“Be not too bold.” So wrote Edmund Spenser in his 1590 best-seller The Faerie Queene, a work so obscure, so archaic, and so tedious that even we can’t stand reading it. And anyway, it’s bad advice, at least when it comes to something called Bold Predictions, and at least for us Birchwood Brothers, whose stock in trade is identifying the unheralded and unsuccessful before they become heralded and unsuccessful. Thus, we pledge: nobody among our ten bold predictions cost more than $1 in the just-completed Tout Wars mixed auction. Indeed, some were reserve-round picks, and some weren’t chosen at all. And to keep our promise, we’re starting with a bonus pick, which includes guys who went for more than $1, though not much more. Thus, in ascending order of improbability, we have: Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody knows whether the great novelist Joseph Conrad played Fantasy baseball. He died in 1924, so perhaps not, but a passage in one of his novels suggests that he envisioned it. In The Secret Agent, a character entertains the “horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture could be contained between two successive winks of an eye.” We can now attest to the accuracy of that notion, because we had such an experience in a Fantasy baseball auction last Sunday. We had neglected to stock our catching staff, and, as a result, between those two successive winks we were compelled to place a $7 bid on Francisco Cervelli. “Pain” and “torture” were indeed the centerpieces of our experience in that instant.

We were going to report on the above-referenced auction in this week’s installment, but frankly it’s just too embarrassing. Consistently undervaluing catchers until we were stuck with a $7 Cervelli and a $2 Jason Castro was just the most egregious of our errors. But our loss is your gain, because we decided to write something useful for a change: a review of auction market prices.

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Last week, we took a look at some pitchers whose Fantasy-irrelevant stats in 2016 suggested they pitched better (or worse) than appeared. There was some reason, beyond our need for something to write about, to think this approach might actually identify under- and overvalued players. There’s no reason at all, other than intuition, to think that the same approach works with hitters. But let’s take it for a spin and see how it handles.

To review the underlying theory and the stats in question: the harder a batter hits a ball, the likelier he is to get a hit. So the less frequently a pitcher gets hit hard, the better he will do. But sometimes, the inscrutable gods of baseball decree otherwise, so that weakly-hit balls go for hits, popups go for home runs, and guys who throw effective pitches have nothing to show for it. Vagaries, however, balance out in the long run. So last week we looked for pitchers whose Batting Average on Balls in Play and Home Run to Fly Ball Ratio were immoderately high, even as their Hard-Hit Ball Percentage was low, on the theory that the universe would right itself this time around. And, of course, we looked for pitchers whose stats suggested the same outcome in the opposite direction. Read the rest of this entry »

Luck, as Branch Rickey famously observed, is the residue of good fortune, and it seems to us that a lot of what we Fantasists do amounts to determining who’s been lucky and who hasn’t. This is the stock-in-trade of one genre of preseason Fangraphs article that we, for two, are suckers for: Player A, the article will assert, had bad (or good) Fantasy-relevant numbers last season, but a massage of those numbers or an examination of more granular stats suggests that his performance wasn’t as bad as (or was worse than) his Fantasy outcomes.

The closer look or the more granular stats, the article will continue, reflect the guy’s true performance, whereas the Fantasy numbers are artifactual, and largely produced by the guy’s luck. Since luck evens out, the article will conclude, the guy will do better (or worse) than people who haven’t looked closely at the numbers think, and will be worth more (or less) than the market thinks he is.

One of our relatively accurate forecasts of our rather pitiful 2016 season derived from this approach. At mid-season, we opined that Danny Salazar (first half ERA: 2.75) would decline sharply thereafter, whereas Carlos Rodon (first half ERA: 4.50) would improve significantly. And so it turned out. We reached these conclusions by asking: which starting pitchers, if any, were in the highest (i.e. worst) quartile of Batting Average on Balls in Play and Home Run to Fly Ball Ratio, and in the bottom (i.e. best) quartile of Hard-Hit Ball Percentage?

And which starters, conversely, were in the lowest quartile of BABIP and HR/FB and the top quartile of HH%? Our reasoning wasn’t abstruse: if a guy’s not getting hit hard, and yet is giving up a disproportionate number of hits and home runs, maybe he’s been unlucky, and if his only problem is that he’s been unlucky, maybe his luck will change. And, on the other hand, maybe the luck of a guy who’s getting hit hard but doesn’t yet have the scars to show for it will run out. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to resume our search for underpriced starting pitchers. For the past two years, we’ve been taking a look at which starters qualify, on the basis of the previous season’s stats, for the Holy Trinity (an established way of looking at stats, relying on a pitcher’s strikeouts per 9 innings, walks per 9 innings, and ground ball percentage), and the Holy Quadrinity (an approach of our own devising, relying on strikeout percentage, walk percentage, soft-hit percentage, and hard-hit percentage).

If you want more background and detail, go here. Obviously, most guys who do well in these categories are going to be top pitchers everyone already knows about. But the approach yields some surprises, including, last season, Justin Verlander and Kyle Hendricks. And, as we determined at the end of last season, in the aggregate it produces some positive value. So let’s see who it turns up this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Our report on the first half of our NFBC Slow Draft received reviews that were decidedly, um, mixed. But mixed reviews didn’t deter the producers of Batman vs. Superman from offering a sequel, and they’re not deterring us. We won’t revisit the background information about the draft or the strategy with which we approached it; it’s there at the start of the first installment. We’ll just report our selections, and comment when comment seems called for. And remember, folks, this is the second half of a 50-player draft. If everything goes perfectly, which of course it won’t, almost none of these guys will crack our starting lineup. Many of them are strictly spare parts. So “Ewww! Eduardo Escobar” is uncalled for.

Draft Position 374. Scott Schebler and 377. Francisco Liriano. Liriano, at least in 2017, is the kind of pitcher you take when you have a deep bench. We suspect that his career as a starting pitcher is over. He was very bad with Pittsburgh in the first four months of last season—his ERA third time through the order was 10.04–and while he helped Toronto a lot in the August and September, he still had trouble getting past the fourth inning in his 8 starts: ERA, innings 1 through 4, 1.97; ERA thereafter, 5.28. We’re not counting on him. But we got him cheap (his NFBC Average Draft Position is 324), he can still get strikeouts, he’s already penciled in to the Blue Jays’ rotation, and maybe we’re wrong about him. Read the rest of this entry »

Back to our originally scheduled schedule with a report on our (still ongoing) NFBC slow draft. The mise-en-scene: 15 teams, 50 rounds, up to 8 hours to make a pick, no in-season transactions. The dramatis personae: people who (a) in the month of January are reasonably conversant with and able to distinguish microscopically among the statistics, orthopedic well-being, and prospects of at least 700 professional baseball players, and (b) are willing to attend to–indeed, obsess over–this process, to the exclusion of sound hygiene and personal responsibilities. In short, our kind of guys.

Our draft selections were animated, or, if you prefer, enervated, by certain strategic considerations:

–We detected, or thought we detected, something of a dropoff between the first 20 or so likely draftees and the next group. Conversely, we thought that numbers 8 through 15 were approximately equal. And, having always drafted in the middle of the pack before, we hoped to avoid the frustration of being unable to plan effectively because we’ve always had to wait six or seven picks to make our next move. So, if we couldn’t draft in the first four, we were happy to draft in the last four. We wound up drafting 14th, which was fine with us. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re preempting the promised report on the first half of our NFBC slow draft to offer some information that, for a change, you might find useful. Stats, Inc. keeps track of Average Draft Position in NFBC drafts, starting with the earliest drafts in late 2016 and updating as the preseason heats up. We’ve been tracking the tracker—following the movement in ADPs– and have seen some interesting things.

When we studied this recently, there had been 46 NFBC drafts (there have now been 57; the trends we report below have mostly continued, and none of them, with one exception noted below, has reversed itself). The NFBC ADP at that time of course reflected the average of all those drafts. We knew what the ADP after 34 drafts had been, and we calculated the separate ADP of the next 12. We figured—accurately, it appears—that the all-drafts ADP would mask some interesting developments. Read the rest of this entry »

Though we grew up, and still reside, in the Northeast, we’re not winter sports guys. How much are we not? Well, there’s this Olympic event called the biathlon that combines Nordic skiing and rifle shooting. One of us—we’re not saying which one—was in his twenties before he realized that cross-country skiing, which he’d seen though not tried, and “Nordic skiing,” which he’d never seen, were the same thing. And that very brother was thirty before he learned, aggrievedly, that the two activities of the biathlon don’t occur simultaneously.

So each winter, all our sentient lives, we’ve yearned for the first sign of spring. And for us, even when up to our navels in snow, the traditional first sign has been the commencement of baseball spring training in February. Except, for the past three years, since the start of our mutual immersion in Fantasy baseball, that welcome harbinger has come even earlier—in January, in the form of our first Fantasy draft of the season.

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As our regular readers, assuming optimistically that we have any, probably know, it was a disappointing Fantasy season for us. But are we discouraged? Not we! Rising on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things, we have embraced the challenge (despite the punishing vig) of the NFBC Post-Season Contest.

Contest rules, predictions, and entries in a moment. But first, allow us to note that we’re a bit better at predicting outcomes at the team level than at the individual level. Thus, aside from the virtually-infallible Brett Talley, we alone among 55 Fangraphs writers predicted that Seattle would make it to the wildcard game. That’s right, spoilsport; they didn’t. But they came close. And, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, we now know the exact difference between having Lloyd McClendon as your manager and having someone else as your manager. (10 games.) We also envisioned that new manager Dave Roberts would assemble a bullpen that would enable the Dodgers to get from the fifth or sixth inning to Kenley Jansen, and we were right, although (except for Joe Blanton) we were wrong about the guys he’d assemble it with. And finally, our proudest accomplishment: we were four-for-four in our preseason over-under predictions, and the spiritual succor we derive almost offsets the fact that it did us no financial good whatever.

Back to the contest. It 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. The big gimmick of the contest is the “Scoring Multiplier”: a player’s points total in a given week doubles if he’s on your roster the next week; his point total for the first round triples if he’s still around for the World Series. Since there’s a premium on picking players who make it to the succeeding rounds, you want to be right about which teams win. It also appears to us that the rules favor home runs unduly, and tilt slightly in the direction of starting pitchers and against closers (forget about non-closer relievers). And of course, to the extent it comports with what you actually think might happen, you want to be contrarian.

So here’s how we see the playoffs: Read the rest of this entry »