Return with us now to the distant evening of April 2, 2015, when we were young, life was simple, and Jennrys Mejia was the Mets’ closer. Our task: conducting the NFBC Main Event draft (15 teams, 30 rounds) without embarrassing ourselves. The setting: the “Rhinelander Gallery” of a Manhattan hotel, and it is depressing indeed to think that we are so ancient that we remember not only when the Cincinnati Reds were officially nicknamed “Redlegs,” but also when they were widely known by the unofficial nickname “Rhinelanders,” a nod to the ethnic group that once dominated that city, and at some point during its hegemony concluded that chili is best served over spaghetti. The immediate situation: the approximate midpoint of the draft. For an outline of our overall approach to the draft and an account of the first half, see our previous post. Read the rest of this entry »

It is often said by those who practice the exalted art and science of oral advocacy in appellate courts that, in any given legal case, there are three oral arguments: the one you plan to give, the one you actually give, and the one you wish you’d given. And so it is with the even more exalted art and science of Fantasy Baseball drafting.

We rediscovered this wisdom last week, as we and some two dozen other similarly soigné gentlemen foregathered in Manhattan for a live draft in our NFBC Main Event League: 15 teams, 30 rounds, standard Rotisserie lineups, twice-weekly lineup substitutions for hitters (weekly for pitchers), plain-vanilla 5×5 categories. We were drafting in fourth position. The ultimate hope: triumph not only in this league, but in the overall Main Event competition, encompassing 30 leagues and 450 teams.

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If you’re like us—we sincerely hope you aren’t, but if you’re reading this blog, you probably are—your soul is suffused with the sickness unto death as you contemplate how microscopic the attention you pay to baseball events must be if you hope to succeed in any moderately sophisticated Fantasy Baseball league. First, of course, you have to know how the players everyone knows and cares about are doing. Thus, it will matter to you when you see a headline like “Sean Doolittle plays catch.” We know that this fact has a measure of real-world significance that, say, “Khloe Kardashian plays catch” or “Mitch McConnell plays catch” doesn’t. Still, we keep expecting to see follow-ups: “Sean Doolittle walks the dog.” “Sean Doolittle takes his kids to P.F. Chang’s.” Nonetheless, we care. And just to set the record straight: Doolittle doesn’t have kids, or a spouse, though he does have a famously hot girlfriend.

And then, of course, you need to be completely familiar with the resumes and futures of guys that normal people haven’t heard of. We won’t insult you by telling you who Bruce Rondon is, because you already know. But believe us, there are plenty of hard-core baseball fans (as opposed to Fantasy addicts) who don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

“Cold” because we’re late for the predictions-feast, and the earlier arrivals have eaten a lot of the tastiest victuals. If it’s a “bold” prediction, not everyone’s making it. So here and there, we, and therefore you, are stuck with leftovers. But don’t worry, because we’ve brought some delicacies of our own. Here are our top ten, in reverse order of preposterousness. A couple of them we’ve mentioned before, but Spring Training developments make them worth mentioning again. If we’re right about our two or three most outlandish picks, we’ll claim Fantasy immortality. Read the rest of this entry »

In our ceaseless pursuit of Fantasy bargains, we now consider the Cincinnati Reds—or, as one of us will go to his grave calling them, the Cincinnati Redlegs. (This was actually the team’s name from 1954 through 1959, presumably in order to avoid confusion with the crosstown Cincinnati Communists of the Internationale League.)

But we divagate. The Reds in 2014 lost 38 one-run games, the most in a single season by any team in this century. Their record in such games was 22-38, which is likewise abysmal. You’d figure that such a team would have a weak bullpen, and the Reds sure did. They had the fourth worst bullpen ERA in the majors, and no other team was even close to the bullpen’s 11-31 won-lost record. You might also expect that such a team would have a weak closer, but the Reds didn’t. In fact, as you no doubt know, Aroldis Chapman is perhaps the best closer in baseball, and finished second last season in percentage of saves converted. Moreover, Jonathan Broxton, his replacement for the first month or so of the season, converted five out of his six save opportunities.

No, it was the rest of the bullpen—including Broxton, once he became the set-up guy after Chapman returned—that sank the Reds. Chapman, you see, was used almost exclusively (1) in the 9th inning with (2) either the score tied or the Reds holding a narrow lead. If the Reds, courtesy of the bullpen, couldn’t get to the 9th, Chapman wasn’t a factor. Likewise Broxton, in his capacity as closer. Read the rest of this entry »

Suppose you think a team is going to improve significantly from last year’s performance. You’re not sure exactly how they’re going to do it, but you’re reasonably confident that they will. If you happen to live in the enlightened state of Nevada or are acquainted with a sports accountant, you can bet the team’s over-under. Is there any way to translate that belief into the acquisition of an undervalued player on draft day?

In forecasting team outcomes, we always like to look at a team’s record in 1-run games in the preceding season. The Elias Sports Bureau long ago discovered that (to simplify but not distort their insight) teams that perform poorly in 1-run games in Season 1 and then have a good record in the spring training games of Season 2 significantly outperform almost everyone’s expectations during Season 2 itself. The teams with the worst 1-run records in the majors last season were the Astros (17-28) and the Reds (22-38). Is there any reason—right now, before any spring training games have been played-to think they’ll do better in 2015? Yes, we think. Read the rest of this entry »

Our quest for deep sleepers continues, and as former academics now seeking the Fantasy Baseball equivalent of tenure, we know the value of using as much of other people’s research as we can get away with.

Thus, first came Robert Arthur, an inhabitant of sabermetric Valhalla by virtue of his ability to combine meticulous and microscopic analysis of baseball stats with enjoyable prose. He demonstrated—we’re dumbing this down a bit, but it’s substantially accurate—that sluggers see fewer fastballs than other hitters. He noted that “fastball frequency normally varies according to the pop of the batter, so that when it changes, it may be indicating a change in the skill level of the same batter.”

Beloved Fangraphs editor Eno Sarris then built upon Arthur’s research. He observed, as Arthur had, that “the more we know about a player’s major-league work, the less powerful a change in fastball percentage is for prediction.” In other words, if we want to use fastball frequency to find players who might start hitting home runs in unexpected clusters, look at guys who don’t have much in the way of established performance. So Eno looked for hitters who (1) had fewer than 800 career plate appearances through the end of 2014, and (2) saw fewer fastballs in the second half of the season. This produced a list of power breakout candidates for 2015: Corey Dickerson, Rougned Odor, Kolten Wong, Nick Castellanos, Travis d’Arnaud, Scooter Gennett, Marwin Gonzalez, Mike Zunnino, Yasmani Grandal, and Jon Singleton.

As Eno points out, this is a group of striplings (average age 23). The thing about young players, though, is that they may be seeing fewer fastballs because pitchers have deduced that they can’t hit anything else, or perhaps even that they can’t hit anything else and swing promiscuously at anything-elses that aren’t in the strike zone. So, we wondered, how can we identify which hitters are true candidates for a power burst? We thought of a study of our own that we introduced in our second Fangraphs post. For those of you who haven’t been taking notes: We looked for hitters who saw fewer strikes and took fewer swings at bad pitches in the second half of the 2014 season, on the theory that this betokens increased wisdom for both the hitters in question and the pitchers who face them.

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Back to our NFBC slow draft: 15 teams, 50 rounds, no post-draft transactions–a league that journeys beyond the merely deep to the abyssopelagic. Join us now as we relive our plunge into the second half of the draft.

Much of what we did was so boring it defeats all efforts at amusing commentary. We picked up too many high-strikeout no-save relief pitchers (Zach Duke, Shawn Kelley, David Carpenter, Tony Sipp, Shae Simmons[!]); some fourth-outfielder types whom you don’t have to squint at too hard to see decent playing time and some upside (Dayan Viciedo, Rymer Liriano, and [except for the upside] Jordan Schaefer); starting pitchers who could be good (Jose Urena), show signs of being good (Chase Anderson), have been good (Brett Oberholtzer), or whom we don’t actually remember drafting, much less know why we did (Jeremy Guthrie).

But there are a few guys who deserve comment.

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Our long National League nightmare is over. Two and a half weeks and 750 draft picks after it began, the NFBC slow draft is done. Though we used it primarily as preparation for our NFBC Main Event draft in April, we weren’t opposed to success, though it may seem that way when you review what we did.

Our draft can be described, accurately and justly, as “high-risk, high-reward.” It can also be described, with equal accuracy and justice, as “feeble.” Laugh and weep with us as we explain what we were planning to do, what we thought we were doing, and what we actually did. And that’s right, wise guys, it was in fact a mixed-league draft, but we liked our opening line too much to jettison it.

Our strategy going in to the draft was animated by several insights, or, if you prefer, delusions. They were:

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In our last séance together, we confided to you our passion for Ender Inciarte. That passion was sparked by our attempt to identify hitters who, over the course of the 2014 season, figured out something new about hitting, and were recognized as such by opposing pitchers. In doing that, we also came across hitters who appear to have been tamed during the season, in that they were both seeing better pitches and chasing more bad ones, with declining results. We provided lists of the top- and bottom-20 hitters, according to this metric. One of the top guys was Ender Inciarte. Now we’ll interrogate (as they used to say in Deconstructionland) those lists, see how they answer, and try to separate signal from noise.

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