Good morning! Sorry I missed you all this weekend, so let’s get caught up on what went down. I won’t cover every save this weekend, but just the situations worth monitoring moving forward since there were a lot of saves.
Things have been tough for Trevor Rosenthal lately, to put it nicely. Tonight’s game certainly did not help the Cardinals confidence in him, as he blew a two-run lead in the 9th. Rosenthal didn’t retire a batter after giving up a lead-off double, a walk, and then a walk-off three run homer by Adam Lind to seal the deal. Rosenthal has blown four of his last seven opportunities, and has not thrown a clean full inning since June 9th. His ERA is now up to 5.63 after this latest appearance. For more on Rosenthal’s struggles, check out this article by Paul Swydan. Regarding the current situation in St. Louis, nothing has been said whether or not he will lose the closer role just yet, but if I owned him, I would be prepared for a change coming up soon.
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This week I wanted to take a look at the three top 1B prospects in AAA. I am not suggesting that these players will definitely get called up this season, but these are players I wanted to look at further either because of performance or because of opportunity. The player may not have a direct path right now, but could be moved creating that necessary path. The player may not be called up this season, but may provide value in those deep keeper leagues where minor leaguers hold value and could be an asset next season. Note that this article was written Thursday morning, so some of the stats may be off by a day.
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I currently work in education and one of the subjects I used to teach was fifth-grade social studies. Something I would work on with my students is spectrum thinking. The idea behind this is that there are multiple perspectives when it comes to historical events. Instead of simply telling my students an event from one singular perspective, I tried to provide for them the multiple perspectives in the hopes they could draw their own conclusions about why certain events occurred and which positions were more justified. Admittedly, this was not always effective with all my fifth-graders as some of my students were not developmentally ready for this type of critical thinking. I imagine this would be more effective at a high school level.
The point of bringing this up is not to reminisce about my days as a teacher. In history, things are rarely black or white: there is a lot of gray. When evaluating players, the same can be true. Even when we are right about our predictions, this doesn’t mean that the prediction had an absolute certainty of happening or not happening. There are probabilities for certain things happening and nobody is 100% correct when making their pre-evaluations. I imagine this is not a new concept to those reading this. And even if it is, hopefully you will learn something new from this perspective.
Today, I am going to look at two first basemen who may become relevant depending on how deep your league is. It would be easy for me to dismiss their recent performances, which would make the point of this article pretty useless. I am going to attempt to go through some spectrum thinking by looking at the highs and lows of both hitters. More likely than not, I won’t be able to make any concrete conclusions, but you will hopefully be able to gain some additional perspectives on what values these players could potentially provide. Read the rest of this entry »
I was mistaken yesterday in thinking this version of the Bullpen Report would come out early the next morning. Sorry if this caused any confusion, but this is good news for those night owls who will get the BR earlier than expected. Read the rest of this entry »
Good morning! Coming at you from a different time after a late slate of games, and the same may be true for the 14th. Apologies to all the night owls, who may just need to pull a couple of all-nighters. Ok, onto the report.
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Yesterday I had mentioned that the Rockies had not announced a closer. Well, that was wrong as Weiss named Carlos Estevez as their closer while McGee is out. This came after Estevez recorded his first save and Weiss had said earlier that Estevez would be sharing duties with Jason Motte. Must have been nice for Estevez owners to hear their guy would get most of the saves, right? That was until Boone Logan got the one out save today, after Motte started the 9th off retiring the first two batters. He then walked his third hitter, and then Weiss called on Logan to get the last out as he earned his first save of the season. This wasn’t a case of Weiss going against his word. Instead, Estevez was due some rest after throwing 28 pitches on Friday and closing out last night’s game despite Weiss saying he wanted to avoid that. This was just a normal day of rest for Estevez, and he should be getting the rest of the save opportunities. I left it at Yellow because it is a Colorado pitcher and I don’t think the Rockies will hesitate to pull him if he began to struggle in the 9th.
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As if the Reds bullpen wasn’t frustrating enough, they elected to use their closer Tony Cingrani in the 8th to match-up with Oakland’s 2-3-4 hitters, instead of saving him for the 9th. He did his job and earned his 7th hold of the year, paving the way for Ross Ohlendorf to earn his first save of the season. Ohlendorf made it slightly interesting giving up 2 hits, but managed to strike out Billy Butler with two on to close it out. Save opportunities are few and far between for the Reds, and the usage shown today makes this situation one I will continue to avoid with the exception of the deepest of leagues. Read the rest of this entry »
I understand that BABIP data is not necessarily complete data. However, I do think there is some value in looking at what players’ BABIP looks like relative to their careers. For this article, I just explored qualified 1B according to Fangraphs data and took out rookies (think: Byung Ho Park) since we don’t have past data to compare it to. Again, this data should not significantly alter your fantasy plans, but is worth considering when looking to buy or sell the MLB qualified first basemen.
For this table, I simply subtracted Career BABIP from the players’ 2016 BABIP. I could’ve included more players, but I wanted to start small instead of filtering out every single player with 1B eligibility regardless of sample size. A positive difference means that a player is outperforming their BABIP, whereas a negative difference means the opposite where a player is underperforming their career BABIP. Here is what the table looks like:
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Well, the Houston situation just got interesting. A.J. Hinch said they will are going to use multiple guys to close games. In other words, they are going to use fantasy players favorite term and have committee closers. This is the day after Luke Gregerson blew his fifth save of the season giving up a game-tying homer to Jed Lowrie. In today’s game, Will Harris was given the save opportunity and pitched a clean ninth tallying one strikeout. Gregerson’s K’s are in line with his career norms, but his walks are up and his ERA sits at 4.56, which is a career high. There is still hope he can earn the role back as his FIP is 3.16, which is higher than his career FIP (2.99), but not by much. Though he has struggled pretty mightily in May, so taking this weight off his shoulders may help him right the ship. Harris has been absurd this year posting a 0.34 ERA (1.40 FIP) with improvements in his K% and BB% from last year and his career. Ken Giles may have been called on to close the 9th tonight, but he pitched two scoreless innings last night so he was due the night off. Hinch has indicated that he will use all three guys, and will even throw Michael Feliz into the mix as well.
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