Wins is the flukiest stat in fantasy baseball, and that is particularly irksome for starting pitchers since, without saves, they only have four categories to earn roto value. Over a couple of months, artificially high and low win totals can obscure the realities of pitcher performances and reasonable expectations for their rest-of-season fantasy production.
Plate discipline is an unheralded casualty of this new era of depressed offense. There have been 19 players with a .15-to-1 walk-to-strikeout rate or worse in a qualified season since the end of the dead ball era in 1920, and there are 11 players on that pace so far this season. Increasingly, that leaves fantasy owners stuck with sub-.300 on base players and their correspondingly low batting averages and runs totals in even moderately deep formats.
As sample-size conscious baseball fans, we are slow to trust early-season numbers. That caution is appropriate, but sometimes I wonder whether we are too attached to the idea of a separation between seasons to recognize when solid starts to the season are really just a continuation of an improved level of play that was established the previous season.
Fortunately, FanGraphs leaderboards have a really cool Past 1 Calendar Years split. In perusing those leaderboards of both hitters and pitchers, these are the names that stood out to me as players I may have been underrating.
The Milwaukee Brewers are the surprise team of the first month of the season. After an 88-loss season a year ago, they currently lead baseball with a 20-8 record, which includes a 5.5 game lead over the reigning NL champion Cardinals for first place in the Central division.
The team success may have come as a surprise to many, but fantasy owners were optimistic about the production of several Brewers before the season, especially in the outfield. Perennial fantasy first-rounder Ryan Braun was back from his suspension, and concerns over the effects of his banned substance use were not enough to push him out of the top two rounds in most drafts. Early returns had rewarded the owners that invested in him in spite of his persistent thumb problems, but an oblique strain has his return on hold for the time being.
It is with the permission and endorsement of the founder of the Corey Kluber Society, Carson Cistulli, that I urge you to buy low on Corey Kluber. Right now. He is scheduled to pitch this Saturday at home versus the Blue Jays, a neutral offense based on wRC+ so far this season. With only three starts to date, any solid start could have a dramatic impact on his 5.40 ERA. I think it will start with this one.
Josh Rutledge was a compelling sleeper entering 2013 after his 23-year old rookie season in which he put up a 93 wRC+ with a flash of both power and speed as a middle infielder. Unfortunately, Rutledge fell two points shy of a .300 OBP over the first month and a half of the 2013 season and was optioned to AAA. He made two return trips to the majors later in the season, but he never recaptured his fantasy success from the year before.
His replacement, D.J. LeMahieu, is not exactly Barry Bonds. LeMahieu carried a .311 OBP and a 70 wRC+ over 434 plate appearances last season, but the Rockies are clearly satisfied with him since he once again made the team at Rutledge’s expense this season.
There is a lot of data in baseball. Last season, there were 184,872 plate appearances. Each one of those plate appearances was made up of as many as 16 pitches. Add to that everything that happens once a ball is put in play, from batted ball speeds and locations to baserunner and fielder movements, and all the different splits you can dream up of seasonal data. It can quickly overwhelm. That is why databases are critical for rigorous research, especially if you want to study trends across multiple seasons or even decades.
But sometimes, a spreadsheet is enough. Perhaps you lack the SQL expertise to quickly solve a problem that you could solve quickly in Excel. Perhaps you lack the access (wink wink) to a database of baseball statistics, and it simply isn’t worth your time to create that infrastructure when there are ready alternatives. Whatever the case, the reality is that modern spreadsheets provide the tools you need to do some sophisticated number-crunching as long as performance is not the bottleneck of the task at hand. And as long as you’re willing to get a bit creative with the built-in functions.
1. Jason Heyward will be the No. 1 overall player in 5×5 leagues with OBP instead of AVG; he will hit .295/.415/.540 with 30 home runs, 110 runs, 70 RBI, and 25 steals.
In 2012, Jason Heyward spent about half of his plate appearances in the third spot in the batting order and the other half in the four-to-seven range. A full-time move to the leadoff spot could add another 50 or more plate appearances over a full season. Of course, full season is the critical phrase. Heyward really has just one full season to his credit, in 2012. That year, he reached 651 plate appearances. Add the 50 and round to 700. For his career, Heyward has a .259/.352/.443 triple slash with 24 home runs, 95 runs, 75 RBI, and 14 steals per 700 plate appearances. As the leadoff man, those numbers should skew away from RBI and toward runs, but they are equally valuable in roto. Heyward has increased his line drive rate each of the last two seasons, from 13.1 percent in 2011 to 19.3 percent in 2012 and 21.4 percent last season. If that trend continues, his BABIP should jump 40-plus points from the .281 he had last year and carry his average to near .300. Meanwhile, most of the Braves’ lineup suffered down years in 2013. If even half recover and Heyward plays a full season, his counting stats should soar. He’s still impossibly young at 24, but I think this is the season he enters his prime and becomes a perennial MVP candidate.
One of the most interesting trends of the offseason has been the investment analytical teams like the Athletics and Rays have made in their bullpens. With the Rays, specifically, a pair of trades and a free agent signing have added two relievers with experience closing games to a bullpen that already boasted more than 100 career saves. Together, they should form one the most dominant bullpens in all of baseball with several attractive options for deeper fantasy leagues.
The Rays landed a likely bargain in Grant Balfour for two years and $12 million thanks to his failed physical with the Orioles. It is difficult to be overly concerned with his health status given that Orioles seem to have had more failed physicals than actual signings this offseason. The real reason owners should be pessimistic of Balfour is the handful of excellent arms behind him that boast numbers as good as he has in their careers, if for fewer seasons. In fact, Balfour is one of four Rays relievers to have struck out at least a batter per inning in his career.
Coming off a 99-loss season, the White Sox made a pair of tremendous moves to add youth to their lineup. First, they traded reliever-turned-starter Hector Santiago to the Angels in a three-team deal that netted them Diamondbacks’ center fielder Adam Eaton. Next, they sent closer Addison Reed to the Diamondbacks for third base prospect Matt Davidson, who could easily become their Opening Day starter at the hot corner.
Turning relievers into pre-arbitration assets is Rebuilding 101 and seems especially likely to pay dividends for the White Sox, who have enjoyed a lot of success in building their pitching staff through their farm system in recent years. However, it does create some uncertainty in their bullpen, where a new closer will have the chance to replace Reed and his 40 saves.