Author Archive: Paul Sporer

Episode 243

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

I ACCIDENTALLY LIED AT THE END OF THE EPISODE AND SAID JASON & I WOULD BE BACK SUNDAY, WE’RE ACTUALLY OFF THIS WEEK. THE NEXT EPSIODE WILL BE TUESDAY’S EDITION.

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris discuss the news for Jose Altuve, Cole Hamels, Wil Myers, and Fernando Rodney. We finish with another edition of Hype or Hold covering some high-expectation pitchers who haven’t quite lived up to the billing yet.

Eno on the CLE rotation

Eno on Bad Fastballs

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Pitching has been kind of weird this year. We are still definitely in a pitcher’s era. There has been a slight decline in strikeout rate for starters from 19.4% to 19.2%, but it’s still historically high. Meanwhile, starter walk rate across the league has held at 7%. ERA is back up over 4.00 (just slightly at 4.03) after last year’s 3.82 mark, something the league hasn’t come close to since 1992’s mark of 3.85 for starters.

The overwhelming pitching depth from recent years finally started to change the valuations in the fantasy game and now the collective fantasy world is feeling kind of burned. After all, there are only 25 pitchers with a sub-3.00 ERA (at least 50 IP). We had 33 such pitchers through this point last year. A total of 77 were at 4.00 or better at this time last year, a figure that is down to 68 so far this year.

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Episode 242

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris discuss the news for Kyle Schwarber, Trevor Rosenthal, Delino DeShields. Then Eno gives his thoughts on Byron Buxton. We finish with a little game of sorts called Hype or Hold covering some high-expectation guys who haven’t quite lived up to the billing yet.

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As Charlie Morton embraced his two-seam fastball and turned into a severe groundball pitcher, he has become a solid, but underrated fantasy asset. In 2013-14, Morton put up a 3.52 ERA and 1.28 WHIP in 273.3 innings of work for the Pirates. He began the season on the DL recovering from hip surgery. It was his eighth trip to the DL in eight seasons, including five in the last three. Health will always be a concern with Morton, but his talent deserves attention.

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Episode 241

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Jason Collette discuss the injury news for Corey Dickerson, Martin Prado, Lance Lynn, Aaron Sanchez, and Bryce Harper then dive into the call-ups: Byron Buxton, Francisco Lindor, Domonic Brown, Allen Webster, and Steve Cishek before closing with around the league chatter.

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Episode 240

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris start off with injury news about Andrew Miller, Ryan Zimmerman, Miguel Gonzalez, and Zack Cozart. For player performances, they talk about some deeper league guys in Kyle Gibson, Chris Coghlan, Stephen Drew, and Chris Heston before finishing up with some call-ups: Mason Williams, Jorge Polanco, Kyle Kubitza, and Taylor Jungmann.

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We’re nearing mid-June and you’re languishing in eighth place. Your sleepers  have not panned out as a group and you were dealt some tough injuries in April. What? Now Andrew Miller is headed to the DL, too? That’s OK, he was your backup plan to Dellin Betances in the first place so you still have an elite closer in Betances since you drafted both guys. But that offense… whattya gonna do about that offense?

Sitting near the bottom of the standings around this time of the year can feel hopeless. I mean, being 38 points out of first place feels insurmountable. After all, we’re definitely no longer at the “start” of the season and we are no longer seeing 20-point shifts by teams in the standings on a daily basis. And yet there is still a ton of time left in the season. Even enough to overcome a 38-point deficit. Of course, if you find yourself behind this 8-ball (or 38-ball, amirite?), standing pat probably isn’t the move.

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If you followed the unveiling of our positional rankings updates then you probably have a good idea of how I feel about the NL pitching landscape, but a straight ranking of all starting pitchers is a little different than tiering the arms in one specific league. We’ve also gotten five or six more days of information since releasing those rankings. In short, I’ve made some changes. Nothing sweeping, just a few moves here and there in comparison to last week’s rankings. If you want to see how things compare to the previous months, they can be found here:

• March/April
• May

As in May, I’ve got 10 tiers, but I’ve bumped the total number of pitchers from 70 to 72. There are 75 guys in rotations at any point in the NL, but they aren’t all rank-worthy and in fact, this isn’t even 72 of the 75 as some of these guys are on the shelf or still in the minors. For the naming of the tiers, I’m choosing 10 of my favorite TV shows right now. They’re all funny, witty, smart shows, at least in my estimation. If you haven’t seen one of them, you should check it out. The shows used for each tier aren’t really related to the pitchers in the tier, but there were some happy accidents after I ranked the shows 1-10.

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Episode 239

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris look at Carlos Correa’s debut so Eno get a chance to give us his thoughts, they also discuss the less-heralded of the two Astros call-ups in Vincent Velasquez. They end the news segment discussing Rafael Soriano and Matt Holliday before getting into the performance discussion surrounding Chris Sale, Erasmo Ramirez, Andre Ethier, Joe Panik, and Chris Colabello.

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We did it! We made it all the way around the diamond. We’re finishing, fittingly, with our closers and middle relievers and for that we brought the Bullpen Report crew aboard. Alan, Darren, Colin, and Benjamin join myself to tackle the bullpens. Here are the other positions and you can also access them via the Positional Rankings in the right sidebar:

• Catchers
• First Basemen
• Second Basemen
• Shortstops
• Third Baseman
• Outfielders
• Starting Pitchers

If a ranker didn’t rank someone that one of the others did, he was given a +1 of their last rank as I’m sure you noticed in the other positions.

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