It’s time for me to wave the white flag on this year in Scoresheet. At 27-42, I’m only nine games out of first in my division, but I’m in last. As in dead last in King Kaufman’s AL-Skeeter 12-team AL-only Scoresheet league in the inaugral year. A couple of injuries lasted longer than I thought they would, and I’m not sure I understood how much depth is needed going into the season. In any case, I’m willing to jettison non-keepers to improve my position for next year. Inauspicious beginnings, but there are some things to like about this team still.

Perhaps you can help me identify the best non-keepers. It’s my firm belief that a fire sale should come with a white flag waive — I did that by trading Derek Lowe for a 21st-rounder next year — and then a quick strike with the best tradeable chips leaving first. We keep 13 veterans and as many prospects and/or rookies as we like (rookie is defined as anyone under the rookie eligibility 130/50 PA/IP cap).

So who should I be pushing next? Where are my biggest decisions? I’ve put asterisks next to the veteran keepers I’m looking at — I need three of the guys with (*) next to their name. I shopped Napoli some, but the offers were not exciting, so I’m more likely to work around the edges.

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How’s that for a nerdy title. At least you know what you’re going to get. Using slash12’s updated xBABIP formula outlined by Jeff Zimmerman yesterday (with the 2009-2011 constants in place), we can look at players that ‘should’ be showing better BABIPs than they are right now. Since the constants in the formula change a little from year to year, let’s use the list as a general guide to batted ball luck instead of a specific prescription for doom or boon for each player.

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As you get older, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your belt. A danish or three and you might need to reevaluate that notch you’ve worn into your favorite leather strap. As your fantasy team progresses, you might want to keep an eye on your Brandon Belt, too. A home run or three, and you might want to reevaluate that notch he’s worn into your team’s bench.

Certainly, the news is better today than it was even just a week ago. He’s now got three home runs and looks to have a handle on at least three-quarters of the playing time at first base in San Francisco. Especially now that Aubrey Huff Kendrys Morales‘d that Matt Cain celebration, the position is mostly Belt’s to own. He’s always had patience, too, so in OBP leagues — especially those with five outfielder slots — he’s already a boon. But the question still remains: what is his true-talent power level?

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Maybe fans should retort “NoMo LoMo” next time Logan Morrison quips “no homo” on twitter — especially if they’ve been laboring along with the Marlin outfielder on their roster. He’s still owned on 48% of Yahoo rosters, but that number might drop in the coming weeks if we can’t find hope in his statistical line. Let’s give it a shot — even though my Bold Prediction, that Lucas Duda would outshine him in every roto-relevant way, looks like it’ll come true no matter what.

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Right along the fringe of most leagues, there’s a class of mostly-replaceable, mostly-interchangeable, mostly-lefty, definitely-still-useful platoon outfielders. If you only play them when they have the handedness advantage, and act cutthroat about them when you face a roster crunch, you can get the most out of them while reducing your risk. It’s a tried-and-true strategy in most head-to-head leagues on the pitching side, where streaming is ubiquitous. Maybe it makes sense to have a semi-streaming spot on your offense in your tighter, more active leagues — and if that’s the case, it probably makes sense for that player to be a first basemen or outfielder.

Here are some guys in the National League that fit the description of a fantasy-platoon outfielder. Either their complete offensive upside is only above replacement when they have the platoon advantage, or they legitimately seem to have a platoon situation going on. If there are so many of this type in one half of the league, maybe they truly are replaceable in your standard mixed league.

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Well, we can talk beer or real baseball or Lucas Duda if you want.

It’s saves mini-series week here at RotoGraphs! We tried one look into whether or not bad teams provide save opportunities, and then we tried another. We looked at lefty closers. The results seem to indicate that bad teams are almost as good as good teams at providing save opportunities, and managers don’t seem to prefer lefty closers.

But ‘bad teams’ and ‘good teams’ are not all alike. Commenters rightly pointed out that there might certain types of teams that create more save opportunities. How about teams with small run differentials? They seemingly play in more close games which could end in saves. How about teams with good pitching staffs? They might keep the score down and create more save situations. Or even teams with good bullpens. They might be able to keep the score close and hand the ball to the closer more often.

These are all testable questions. So it’s time to run the correlations — this time with teams since 1990, in order to reflect current bullpen usage more accurately. There are still over 600 team-seasons in our sample. SVO stands for Save Opportunities.

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Watching for Sasquatch is less rewarding then betting on a lefty closer, but that isn’t to say that managers don’t prefer righty closers. Ceding the platoon advantage to three-quarters of the league in the ninth inning seems like a bad idea unless you really have something in your lefty.

So how often does the lefty closer happen in baseball? Answer: not as often as it should.

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There were some questions about the best way to see if bad teams earn saves as well as good teams — so here are hopefully some answers.

Should we have used save opportunities as our metric? Better teams should make more save opportunities for our closers, and using opportunities removes the quality of the closer from the equation, right? One problem, before we run the numbers, is that save opportunities exist in the seventh and eighth innings, but the closer is rarely brought into those innings any more. So there will be some save opps that won’t ever turn into saves for our bad team closer… but let’s see what happens:

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