The most amazing thing about Todd Frazier’s breakout season is how little his basic statistical profile changed. He was still the same old Todd Frazier, but better this time. Good enough to be the second-best third baseman in 5×5 fantasy baseball in 2014.
You can’t choose your last name. Otherwise, we might have to quibble with Neil Walker’s choice, considering his career walk rate is below league average. His impatience doesn’t come with a poor knowledge of the strike zone, however, and that’s probably what helped fuel a semi-breakout season at 29 years old, despite a four-year low in walk rate.
Miguel Cabrera was the third-best first baseman this year by our end-of-year evaluations, but his owners paid first-best fantasy player prices. Take a look at his isolated power — the main missing component this year — over his career, and last year actually looks familiar. Has Cabrera returned to being the player he was earlier in his career?
The verb in the headline is a person. But once a person has broken out like Devin Mesoraco has this year, the first instinct is to look for lightning to strike again in the same fashion. Given the season Grandal just had — 15th-best in the end-of-season rankings — maybe he’s even further along than Devin Mesoraco once was. Maybe it’s still fair to wonder if he can Devin Mesoraco.
The Astros apparently listened to their analytics team when they acquired Collin McHugh. You see, McHugh’s spin rate on his curveball is exceptional. Maybe it’s not quite that cut and dry, we’ve talked about his move to the four-seamer over the two-seamer was great for him. But read this newest snippet on McHugh and you’ll see that spin rate was huge for his acquisition:
The Astros’ analysts noticed that McHugh had a world-class curveball. Most curves spin at about 1,500 times per minute; McHugh’s spins 2,000 times. The more spin, the more the ball moves during the pitch—and the more likely batters are to miss it. Houston snapped him up. “We identified him as someone whose surface statistics might not indicate his true value,” says David Stearns, the team’s 29-year-old assistant general manager.
It was a decent season. Won 25% of my leagues. Placed in the top third in 58%, bottom third in 17%. When you’ve got 12 leagues, mostly with sharps, it’s tough to expect much more than this, but I do. Especially since all my pitching staffs were so good. Gotta be better with hitting.
And you’ll see that I might have gotten over-exuberant with my hitting predictions. With the run environment tanking every year, maybe it’s all about safe plays (if they exist) in the lineup. Which is tough on me because I love upside.
So let’s look at the tale of the tape. How did I do on my bold predictions? I have a feeling I’m going to get a sixer of good adult soda from Jay Long of Razzball…
My 12 leagues are coming to an end, and I’m scrambling in the leagues where scrambling makes sense. And so, as a selfish and lazy person, I will just scan the probables for Tuesday and discuss the names of the starting pitchers that we know less about.
Hey, it might be selfish and lazy, but it should be useful for us both.
Power turns outs into hits, hits into RBIs, and fly balls into home runs. You have to draft for power, or you’ll find yourself behind in way too many categories. So hopefully you have some power on your squad and don’t necessarily need to stream for it now.
But lets say you find yourself up against a team with lots of speed. If you wanted to punt stolen bases, you might be able to drop a speedster or a bench piece for power in the late going. Let’s look at the end of the week and see if we can identify a few flawed (available) sluggers in nice parks with the platoon advantage.
We’ve got streaming for steals. We’ve got your streaming two-starters sussed twice over. Tomorrow, I’ll look at some late week streaming for power options.
But today, I’m going to look at ahead at mid-week starters that deserve your attention. You may need to pick them up early, or at least identify them for quick waiver work. Because now is the time for all hands on deck — no more waiting for a bounce-back or a could be or even a should be. If you’re still in it, look at all your roto categories or every position on your head to head bench and ask yourself “What have you done for me lately?”
If you use large samples and go looking for pitchers with many different plus pitches by whiff type that aren’t yet fully appreciated by the masses, you’ll get guys that we’ve been talking about all year here: Carlos Carrasco, Garrett Richards, Homer Bailey, Jake Arrieta, and Marcus Stroman, to name a few.
But if you relax the samples a bit — in this case down to thirty pitches thrown per category — you get some names that might be interesting to dynasty leaguers looking to the future, or deep leaguers looking for a sneaky late-season play. Or even mixed leaguers looking for names to stash for next year.
So here are a few interesting pitchers that have at three non-fastball pitches that qualify as ‘good’ by the benchmarks set by Jeff Zimmerman and I.