We’d hoped to discuss the first half of our NFBC slow draft this week, but it’s moving with the Thialfian swiftness of Bartolo Colon trying to leg out a triple. So instead we’re back with another installment in our lucky/unlucky series, wherein we attempt to disentangle bad fortune from disappointment and good fortune from success.

For newcomers to our world: our theory, which seems to be borne out in practice, is that pitchers who aren’t hit hard but give up a lot of hits and a lot of home runs are simply unlucky, and pitchers who are but don’t and don’t are merely lucky. We posit that the unlucky guys outperformed their numbers last year, and will accordingly be undervalued in this year’s drafts and auctions, while the lucky guys will be overpriced and should be avoided. And we deduce who these guys might be by looking at 2017’s Hard-Hit Percentage, Batting Average on Balls in Play, and Home Run to Fly Ball Ratio.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here in Fantasyland, relief pitchers come in three varieties: Closers, Guys Who Aren’t But Might Become Closers, and Everbody Else. Fantasy fortunes are made and broken on the basis of these distinctions. If, say, you were sharp enough to acquire Hector Neris, Felipe Rivero, and Brad Hand on draft day, you won a category and spent essentially nothing to do it. If, conversely, you started the season with Seung Hwan Oh and Francisco Rodriguez as your closers, then you were probably waiting till next year by the All-Star break.

We like unanticipated delight as much as anyone, but for Fantasy players, avoidance of hearbreak seems to us even more essential. And to that end, we reintroduce to you our Who Got Lucky report. The back story: In the middle of the 2015 season, we stumbled upon a simple approach that enabled us to avoid trading for Danny Salazar—an excellent move, although it didn’t help us much. We wondered: which pitchers who’d given up a lot of hard-hit balls had emerged unscarred by virtue of having low BABIPs and HR/FB percentages? We figured those guys had gotten lucky, and that their luck would change. It worked so well in identifying Salazar, and—in the other direction, as a guy who’d been unlucky—Carlos Rodon, that before last season we ran the numbers for both starters and relievers, and even for hitters, on the theory that anomalies in the same categories would once again right themselves.

Read the rest of this entry »

Absolutely…nothing! For our immediate purposes, that is. The usual off-season lull, further deadened by the glacial free agent market, has left us with nothing current and baseballish to ponder during the long winter, other than stuff that, frankly, doesn’t interest us much. Thus, the WAR wars—in brief, Bill James, the Cornel West of sabermetrics, doesn’t like WAR as an evaluative tool—have left us longing for PEACE! (Though if your curiosity is piqued, here’s a judicious evaluation by our Fangraphs colleague Dave Cameron.)

Likewise the Hall of Fame debate, which has long outlasted our attenuated interest. Your stats tell you that Curt Schilling should be inducted into the Hall of Fame instantly? OK with us. You’d prefer to see him tarred and feathered? Godspeed, say we. Just don’t bother us about it any more. We have less important things to think about.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re back after a long silence—too few things to say, too few good ways to say them, too few time—to review our Bold Predictions for 2017. Our forecasting shtick, as some of you may recall, is to detect Fantasy merit among the cheapest of the cheap—the fourth outfielders, fifth starters, and sixth men out of the bullpen who, in defiance of logic but in our view, might have value in the coming season.

So our Bold Predictions were ten guys who either cost a dollar, went in the reserve round, or weren’t taken at all in the Tout Wars Mixed League Auction the week before the season started. As we reckon it, two of our picks were derailed by injury, two (all right—three, but one of them was too whimsical to really count) were bad, one was not-bad, and four were quite good indeed. If you convened a panel of Roto experts and asked them to pick ten $1 players, would they do better than we did?

Really, we have no idea, and we’d like to know. One way or another, we actually had most of these guys on our teams this season. But then again, we played in enough leagues to have had most of the rest of MLB as well. Hope we’re at least a bit responsible for at least some of you having at least some of the guys who panned out. Read the rest of this entry »

Having last week identified some hitters who seem to us to have been lucky or unlucky so far this season, and then suggested what their trade value might be if their luck evens out, we now work the same magic with starting pitchers. These guys’ granular stats, we posit, indicate that they’ve pitched significantly better or worse than their Fantasy-relevant numbers suggest that they have.

We propose that they’ve been unfortunate, and that their fortunes will change. So we ask ourselves (1) who are these guys? (2) what will their stats look like over the rest of the season if their luck balances out and their full-season numbers are about what they were projected to be? and (3) what other pitcher’s expected performance will our guy’s rest-of-season stats resemble?

Our methodology is simple. We first tried it last year, with some success, and then in the preseason, where it would have pointed you towards Dallas Keuchel and away from Julio Teheran. So it shows promise. To find guys who’ve been lucky, we look for starting pitchers who are the top third of their cohort in Batting Average on Balls in Play and in Flyball/Home Run percentage, but the bottom third in Hard-Hit Percentage.

We figure that a guy who’s not getting hit hard but giving up a disproportionate number of hits and home runs is a good candidate to turn his season around. And we turn the method on its head to identify the lucky guys who do get hit hard but—because they’re giving up fewer home runs and hits than they should be—don’t yet have the scars to show for it. We think those guys are headed for a fall. Read the rest of this entry »

In the run-up to the season, our sense of adventure shone brighter than our always-flickering common sense, and so here we are playing in not just one but several leagues that permit trading. When you trade, to state the obvious, you’re betting that the package of stats you’re giving up is less valuable to you than the package you’re getting. Sometimes, this is just a question of trading stats you don’t need for stats that you do. If you’ve got four closers but your hitters have no speed, you’re going to trade some saves for some stolen bases. And sometimes, of course, just like teams in Reality Baseball, you’re trading this year for next year.

But—as we used to say in Academe when we didn’t want to do any more work on a project—keepers are Beyond the Scope of this Article. The thing you’re most often trying to do when you contemplate trades is divine who on your team has produced stats that flatter his actual performance, and who on the other guy’s team has better things in store. And to assist ourselves, and now you, with this project, we’ve tried to identify hitters who, through the first one-fifth of the season, have been lucky or unlucky, and who figure (we hope) to produce numbers more typical of their projected performance. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we told you about some hitters who might be of interest to, and only to, people (like us) who play in leagues so deep that they (the leagues, not the people) are hadalpelagic. Your kind response has encouraged us to take on an even more daunting task: identifying, down there among the bristle worms and the viperfish, starting pitchers who aren’t widely owned (which we define as being owned in fewer than 50% of NFBC leagues) and might be worth having. Read the rest of this entry »

“Deep League Hitter Pickups.” So promised a bulletin we received, unbidden, from America’s Leading Fantasy Sports Aggregator. Likewise “Under the Radar Waiver Wire Pickups.” These communiques used to annoy us, because, absolutely without exception, every player thus recommended was long gone in every league we played in. But then we realized: these bulletins from ALFSA are for people who play Fantasy baseball the way we play Fantasy football: join a small league with shallow rosters, prepare for your draft the day before it happens and no earlier, check waiver wire recommendations on Tuesdays, check again Sunday mornings to make sure your players remain alive and ambulatory, and that’s it.

All in all, a sensible way to do things, but when it comes to Fantasy baseball, prudence and we are strangers. And this season, our folly has led us to a couple of leagues where the number of teams, limited player pool, and shortness of roster space produce only three choices when one of our players gets hurt, gets sent down, or is terminally disappointing: (1) a vacant roster spot; (2) an occupied roster spot that might as well be vacant; and (3) a roster spot whose occupant, though widely shunned for excellent reasons, has a faint chance of doing something useful.

Unfortunately, though the season is in its infancy, we’ve already had occasion to wonder who might be behind Door Number Three, and we thought we’d share with you the fruits of our research. Here, then, are five hitters—one at each position, with the middle infielder qualifying at both spots—whom we either would get, did get, or tried to get when in extremis. All of them are owned in fewer than 50% of NFBC leagues, which means they are more likely than not available to you. Hope you don’t need them.
Read the rest of this entry »

(To the tune of “You Shook Me All Night Long”)

I did a late night draft
Just to have some laughs
‘Cos I’m a big-time expert with Rotographs

The price was steep
The draft was deep
It’s crazy to do this when I should be asleep

I missed Arenado,
Missed Machado and Votto,
The best I could do was Prado and Delgado.

And my head was aching,
My hands were shaking,
The draft was snaking,
I couldn’t start waking up, and

It…took me all night long (when we drafted)
It…took me all night long (I got shafted) Read the rest of this entry »

As you know, Stats, Inc. keeps track of every player’s draft position in every draft conducted by the National Fantasy Baseball League. As soon as there’s been a critical mass of drafts, in (as we recall) late January, it starts publishing each player’s Average Draft Position, and updates those numbers continuously as drafts accumulate. And as our regular readers know, we’ve been tracking ADP changes. Our theory is that aggregate ADP, which changes pretty lazily once there are enough drafts, often masks dramatic developments in ADP during more recent drafts, and that it’s useful to know about these developments. If a player you’re targeting has, say, an ADP of 225 over the course of 50 drafts, but has an ADP of, say, 200 in the ten most recent drafts, he’s probably going to go two rounds earlier than you expected, and if you want him you’ll have to budget for that fact.

Although Stats, Inc. doesn’t offer breakdowns of ADPs, NFBC offers a few, and the most useful is the “Since March 1” category. If you’re interested in Steven Wright, for example—we confess we’re not—it helps to know that his overall ADP is 379 but his ADP since March 1st is 339. But, we think, it helps even more to identify more recent ADP trends. With Wright, the 40-place jump partly conceals a jump from 347 (his ADP as of March 21st) to 322 (his ADP in the 41 drafts held from March 21st through March 25th). As far as we know, we’re the only ones tracking this kind of information, or at least the only ones willing to share it gratis. Read the rest of this entry »