if you’re so inclined. 5×5 with a couple of wrinkles on the hitting side: OBP, SLG, and NSB instead of BA, HR, and SB. Draconian innings-pitched limits at both ends (1000 IP minimum, 1458 [i.e. 162×9] maximum), and no more than 162 games played per each hitting position. Daily transactions of every conceivable variety are not only permitted but encouraged and applauded. The concept, obviously, is to approximate “real” major league rosters and team management.

It was, in some ways, gratifying to discover that these guys (or we guys, if you care to flatter us) don’t know anything more than you (or we, if you care not to flatter us) do if you’ve been paying attention. At about noon on Sunday, Ken Giles went for $19 in this league, while Luke Gregerson went for $6. At about 9 on Monday morning, Houston manager A.J. Hinch announced that Gregerson would be his closer. Even granting that Giles probably takes over as soon as Gregerson blows a save, we imagine that those prices would have been nearly transposed if the draft had been held a day later or Hinch had less of a flair for drama.

We didn’t set out to be contrarian in this league, but as it developed, we were. We decided that (1) the league rules made platooning and DFS-style day-to-day matchups a possibility for hitters, and (2) our unwholesome in-season obsessive attention to detail would enable us to optimize our hitting while not running afoul of the 162-game limit. We accordingly decided to pay extra for our bench players, and not to put any pitchers on our bench. We also decided to go with 6 starting pitchers. We thought that many teams would pursue this strategy, but only one did, at least in its pure form (the strategy, we mean, not the team).

Here’s our roster, listed in the order in which we acquired it. For a bit of context, Trout went for $59, Harper for $56, Kershaw for $52, and Goldschmidt for $50…

Drew Smyly, $15
Stephen Vogt, $10
Xavier Cedeno, $3
Chris Davis, $34
Corey Kluber $31
Cody Allen $24
Kole Calhoun $10
Ben Revere $13
Mark Melancon $21
Jose Quintana $11
Elvis Andrus $10
Randal Grichuk $8
Danny Valencia $2
Joe Ross $7
Trevor Plouffe $5
Pedro Alvarez $11
Brock Holt $3
Stephen Piscotty $5
Welington Castillo $2
Jonathan Schoop $7
Chris Owings $5
Zach McAllister $3
Matt Moore $7
Nate Jones $1

…which, now that we type it out in the merciless daylight after a night spent with this squad, doesn’t look as good to us as it looked in the smoky fluorescence of the tavern at 2 Monday morning while the bartender emptied the till and set the chairs upside-down on the tables. So we’ll see.

But one thing we did in this league may be of use to you and us down the road. A month ago, we identified some starting pitchers who qualified for the Holy Trinity and the Holy Quadrinity—two different approaches to granular stats designed to identify guys who pitched better than it might have looked like they did last season. With relief pitchers at something of a premium in the BBL, we took the same approaches to relievers who threw more than 30 innings in relief last year. Eight guys qualifed for both the Trinity and the Quadrinity. Two—uh, three–are closers (Zach Britton, Hector Rondon, and Gregerson). Two others are injured, and not in ways that bode especially well for their return (Carson Smith, Aaron Loup). The other three are Will Harris (well-known as a capable seventh-inning guy, and orphaned, a bit surprisingly, in the BBL, though we might have taken him at the end if Jones hadn’t been available); Xavier Cedeno (whom we got, contentedly, for $3, and who is a candidate to close some games for Tampa Bay); and Sean Gilmartin.

Gilmartin’s the really interesting one. He’s a former first-rounder who kicked around for a while as a starter until the Mets took him as a Rule 5 pick in December 2014. He was superb in long relief last season, and, though he’s left-handed, actually did better against right-handed hitters. The Mets optioned him to AAA a few days ago, evidently with the idea of making him a starter again. And indeed, it’s not clear why a left-hander who can get righties out and has a tepid fastball but a four-pitch repertoire wouldn’t fit in as a starter. Of course, that’s what the Braves and Twins thought when they had him. We nonetheless predict that the reconversion will work, and that he will prove to be a better pitcher than (former Rule Fiver) Logan Verrett, who’s his competition for the sixth-starter role. If, for whatever reason, Gilmartin gets summoned to start a game or games this season, we’re going to grab him, unless one of the bluefish grabs him first.

As you may recall, the Annapurna that we have been preparing to scale this season is the NFBC Auction Championship: mixed league, 15 teams, 5×5, standard-issue 23-man roster with a 7-round snake draft for reserves. Well, we had our auction last week, and it was…humdrum. Somewhat to our surprise—about which more below–bidding was restrained and prices were temperate. Once we caught on to this—Bryce Harper for $41 and Mike Trout for $44 did the trick—we accomplished most of what we set out to do, and don’t think we overpaid or underpaid by more than a dollar for anyone. Possible exceptions are noted below. Our roster is barely worth reporting, and certainly not worth analyzing in detail. Nonetheless, for the record, here it is, with our picks listed in order of acquisition by way of giving you an idea of where we went with our endgame. As always, we invite your comments: Read the rest of this entry »