In redraft and shallow keeper formats, I tend to avoid most prospects. The bust rate is brutal. However, deeper dynasty leagues force everybody to play in the prospect pool. After five years of ottoneu and other deep formats, I’ve started to notice some things.

When a person does something long enough, they start to see patterns. Sometimes these trends contain meaningful information. In other cases, they’re merely confusing or outright misleading. A lot of the things we think we know about fantasy baseball are tied to these false flag patterns.

Read the rest of this entry »

Keepers, keepers, keepers. We talked about keepers! Here’s the transcript.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is probably a main blog fantasy masquerading as a fantasy blog post. I’ll analyze zero players, discuss no strategies, and only once reference a draft (<—there it is!). Instead, let’s talk about the future – specifically how millennials (and whatever post-millennials are called) will want to consume televised baseball. It’s a future that’s simultaneous brilliant and illegal.

It’s time for micro-broadcasts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s just get this out of the way. I really like Luis Castillo. I like him for all the reasons Jeff Sullivan and Nick Pollack also really like Castillo (Sullivan’s post, Pollack’s post). I emphasize my ‘like’ of Castillo because the rest of this post is about his downside; all the various scenarios in which Castillo isn’t the shiny bauble we witnessed late last season.

The real world has repeatedly confirmed that humans are really shitty at thinking probabilistically. NBC’s Craig Calcaterra was discussing this very topic earlier today with regard to politics. Remember when Nate Silver predicted Hillary Clinton would win with something around a 75 percent likelihood? That meant a Trump victory had the same odds as flipping a coin heads up twice in a row. That happens a lot. In fact, it happens one quarter of the time. Silver wasn’t wrong – at least, we can’t know that he was wrong without a LOT more data. A Trump victory was well within the realm of possibility.

The Castillo painted by Sullivan, Pollack, and others may be here to stay. He existed for a time in 2017. Performing at a high level is a great indicator for future ability to perform at a high level. Still, we as an industry are getting a little crazy about 89.1 good innings. Here’s how it could all go wrong with my guestimated risks. Adjust those however you wish.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s prospect week which means it’s time for RotoGraphs to jump in line with cross-promotional synergistical, uh… I lost my train of thought. Anyway, I’m going to write about two prospects.

Wait. Here’s an important note about me, the author, with regards to assessing minor league talent. My prospect exposure is not uniform. I have a very strong grasp of the Phillies system, in part because I grew up within walking distance* of the city, and in part because they may have the best prospect coverage (h/t to @Matt_Winkelman and friends). I also have a few MLB contacts – mainly scouts with whom I used to play – who will occasionally feed me breakout prospects before they’re publicly recognized as such. Mostly, I use google-able scouting reports and FanGraphs stats to analyze players. Ok, disclaimer proclaimed. Shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, I wrote about four of the most obvious closer sleepers. If I’m looking for the lowest hanging fruit, my eyes are on the Diamondbacks, Twins, White Sox, and Angels. That leaves us with plenty of other low hanging fruit. You’ll just need to overlook some minor blemishes.

In case you need justification to bargain hunt for closers, here’s my cold take on the subject:

Read the rest of this entry »

Paying full price for saves can make it challenging to build a dominant roster. Closers are among the most inconsistent of baseball assets. Not only do they have the injury and performance risks typically associated with pitchers, but they also have to remain the best reliever on their particular team. A guy like Hector Neris could stay exactly the same – i.e. acceptable but not exceptional – and lose his job.

Last season, 23 relievers had the closer role and then lost it. That’s excluding the handful of players who had the job, lost the job, and later recovered the job. In 2016, 25 closers were booted from the ninth. Only 21 got the ax in 2015. The good news is that many of those guys – like Tyler Clippard – were always meant to be temporary solutions. A handful of struggling teams often account for over half of the demoted closers.

Entering 2018, most of the league looks pretty set in the ninth inning. Even so, we’ll still almost certainly see the usual turnover at the position. Over the next couple days, I’ll cover some of my preferred closer sleepers, starting with the most obvious.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s today’s chat transcript featuring lots of keeper and Acuna talk.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE 4:00pm ET: In the less than one hour since this article was published, Castro re-signed with the Colorado Rockies.

Anybody with information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of the Daniel Castro Fan Club (@DanielCastroFan) should contact the FanGraphs tip line.

Perhaps the weirdest thing happening to me and my fellow FanGraphists is the Daniel Castro Fan Club. Presumably, the club consists of one dude, but I’ll give “them” the benefit of the doubt. “They” contact me at least once a week to promote their pro-Castro agenda. And, for lack of a better topic today, they’re getting their wish. Sort of. Today we’ll discuss bad players who become good. Because Daniel Castro is bad.

Read the rest of this entry »

Um…

Read the rest of this entry »