You can follow along as we mock, but you’ll see us highlighting specific picks and rounds over the next couple of weeks too. Multiple times in the draft, I found that there were back-to-back outfield picks that were interesting. Matt Kemp and George Springer. Michael Brantley and Justin Upton. Yasiel Puig and Carlos Gomez.

In the third round, after picking up Miguel Cabrera and Anthony Rizzo with my first two picks, I found myself in just such a predicament. I wanted an outfielder, and Michael Brantley and Ryan Braun were clearly the best of the remaining. Given their respective ages, histories, name values, and draft positions, I found that juxtaposition interesting and worth investigating.

Would you rather have Brantley or Braun?

Full disclosure. I have not yet done my own rankings, since I’m deep into editing FanGraphs Plus, so I’m winging this mock. Once I investigate, I may decide I made the wrong decision. So it goes.

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Based on stuff, there are very few starting pitchers that can hang with Gerrit Cole. 96 mph heat, plus three other pitches that rate well by peripherals — it’s very fun to watch. But look at the numbers at the end of the year, and the overall results are less whelming. With a team that has very defined (and so far, successful) ideas about pitching, is it possible The Pirates’ Way has sunk Cole’s fantasy value?

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In many different ways, Jon Niese is average. But when it comes to fantasy, average is not very attractive. Elite needs to be valued more highly. This sort of realization has repercussions for leagues of any sort and size.

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I traded for Allen Webster and I’m not sure you should too. You see, I traded for Webster in a 20-team 28-keeper league, and he’s immediately my last keeper. Even if he’s the best last keeper, he’s probably no better than 540th. On the other hand, I spent a real-life asset to get him, so, yeah, I’m going to own some Allen Webster shares.

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You’ve heard me yammering about pitch-type peripherals for two years now, and we’ve made some advancements along the way. We established some good pitch-type peripheral benchmarks, and we took a first look at properly weighting each pitch. We’ve started to get a sense of how these things interact when it comes to the shape and speed of pitches. We’re making progress.

It’s worth stepping back and figuring out what the aim is at this point. Because we aren’t trying to rank the best starting pitchers overall, really. We’re trying to find undervalued pitchers before the market realizes that they’re good. So we have to move in the smallest possible samples. And we want to have a list of great pitchers that has some weird names on it as well. Those names, we hope, will soon start to make sense.

So, to that end, I’ve taken each pitch type and looked at only those pitchers that have thrown 100+ in each of those types. I’ve summed the ground-ball and swinging strike rates for each pitch, and then found the standard deviations. I’ve given each pitcher a z-score for his ground-ball rate and swinging strike rate on each pitch type. Then I’ve summed the z-scores for each pitch type, and then for each pitcher.

What we should be looking at is an Arsenal Score. With this way of looking at things, it’s possible to have one dominating pitch and still score well. Or a group of lesser pitches that are all positive.

What we haven’t done yet is nail down what the smallest sample for each pitch is. Or how to weight the pitches. Or how to weight the whiffs versus the grounders. So this may look different once we weight each pitch differently, and if we find a way to weight grounders and whiffs more correctly.

But at least we have a first attempt at it here.

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First you establish that Jake Arrieta and Collin McHugh both soared to new heights due to throwing their breaking balls much more than they ever had before. Then you worry about their elbows.

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So many things happened. Everyone was traded. Everyone was released. And everyone was signed. It’ll fuel RotoGraphs pieces for weeks to come. You’ll see more in-depth pieces on these guys. But, with the dust settled, it seems like a good time to run all through some of the players that changed addresses, and talk a little bit about how they may have changed their fantasy outlooks for the coming season.

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It’s tempting to say Brandon Moss will be about the same in his new digs. Without delving too deep, it looks like the slugger goes from a good lineup in one pitcher’s park to a good lineup in another. But there are plenty of reasons to like Moss more today than yesterday. He’s an Indian now.

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Only seven starters had changeups with better whiff rates than Chase Anderson in 2014. That’s enough to put him on my radar in the coming year. But how excited we should actually be about him depends on more than just that one fact.

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We’ve already spent some time with Tanner Roark’s breakout season and it’s mostly about that two-seamer and getting strike one if you ask him. Let’s focus on those things first.

The bad news first. First strike rate isn’t super sticky year-to-year. The correlation is .479 year-to-year, meaning that this year’s first strike rate describes 23% of the variance in next year’s first strike rate. That’s as weak as the year-to-year relationship of home runs per nine innings, or a little bit less than half as strongly correlated as strikeout rate.

Roark may have been above-average in that regard for two years, but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily going to manage the feat again next year. If you throw 70% strikes on the first pitch, maybe batters start swinging more at the first pitch and then maybe you start throwing fewer first pitch strikes. However it works, this isn’t a skill we can bank on in a 200-inning sample.

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