Tyler O’Neill homers on Opening Day. Mike Trout homers on his birthday. And new dads homer what feels like all the time.
So in honor of Father’s Day, I’ll comb through the Fangraphs Transaction Tracker to find a few newly minted pops, check in on how their season has been going, and offer a bit of not at all fatherly advice.
I fought the law and the law won. And that law is the law of starting pitcher attrition. To make up for losing starters to season-ending injuries and the regression monster, turn to IL stashes.
This article won’t be for all of you, or at least the advice won’t be universally applicable. For those of you with limited IL room, or limited IL slots, this may not be as actionable today. But for most of these pitchers, you can likely hold off a few weeks before others in your league are ready to pull the trigger.
But if you do have room to hold onto a player with a little upside, you are unlikely to be outbid in FAAB at this point. That would be the biggest value add of bringing on these pitchers now — not having to outbid opposing managers once more news is out.
I will run through a handful of pitchers worth considering, sticking to blurbs unless a pitcher excites me to the point of digging in a bit deeper. I will focus on players who are rostered in less than half of CBS and Yahoo leagues (sorry Kris Bubic and Logan Henderson).
With all of the preparation that goes into draft season, it’s easy to throw that all out of the window when you come into June and a guy is hitting .180 and has fallen far outside of the top-ranked players in the majors.
This is especially true for managers in 10- and 12-team leagues. In these formats, the quality and depth of the waiver wire is never better than it is in April and into early May.
Contrast that with the struggles and small sample size bloated ERAs and miniscule counting stats, and it is easy to see why so many of us contemplate dropping players we considered ourselves excited to draft just a few weeks before the season.
In this article, I’ll look back at some of the hitters the industry liked heading into this season, noting their current roster rates and player rater values, and why you should consider buying back in while you still can. I’ll start with players who have already demonstrated some value of late and wrap up with blurbs on some names who could be next.
You must be able to see it, Mr. Manager. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Manager? Why? Why do you persist?
Because you choose to. Because sifting through recently discarded hitters is your jam. Because the occasionally interesting platoon bat may just be set up for an interesting occasion.
So, why do we persist? Because we all do. Why play fantasy baseball if not to savor the constant oneupsmanship. Oh yeah, pal o’ mine, you’re going to burn your FAAB on the hot young prospect? So what, I’ve got the entire Rockies lineup in Bing Bong Ballpark in Vegas this weekend.
Beat that.
In this article, I’ll use the Fangraphs Lab Baseball Sim tool to highlight some potential hitters to stream in this weekend’s juiciest matchups. And I’ll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes and the extent of how you can use the Sim tool yourself.
Streaming pitchers is a much cleaner exercise than streaming hitters. And oftentimes, the expected production is relatively more guaranteed. But in an offensive environment where hitting seems to be increasingly hard to find on the wire, then playing hot hands, and even better, trying to predict hot hands, becomes worthwhile.
That’s what I’ll try and do in this article. At the team level, I’ll point you to the teams who are playing the most games this week, the teams playing in the friendliest hitter’s parks. Then, I’ll look more into platoon splits, playing time, and how hot they are heading into the week to try and identify a crop of hitters you should consider streaming. To limit the player pool to hitters who are likely to be available, I’ll only use hitters who are around 50% rostered or less in either Yahoo or CBS leagues.
This is my first attempt at this exercise. I’ll try and provide plenty of information to help you make decisions that apply to your league and team context, from position eligibility to rostership rates.
Please let me know in the comments if there’s other information that’d be helpful, format changes, or any other potential changes!
I know the headline is a little alarmist, but now that I have your attention, I’m here to let you know that not all of these struggles are cause for alarm.
In this article, I’ll take a look at a handful of starting pitchers who struggled to maintain their strong starts to the season, sorting by the biggest ERA increases from April to May amongst those with at least 25 innings pitched. Based on underlying numbers and vibes, I’ll bucket these starters into guys you should look to cut or trade and who to buy or hold.
And remember, try not to worry just because a guy shows up on this list! For the most part, to have a big gap in ERA between any two months, you need to have done pretty well during one of them.
So here we go. Read the rest of this entry »
For most of us, April results are not that much more meaningful than the results we get from our teams during the rest of the season. For those of you who play in Cutline leagues, all the power to ‘ya.
But in practice, April results can have a bit of an outsized impact on fantasy teams. For one, early season-ending injuries are of course more impactful than similar injuries that happen later, since you have more output to backfill.
And April hot starts can sometimes be parlayed into months of strong performance. That Week 1 streamer who turns into one of the stalwarts of your otherwise lackluster rotation or the top prospect who earned a last minute spot in the starting lineup out of Spring Training.
We all know these feel good stories. We all know the other side of that coin, too. The early draft pick who limps through April with an inflated ERA. Or who Tatis’s their way through the first nine weeks of the season without a home run.
In this article, I’ll look at the starting pitchers who have seen the biggest improvements between April and May, keeping things simple by sorting by ERA and K-BB% to trim the fat before getting into meatier analysis on some of the more intriguing arms.
Jeff Zimmerman’s son competed in the State Track Meet this weekend, so he only had time to cover the pitchers while I’ll cover the hitters.
In this article, I am helping Jeff Zimmerman cover the hitters using CBS’s and Yahoo’s ADD/DROP rates. Both sites have the option for daily and weekly waiver wire adds. CBS uses a weekly change while Yahoo looks at the last 24 hours. Yahoo is a great snapshot of right now, while CBS ensures hot targets from early in the week aren’t missed. I will start with hitters being added at CBS who started the week on less than 40% of rosters.
Staying true to the format, the players are ordered for redraft leagues by my rest-of-season preference, separating out catchers and prospects from the overall hitter pool.
If you want to get a hit, trying to square up the ball is a great place to start. But not all squared up hits are created equal. Squaring up your grounders and line drives will likely help your batting average, but won’t do much in the home run department. Squaring up your flyballs, especially at the ideal launch angle, should help get the ball out of the yard.
If you look at the surface level Savant lollipops, you will see a “Squared-Up%” metric, which is represented on FanGraphs by “SqUpCon%”. This describes a batted ball event where at least 80% of the possible exit velocity on a pitch was obtained, given the swing and pitch characteristics, which typically means a ball that was hit on the sweet spot of the bat, according to Statcast.
As explored by Fangraphs’ Davy Andrews, even before we look at the launch angle of a squared up ball, we should acknowledge that not all of these swings result in a ball that’s hit even remotely hard, because a ridiculously slow swing that hits the ball on the barrel can still technically be squared up by the Statcast definition. But for the most part, hitters are swinging relatively hard. And we have ways to see just how fast they swing and how often they unleash their fast swings now, thanks again to Statcast.
With all of this in mind, check out the Fangraphs Squared-Up Explorer. This tool helps you see how often a hitter is squaring up the ball at different launch angles, highlighting the ideal launch angle for home runs and visualizing a given hitter’s profile compared to league average.
Using this tool, you can compare a given hitter’s profile against other hitters and during different periods of time. You can compare Gunnar Henderson’s hot start in 2024 to his 2025 and to his start to this season, as I did last week.
Today, I’ll run through a few examples that demonstrate the possible ways to use the Squared-Up Explorer and try to show you that you can and should use this tool yourself as a starting point for analyzing hitters, whether it be struggling bats you may want to cut or hot streak hitters you’re looking for an excuse to believe in. For the hitters I look into, I’ll provide some recommendations, but really want to invite you to use this exceptionally user-friendly tool yourself.
Let’s start with a particularly frustrating hitter, Fernando Tatis Jr.
Before I get into analyzing what I think may be a relatively broken hitter, I have something to admit. This admission may sound familiar to you. Especially if you are at all impulsive. Or love to trade.
A few weeks back, after trading Corey Seager for Dylan Cease in what felt like an absolute coup, I got a bit ahead of my skis. Without looking at a single Fangraphs or Baseball Savant page, I fired an offer into the ether. I dealt away Michael King, Cade Cavalli, and Bo Bichette for Gunnar Henderson, in what felt like a classic buy low-sell high, where Henderson represented the low and King the high.
The point of this article is not to discuss King’s less than rosy peripherals. Nor is it to shame me for dealing Bichette before he seemingly started heating up. It is, at least in part, a cautionary tale, though I’d say it’s a hopeful one.