“Be bloody, bold, and resolute.” The approach didn’t work out for Macbeth, but these are nonetheless words to live by for the Birchwood Brothers. As we’ve often mentioned, we’re no better than Joe Fan at predicting the value of upper- and mid-tier players. We like Kole Calhoun, for example, but we have no idea whether he’s worth $15, $20, or somewhere in between. We leave the task of determining that to our Fangraphs colleagues.

We nonetheless find most of said colleagues’ Bold Predictions for the season a trifle, ah, timid. And, insofar as we are vessels of enlightenment, it is because we occasionally identify cheap players who might do something compelling. Remember, we’re the guys who last year urged upon you Jose Ramirez, T.J. House, Jordan Schafer, and Todd Cunningham. We operate at the intersection of the statistical and the anecdotal, and try to separate signal and noise. So, passing lightly over the recent news that–have we got this right?–Goose Gossage is retiring in order to home-school Adam LaRoche, we offer our Genuinely Bold Predictions for 2016. And, to quote a sign we once saw in the window of a discount shop, Everything One Dollars or Fewer. Although now that we think about it, some of the stuff in that shop, though undoubtedly cheap, cost more than a dollar. So let’s start with some guys who will probably cost you only that much, but whom we regard as worth $2 if someone says $1 before you get around to it.

Two Dollar Players

1. Keone Kela will lead the Rangers in saves. Contemplating Kela and Shawn Tolleson, the incumbent closer, we are reminded a bit of the situation before last season with Luke Gregerson and Chad Qualls. Qualls was ostensibly the incumbent, but a trifle long in the tooth and coming off an unusually successful season that was going to be hard to duplicate. Meanwhile, by any conceivable metric, Gregerson was a better pitcher. And so it is with Tolleson and Kela, with the additional fillip that Tolleson has a lot of trouble staying healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

We blush with mortification when we contemplate how clueless we were as preadolescent stat geeks. This was back in the age of the glyptodons, of course, but even so, we lacked insight. As far as we were concerned, if Major League Baseball wasn’t measuring it, it didn’t exist. And since fielding statistics for catchers were essentially nonexistent then—really, all they had was fielding percentage (meaningless) and passed balls (the league leader was the catcher on whichever team had a knuckleballer, and everyone else was the same)—we knew and cared only about how catchers hit.

We thus well understand—indeed, as striplings we even played a variation of—a game described by Fred C. Harris and Brendan C. Boyd in their classic treatise of 1973, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book. Their game was called Lousy Catcher. Its play consisted of one guy’s naming a “lousy catcher”—in other words, a second-string catcher who hit say, .240 or less with, say, 5 home runs or fewer—and the next guy’s trying to name a yet “lousier” one. As we recall, the player who trumped all others in Harris and Boyd’s divertissement was Charlie Lau. For us, it was Danny Kravitz. Read the rest of this entry »

The notion of a Holy Trinity, as it applies to theology, derives, depending on which language you’re looking at, from either Theophilus of Antioch or Tertullian of Carthage. The notion of a Holy Trinity, as it applies to starting pitchers, derives from Bret Sayre of Baseball Prospectus. He posited that “the three skills that are most important to the art of pitching [are] getting strikeouts, reducing walks, and keeping the ball on the ground,” and that pitchers who can do all three of those things, as betokened by their above-average stats in those categories, are or can be something special.

Our problem, as seekers after buried Fantasy treasure, is that the guys who qualify for the Trinity are usually special according to any metric you’d care to name. For example, members of the Trinity according to 2015 stats include Clayton Kershaw, Jake Arrieta, Carlos Carrasco, and Dallas Keuchel. Sometimes, though, interesting names pop up. This year’s Trinity also includes Hisashi Iwakuma and Kyle Hendricks, about whom more in a moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps our very worst prediction of 2015—there’s intense competition for the honor– was that Jordan Schafer would lead the American League in stolen bases. As it developed, he tied for last in the AL, with zero. You can grasp our reasoning, though. Schafer, a year ago, was 28, was among the all-time top 100 in stolen base percentage, had stolen more than 100 bases over the previous four seasons of decidedly part-time play, and was the Twins’ center fielder of choice. He somehow contrived, over the course of April and May, to play himself not only out of the Twins’ starting lineup but out of professional baseball entirely. A .217/.250/.261 slash line, plus three caught-stealings and no stolen bases when your principal asset is speed, will do that to you.

So of course we’re eager to tell you who the 2016 version of Jordan Schafer is. By this, we mean the player most likely either to steal far more bases than anyone envisions or to put the quietus on his career. As we wrote last year, our mistake with Schafer was not taking seriously his spring training record, which was short on speed and long on slow. Thus, our recommendation this year comes with a sub-recommendation: Watch this guy during spring training (or let us watch for you; we promise to report back). If there’s evidence that he can’t run, and you haven’t already got him, don’t take him; if you’ve got him, jettison him, as his team will presumably get around to doing. Read the rest of this entry »

Truth be known, even we don’t find the subject of the second half of our recently-completed NFBC slow draft that riveting, but we promised, so here goes. We’ll forbear commenting except when and as necessary. Maybe we’ll provide you with some giggles, some ideas, or both. These are picks 26 through 50. Bear in mind throughout that, with a couple of exceptions, to be duly noted, our hope is actually not to have to use any of these players in our starting lineups this season. We’re listing them by the order in which we took them in the overall draft; numbers in parentheses are their Average Draft Positions in NFBC slow drafts so far this year.

384. Danny Espinosa (ADP 457). On its face, and perhaps even deep in its very soul, a feeble pick. But it illustrates how draft tactics have to change as a draft and your roster develop. We don’t see Espinosa as the starting shortstop for a contending team. He’s not great in the field (though he is pretty good at second base), and while he’s got more power than your average middle infielder, his .230 lifetime BA and .301 lifetime OBP assure that his offense is likewise nothing special. But it doesn’t matter what we think. The only thing that matters is what manager Dusty Baker thinks, and he evidently likes Espinosa—this despite the fact that the Nationals have Trea Turner (number 15 prospect in MLB, according to Fangraphs’ own KATOH projection system; number 13, according to Baseball Prospectus; number 9, according to Baseball America) ready to go. And—here’s the nub of the matter—we ourselves also have Turner ready to go. We figure that Espinosa either does well and keeps the job or does poorly and relinquishes it to Turner. The possibility of the former made us the only ones who wanted Espinosa this early. Did we, then, subsequently also acquire Stephen Drew (ADP 601)? We did not; it would have been like wearing suspenders, a belt, and a diaper. Read the rest of this entry »

Most normal citizens, we’re pretty sure, can imagine few things more tedious than reading a round-by-round account of a Fantasy Baseball draft. Indeed, many such citizens, some related to us by consanguinity or wedlock (though not by both), have told us as much. But if you’re reading this, you’re probably the kind of person who can imagine no more diverting pastime than speculating about who might be the Phillies’ closer this season. (No, we don’t know either, except we bet it’s not David Hernandez.) And if you are, you may want to join us, over the course of this and next week’s installments, as we review our just-completed, 3-week-long National Fantasy Baseball Championship slow (indeed, glacial) draft.

First, the mise-en-scene: 15 teams, 50 rounds, snake draft, 8 hours to make a pick or else rely on Autopick, standard-issue 23-man active rosters, semi-weekly (Monday and Friday) lineup changes, and—this is the important part—no post-draft transactions. If you’re dumb enough, as we were last year, to draft Shae Simmons the very day he has Tommy John surgery, you’ve got a dead roster spot.

Despite the Simmons mishap, we did okay with our slow draft last season—second place in our league, one point out of first—so we approached this year’s iteration with even more than our usual optimism and brio. Our strategy, if you can call it that, was simple: take the best available guys for a while, and then fill the holes as best we can. This was a reaction to last year’s results, where our misguided beliefs that (1) we needed to take two elite closers early, and (2) we had mapped the starting-pitcher topography accurately enough to wait ten rounds before exploring it, caused us significant dismay. We wouldn’t make the same mistakes this year, no sir. Read the rest of this entry »

“The romance of New York [City] during that era is contagious.” So comments a reviewer of a recent book of photographs from said era. And what era might that be? The melting-pot 1920s? The beatnik 1950s? The pot-and-protests 60s? The dot-com 90s? Nope; the 70s. The pink mist of nostalgia that now envelops 1970s New York City puzzles us a bit. In memoir after memoir—most of them quite good, by the way—1970s NYC is portrayed as culturally and intellectually heady beyond the imaginings of those then unborn or unfledged. But at the same time, it’s depicted as dirty, dangerous, and broke, and the memoirists describe it as if they’d survived the trenches at Guadalcanal.

We ourselves aren’t nostalgic about 1970s New York, or 1970s anywhere else, for that matter. In one respect, though, we kind of miss the decade, because (awkward segue coming) it saw the rise of the lively-ball-era stolen base. Even in the 60s, of course, there were stolen-base avatars like Maury Wills and Luis Aparicio. They’d steal fifty or more bases and lead the league every year. Otherwise, though, nothing: on average, a 60s team would attempt a stolen base about every other game. Read the rest of this entry »

The woods decay and fall. Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath, and after many a summer dies Abe Vigoda. But…we’re still around! We’ve worked hard this winter, pumping irony. We’ve added five pounds of muscle—well, one of us has; the other has added ten pounds of fat—so we’re in the best shape of our lives. This season, we’re going to run more. We’re also going to walk more. Especially, though, we’re going to sit semicomatose in front of our computer screens more, burning up even more irreplaceable hours than we did last year. Yes, once again, we’re taking our two-man submersible deep into the sunless sea of fantasy-relevant stats, and, as before, when we resurface, we’ll show you our specimens.

We’re the Birchwood Brothers, honest-to-God siblings, aggregate age 124 years, lifelong stat geeks and baseball fans, unregenerate fantasy baseball addicts, and spare-time would-be craftspersons of lapidary prose. Like you, in all probability, we’ve got better things to do than this, but that doesn’t mean we do them. Having attained mediocrity in last year’s National Fantasy Baseball Championship Main Event, we’ve decided to seek new challenges. The Main Event uses a snake draft; this year, we’ll be joining the NFBC Mixed-League auction, where we figure to be even more overmatched. As an aperitif, yesterday we started an NFBC slow-draft league—15 teams, no in-season transactions, as much as 8 hours to make each pick, 50 rounds or Ragnarok, whichever comes first. We’ll also be playing in the Bluefish Blitz league, whose rules have so little in common with anyone else’s that we’ll have to prepare for it all over again. And somewhere, we’re going to find a fourth league that suits us, and if we can’t find one we like, we’ll start our own. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an actual sentence from an actual e-mail message from one actual Birchwood Brother to the other. Date: October 18, 2014. Subject: Why to Take KC over SF at Even Money in the 2014 World Series. Rationale: “I think KC will figure out how to hit Bumgarner.”

It’s this kind of prescience, we feel, that will impel you to listen to what we have to say about the Fantasy dimensions of the 2015 MLB playoffs. And not for us the tepid, game-by-game forecasts that make DFS go. No–when we say playoffs, we mean the whole month-long thing: a start-to-finish prediction that we are making before the first pitch of the first wild card game is thrown. And as ever, we are putting our money where our opinions are. We are competing in the NFBC Post-Season Contest, which entails picking a lineup for the first round of the playoffs, resetting for the second round, and resetting again for the World Series. Rosters consist of ten hitters and six pitchers, with at least one guy and no more than three from each of the playoff teams in the first round. There’s a premium on picking players who make it to the succeeding rounds, which means you want to be right about which teams win. It also seems to us that the NFBC scoring system overvalues home runs. Here’s a link to the rules if you’re curious: http://nfbc.stats.com/baseball/leagues/rules/nfbcholdem.asp?id=1507 We’ve got as much chance of winning this as we do of knocking over the Milk Bottle Pyramid at the County Fair Carnival, but we’re undeterred. Read the rest of this entry »

As Lou Reed and Jimmy Durante, among numerous others, have observed, it’s a long, long while from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September. In other words, as Yogi Berra (RIP) evidently really did say, it gets late early.

For the Birchwood Brothers, though, the situation is direr. It’s not just late, but too late–too late to cast off the drab cloak of mere respectability and don the royal raiment of Fantasy preeminence that we crave. We co-manage teams in three leagues, and our fate in each of them seems to be the same:

–In our NFBC Main Event league, a modest surge has taken us to 5th Place (198th of 450 Main Event teams overall); we’ve got an outside shot at 4th, though could easily finish 8th, thanks to the saboteurs on our pitching staff. If our pitching had been as good as our hitting, we’d be 18th overall. Conversely, if our hitting had been as bad as our pitching, we’d be 405th.

–In our NFBC Slow Draft league, an epochally bad two weeks for our pitchers (6.27 ERA and 1.373 WHIP in 70 innings) has taken us from first place to fourth. It’s probably too late to recover. We begrudge Dallas Keuchel nothing, but his 11 baserunners and 9 earned runs in 4 2/3 innings last week finished us off, statistically and emotionally, and produced a game score of 11, a number so bad that…that…that it’s worse than all but one of Kyle Kendrick’s 25 starts this year, and Kendrick pitches for Colorado and has an ERA over 6.

–Meanwhile, in the Fangraphs mid-season league we ourselves oversee, we are in third place, and that’s where we’re going to wind up, once again held back by our pitching.

That’s right, we’re whining again about our pitchers. We’ll stop now. Forward-looking and sunny-dispositioned as always, we have risen on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things, and are already thinking optimistically about next season’s draft, and asking ourselves, What have we learned? Can we derive any lessons from our season that go beyond Draft Better Guys? Three things, we think: Read the rest of this entry »