If you were excited by offseason rumors of Isaac Paredes to Boston, or about the Red Sox adding Willson Contreras and Caleb Durbin to their right-handed hitter ranks, you should feel good about Curtis Mead. And if you’re anyone else, you’re probably thinking that the Nationals’ new GM Paul Toboni made like a seasoned fantasy manager and sold high on a few months of Mead for five years of team control of Connelly Early, a promising young left-handed starting pitcher.
But it looks like Mead has made some really intriguing changes that give us reason to believe in his growth as a hitter and Fenway might be an ideal new home for him.
A little over a month ago, I wrote up a handful of hitters that were underperforming their draft cost, were readily available to pick up in most 12-teamers, and why they were primed to break through.
Looking at underlying numbers from this season and comparing them to last season for struggling players can help identify when a player may be on the cusp of coming on strong after a weak stretch.
Kyle Stowers was one such player. Coming back from injury, Stowers scuffled through mid-June, with an OPS below .700 and a K% near 30%. But from June 12 on, when I published the piece, he has slashed .261/.341/.521 with seven homers and 23 RBI. He had been squaring up the ball in the weeks leading up to this breakthrough. But without the results.
Of course, the same process told me to consider Alec Bohm, who is himself rocking on OPS below .700 since I shouted out his hot run at the end of May and into June. I’m no wizard.
But late in the year, hot stretches are incredibly valuable. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that, but it bears repeating. Whether it be in head-to-head leagues, where a hot stretch in the late summer can lift you over opponents, or in season long roto leagues where you find yourself lagging in homers, the hot stretch is like a hot pastrami. Undeniably savory. Perfect.
Now let’s look at some hitters, focusing on a selection of players rostered at different rates between CBS and Yahoo. Consider these hitters, particularly those in the top tier, options to replace struggling veteranslike those that Mike Podhorzer wrote up a few days back. And if you are in a shallower league where these hitters are rostered, consider the art of the deal!
Buying low and selling high. That’s the classic value proposition we all shoot for in trades. We’re trying to win after all!
It’s hard to win if you aren’t extracting value from your opponents, or at least adding value to your own team via the wire.
And at this point in the year, with less than 40% of the fantasy baseball season remaining, it’s time to get serious. It’s time to really consider what holding onto struggling stars means for your playoff chances. It’s time for top seeds to load up on upside and injured players that the bubble teams can no longer afford to hold onto. It’s time to sell the young aces that got you here, for shelf stable veterans, or at least for pitchers we trust to pitch into September.
Bill Buckner and Steve Bartman know better than most that baseball is a haunted sport. Downright spooky even. Curses range from the Bambino to the Billy Goat to Seattle-area Etsy witches, baseball fans subscribe to and are victims of decades long vexing hexes.
And by baseball standards, the Home Run Derby Curse is akin to the curse of being on the cover of MLB the Show. FanGraphs writers have taken hacks at diminishing this curse over the years, but the popular consciousness still loves to tout it. Their theory is fairly straight forward, relying on the idea that derby participants change their swing to try and win the derby, and can’t find their game swing again in the second half, leading to a slump.
In this article, I’ll seek to answer two questions:
In recent years, has there been a fall off between halves for derby participants?
And is there a way to try and predict who will fall off to help us humble fantasy managers sell high?
In fantasy baseball, it’s sometimes safest to avoid platoon hitters. That’s the conventional wisdom, anyways. And in many cases, that’s the right advice.
During drafts, hitters tagged with platoon risk, like Jarren Duran and Oneil Cruz, are often best avoided, as their upside is severely capped. In shallower leagues, when chasing upside and racking up counting stats is particularly important, they should be especially eschewed.
But there are formats and circumstances when platoon bats are worthwhile.
Last week, a trade was accepted in my home league. It nearly split the league in two.
Jack’s Cool League, the JCL as it’s lovingly known amongst friends, is a home league that is going on 14 years of competition amongst 10 teams, conducted in the endlessly entertaining and frustrating head-to-head categories format.
As you may have guessed by the name, I’ve been commissioner of the league since its inception. Various rule changes have reshaped strategy over the years.
We added quality starts. Then OPS. We expanded the default Yahoo lineups to add additional IL slots and NA slots. We increased the active roster size to 25, and then to 26, to keep pace with our colleagues in the majors. We instituted a minimum weekly innings threshold. And moved up the playoffs to end the season before major league teams start resting their stars. And this year, we rebalanced the number of utility and bench slots to try and make streaming starting pitchers more of a calculation.
The only other change has been moving from the Commissioner having discretion to veto egregious trades to having each team having a chance to cast a vote to veto within a two-day trade review period.
It is extremely rare for a trade to be vetoed in our league, as I believe it should be, but it has happened. Teams will use their voting power and rally other managers to vote if they feel one team is benefitting so much that it dramatically shifts the balance of the league. Read the rest of this entry »
Writing about red hot chili players can be fun. When an otherwise mediocre Curtis Mead starts slamming the ball, that is objectively entertaining. Especially for the fantasy manager, players who are far exceeding their draft price or FAAB cost just give us a bit of extra enjoyment when they perform well.
Junior Caminero is certainly red hot. And considering the 45 home runs he hit last year, in his first full season, which he finished as a 22-year-old, this really shouldn’t be a surprise.
Sure, the fact that he’s hit bombs in six consecutive games, and that the stretch in question started with a three-homer game, is wildly impressive. But it’s easy to forget there were some who doubted the phenom third baseman.
With three full months in the books, it’s time for some of us to move from active participation into reminiscing, wishcasting, and dreaming.
Opening back up the draft board. Peeking back, ever so reluctantly, at your preseason rankings. The notes you left yourself to take a flyer on a handful of spring training stud pitchers, from Kyle Harrison to Johan Oviedo. The highlighter on your desk reminds you of when you used it to circle Kyle Tucker as a late first-round bargain as a bat in the middle of the Dodgers order.
We’re coming up on July, and for some of us, if not the majority of us, the World Cup is offering a pleasurable respite from what has been a miserable start to the fantasy baseball season.
That is to say, we’re getting the likeliest outcome for what we signed up for. The 50th percentile outcome. We weren’t going to win! But the point is to try. Chasing that little smidgeon of hope like it’s the golden snitch.
In this article, I’ll redraft the first round for the rest of the season. To get there, I’ll meander back through the projected first rounders from the preseason, wind down into the current top performers according to the Fangraphs Player Rater, and finish with how I’d redraft the first round today, for the rest of this season, with all of the benefits of hindsight, a little foresight, and a gentle drop of dreaming on unrealized upside.
There aren’t many refrains more common for fantasy sports writers than describing a hitter who is performing well during the summer as one who is “heating up with the weather.”
And the thing is, more often than not, it is justified. Ballparks across the country become more hitter friendly as the weather heats up, and cold morning games and windswept, foggy night games become hot, humid oases for home runs.
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.
