Continuing to shrive, we this week take a gimlet-eyed look at our in-season predictions. We omit any further references to our several in-season comments promoting our tragically mistaken vision of the Advent of the Five-Inning Pitcher, in penance for which we have already donned hairshirts.

Very Bad Predictions

–June 1: Mark Reynolds has “lost his power” and “will soon become a headache” to his owners. What we said at the time would still sound kind of plausible, if what subsequently occurred hadn’t occurred. At the beginning of June, despite playing in Coors and having generally good stats, Reynolds had unprecedentedly few home runs and was getting by on a bunch of seeing-eye opposite-field ground balls that had produced a ridiculous BABIP of .411. Almost immediately thereafter, though, he started (a) pulling the ball and (b) hitting fly balls, many of which (c) went for home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

The subject line of an e-mail we got from a Yahoo Group one of us belongs to made our blood freeze. “It’s been raining David Crosby,” it said. Oh no, we thought; again? Closer inspection revealed merely a Youtube clip of pre-Byrds solo-folksinger Crosby performing “It’s Been Raining.” It’s completely harmless, especially if you don’t watch it or listen to it. It occurred to us, though, even as we heaved sighs of relief, that “Raining David Crosby” might be a good metonym for our disappointing-to-catastrophic 2016 Fantasy Baseball season.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of fearless scientific accountability, we must now review our 2016 predictions, “Bold” and otherwise. We’ll look at preseason predictions this week and in-season ones next week. We’ll concentrate, as always, on the outré and the cut-rate; we can’t really take credit for predicting, say, that the Cubs would win the NL Central, though they undoubtedly will, or that Trea Turner would be NL Rookie of the Year, though he arguably is. Read the rest of this entry »

This won’t take too long. Before the current season, and at various points during the early part of the season, we posited that there is such a thing as a five-inning pitcher. By this, we meant a starting pitcher who can pitch well through five innings, but then usually fouls the nest in the sixth. We further hypothesized that, with the success of the impermeable Kansas City and Pittsburgh bullpens, and the burgeoning population of pitchers who can throw 97 MPH for 20 pitches at a time every couple of days, more and more teams would be constructing bullpens that can take over in the sixth inning and remain nonporous through the ninth. And finally, we surmised that an enlightened and stat-wise new breed of managers would start removing the five-inning pitchers after strong performances through the fifth inning, notwithstanding the pitchers’ desire to stay in the game. This, we concluded, would lend unexpected (by everyone but us and our fortunate readers) value to the aforesaid five-inning pitchers, who would now be unable to sabotage their own victories, and their own ERAs and WHIPs, via sixth inning self-immolation. We found for ourselves, and identified for those same fortunate readers, a bunch of such pitchers whose 2015 (and sometimes early 2016) stats suggested they belonged in this category. And in many instances we acquired these pitchers in our various drafts, auctions, waiver claims, and FAABs. Read the rest of this entry »

Parsifal had his Holy Grail, Ahab had his Moby Dick, Sam the Sham had his Ring Dang Doo. What we’ve got is Cheap Starting Pitchers, for which we search obsessively, frustratedly, and often self-destructively. It appears, though, that a strategy for drafting cheap starting pitchers that we proposed back in the pre-season has some promise, and we’d like to report on it for you. Read the rest of this entry »

This year, as always, we found the run-up to the MLB trading deadline absorbing and diverting. And this year, yet again, we were struck by the unexploited entertainment potential of the event. Everyone knows that there’s a market for the manufactured drama of big-league sports transactions. We inhabit a world in which 3 million Americans watch the NBA draft, and another 3 million—actually, it’s probably the same 3 million—are willing to sit in front their TV or computer screens on a Saturday afternoon and watch NFL teams make their 5th-round draft choices.

You couldn’t make the MLB draft similarly compelling, of course. NBA and NFL draftees go directly to the teams that select them. They’ll be playing, and often starting, for those teams a few months later. MLB draftees serve (usually years-long) minor-league apprenticeships. This absence of immediate consequences makes the baseball draft dicier as a viewing spectacle.

Not so the last week of July for MLB. Practically every deal that gets done has, and is intended to have, an immediate effect. The Cubs and Rangers double down. The Yankees and (it appears) the Royals muck their hands. As it stands, the process unfolds glacially, and we ourselves kind of like it that way. But we guarantee you that there are handsomely-compensated consultants brooding as we write about how that gradual unfolding can be turned into a one-day extravaganza. Read the rest of this entry »

We go way back with Jose Urena. We drafted him in January 2015 for the very first team we co-owned. Undaunted by his disappointing performance as a reliever at the start of that season, we rhapsodized about him in May 2015, just before the Marlins re-promoted him and plugged him into their rotation. Further undaunted by his disappointing performance in that role, we effused about him just this past March. And now, still undaunted by his disappointing performance as a reliever in the majors earlier this season, we again wax enthusiastic as he rejoins the Marlins’ starting rotation.

The book on Urena has been well-thumbed, but just in case you haven’t been to the library: 24-year-old Dominican, torrid fastball in both its two-seam and its four-seam variants, indifferent secondary arsenal, good control but misses too few bats for a guy who throws that hard and doesn’t do so great when he throws softer. He’s pitched well, if not always overwhelmingly so, in the minors, but hasn’t (until now—see below) approached seven strikeouts per nine innings since rookie ball in 2010. When he got demoted to triple-A the end of May this season, his career MLB record stood at 2 Wins, 6 Losses, a 5.82 ERA, and 4.39 K/9. Read the rest of this entry »

Redraft leagues that permit trading take you places you wouldn’t otherwise go, although the same can be said of kidnappers. In a no-trading league, wherever Clayton Kershaw or Paul Goldschmidt or any high- or mid-priced player is at the end of the draft, that’s where he’ll be at the end of the season. In a league that permits trading, though, if you’re the Kershaw owner, you will be fending off suitors like a romance-novel heroine. You might be offered, say, Danny Salazar and Carlos Rodon—to take two names that, as you’ll see, aren’t chosen at random–for Kershaw, and you’re going to have to do some spadework to figure out if the deal might be worth your while.

We ourselves, as we’ve mentioned, play in just one trading league. That would be the Bluefish Blitz league, in which trading is not just permitted but encouraged, and not just encouraged but virtually compelled. We have survived our own pluperfect stupidity in this league—we’ll tell you at the end of this installment about the dumbest thing we did—and, rising on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things, have assembled a roster that, when you squint hard at it, appears to be marginally competitive. And now, having spent more waking hours in the past month devising, contemplating, proposing, and receiving trade offers than we have on personal hygiene, we’ve reached the conclusion that we’re one good starting pitcher away from actual contention. Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t play in keeper leagues, for various good reasons, but right now, we’re kind of regretting that we don’t. As we look over our portfolio of leagues during the mid-season lull, we see a couple in which we’re doing quite well, and a couple more in which we are in contention to be in contention. But in one league—and of course it’s the one that cost us more to enter than all the others combined—we are hopeless. That would be our entry in the NFBC Auction Championship, in which we stand 12th of 15 in our league and 125th of 165 overall. Both of these, distressingly, constitute our high water marks in that league so far this season.

We won’t bother with a full post-mortem now. All you need to know is that we are fifth from the bottom overall in pitching, and all you need to know about that is that we’re midpack in saves, signifying that we are incapable of identifying good mid-priced and low-priced starters. If you want to visit the morgue and conduct an autopsy, go here. We got to wondering, though: if this were a keeper league, whom would we try to trade for? For at least some of you, this isn’t the moot question it is for us. Read the rest of this entry »

We—presumably like the Detroit Tigers, perhaps even at this very moment—have been brooding over what to do with and about Shane Greene. For the Tigers, this is one aspect of the broad and compelling question of what to do with and about their 2016 season, which is now in grave jeopardy. Over the past week, they’ve suffered the following indignities: (1) the rehabilitation, from a fractured elbow, of their fine hitter J.D. Martinez is proceeding only glacially, so they have to figure he’ll be out for another month; (2) Jordan Zimmermann, probably their best starting pitcher, went on the DL with a neck strain, which may or may not be the reason he had serious trouble getting outs during the preceding six weeks; and (3) Daniel Norris, a starting pitcher on whom they were counting, suffered an oblique strain and likewise went on the DL. The Tigers, according to Rotoworld, are “confident” that Norris will be back in two weeks, but that strikes us as magical thinking. The over-under, we think, is about a month.

Steven Moya should be an adequate or better substitute for Martinez, and the Tigers’ hitting is otherwise fine. But what’s the deal with their starting rotation? For one thing, they are fortunate that Michael Fulmer, in the first 12 starts of his career, has pitched even better than you’d have expected their top prospect to. Justin Verlander is the useful 3rd starter he’s been since he turned 30, though not the ace he was before that. The Tigers seem committed to Mike Pelfrey, to whom they gave a 2-year contract last winter. Pelfrey is a storied innings-eater, though it would be more accurate to say that the innings eat him. He’s got positive value if he keeps his ERA at about 4; at the moment, it’s 4.78, and his FIP is even worse. They’ve got to hope that Zimmermann comes back strong, though if he’s got an ETA no one’s told us about it.

Beyond that, there’s chaos. So depending on how you calculate it and the sunniness of your disposition, the Tigers, in the short and possibly the long term, need two and perhaps three starters. There’s of course always the chance of a trade—the farm system is thin, but not as thin as it was until recently, and there are a couple of good, very young hitters who could be attractive to a team that’s going nowhere. But meanwhile, let’s review the Tigers’ in-house options: Read the rest of this entry »

We’re the guys who spurned a late-April trade offer for Drew Smyly, he of the 7-plus ERA over his last ten starts. So of course you want to listen to us when we suggest selling high on a starting pitcher, especially one who’s leading the AL in ERA and Quality Starts. Nonetheless, that’s how we see things with Steven Wright.

You probably know Wright’s story. He was on the road to being a career minor leaguer when, 1n 2011, he had a Pauline conversion to the cult of the knuckleball, made it to the majors at 28 in 2013, found his way into the Red Sox starting rotation last season, and pitched pretty well until suffering a concussion after being hit in the head by a fly ball during the other team’s batting practice—a first, as far as we know. This season, he’s been channeling the 2012-model R.A. Dickey: 2.12 ERA, 8 wins, and 12 Quality Starts in 15 overall. Plus, because he’s a knuckleballer, he’s not doing those horrible things to his arm and shoulder that regular pitchers do, and can last deeper into games (almost 7 innings per start) than other guys. Read the rest of this entry »