10/18/17

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER18!

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• AL LCS Review
• NL LCS Review

Strategy Section

• Jason’s Lessons from ‘17

Events

• Baseball HQ’s First Pitch Forum at Arizona Fall League

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10/13/17

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER18!

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• AL LCS Preview
• NL LCS Preview

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10/12/17

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER18!

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It’s Mr. Solo Dolo! Just me (Paul) on this one and I run down the first three tiers of my October SP Rankings. I didn’t timeline it because it’s a bit free-flowing, but it’s also 10 minutes from Game 5 of the NLDS. It’s probably more of the latter, but I hope you’ll forgive me.

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Well, this is the earliest I’ve ever done SP rankings so let’s see how this goes! With the regular season wrapped, I figured it was worth putting my initial list together if only to see how it changes over the fall and winter leading into next March’s draft season. Heck, I’ve already done a mock draft hosted by the InThisLeague guys, which you can check out here and I’ll be on the clock for my annual NFBC draft at the BaseballHQ First Pitch Forum in a few short weeks so having an idea of the pitching pool will be very useful.

As usual, I went with tiers, but since we’re not in-season I simply numbered them instead of naming them. I think it really gets tough to differentiate sharply on guys in the middle of the pitcher pool. Trevor Bauer finished 36th on the Player Rater this year while Dinelson Lamet was 83rd, but are they really that far apart in talent? Maybe the point to make is that once you get to about 40 in the rankings, the separation with each ranking is a lot smaller than if you were comparing say #5 to #55.

Anyway, let’s get to the list. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Was there anyone not in the top 111 that you really think has to be in there?

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10/04/17

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER18!

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• AL WC Review
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Time for the final review of Bold Predictions. I checked in on them back in mid-July and unfortunately, things didn’t get much better for me!

James Paxton Is A Top-15 Arm.

In the end, the injury sank this one as Paxton wound up with just 24 starts. However, he posted a 2.98 ERA and 1.10 WHIP in the 136 IP and still slotted 18th on ESPN’s Player Rater among SP. It’s a loss by the letter of the law as he’s not a top-15 arm at season’s end, but even with the sub-150 IP output, I can’t imagine anyone feels like they lost out by taking Paxton. I’m going to take half-credit on this one if that’s OK.

0.5 for 1 (.500)

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9/28/17

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER18!

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• How our seasons have gone

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Even as someone fortunate enough to have following baseball as my livelihood, I miss things. At any moment, there are 750 active major leaguers across the 30 teams and of course, there are 100s of moves of each year moving guys up and down from the minors as well as on and off the disabled list. In short, it’s a lot. It’s awesome, but it’s a lot. I picked some of my favorite seasons with at least 200 plate appearances, but also fewer than 400.

That’s the sweet spot where you can get overlooked unless you go all Matt Olson on the league. Rhys Hoskins will be among those small sample studs in the sweet spot after six more plate appearances. Neither of them made the list because they were so good that even in a small sample, they had a huge impact that simply couldn’t be ignored.

Austin Barnes, C, LAD | .284/.406/.481, 8 HR, 4 SB, 36 RBI, 32 R in 251 PA

The Dodgers backup catcher has impressed enough with the bat to draw some time at 2B. He played seven games there last year and even a game in 2015, but this year it jumped to 19 games, including four starts. He was drafted as a C2 in NL-only leagues, if at all, and he’s wound being a legitimate C2 across all formats. He’s been consistent all year, too, so even if you jumped on late, you benefitted.

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September is always an interesting month as baseball inexplicably changes its rules entirely with roster expansion up to 40 players. The month will often yield some big offensive outputs that get overlooked for fear that they were achieved against less-than-stellar competition. While I’ll grant that there are pitchers who wouldn’t normally be in the majors in rotations and bullpens, rarely do I think a guy puts an entire month of numbers against such inferior competition. Today I’m looking at a handful of rookies who’ve made some noise in September and should be firmly on your radar for 2018:

Matt Olson | Athletics

Unfortunately, we know that Olson’s season is done after a Grade 2 hamstring strain suffered on Sunday, but it was a tremendous 59-game run for the 23-year old 1B. He clocked 24 HR in just 49 hits, yielding an obscene 66 HR full season pace. Of course, that’s why we don’t take small samples and extrapolate them out. That said, he totaled 47 HR between the majors and minors so a 30-HR full season in 2018 isn’t at all out of bounds.

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