Perhaps you recognize the Factor Grid. It’s an important part of my column – The Daily Grind –  which will return in a little over a week. The grid is a quick look at the most important park factors for a given day – home runs by handedness, weather, and notes on extenuating circumstances (i.e. rain or snow). There are any number of fantasy websites with overcomplicated analysis of daily park factors and matchups – usually behind a paywall. I prefer a simple spreadsheet.

The Factor Grid can be easily used to select hitters in the best offensive venues and pitchers in defense friendly environments. This has obvious use to DFS participants, but it’s also helpful to traditional fantasy owners who like to stream or have a deep bench.

Let’s move onto the grid (or use the link):

The data comes from FanGraphs Guts! I have doubled the park factors so that they’re stadium specific. This introduces some small rounding errors (+/- 1). Guts! has the park factors halved by default so they can be used to transform full season player data. We don’t care about full season applications which is why I’ve doubled them.

I’ve color coded each stadium for a neutral weather day. Green means good for hitters while red is good for pitchers. Eleven stadiums are generally offense friendly, six are mostly neutral, and 10 are pitcher friendly. Progressive Field and Fenway Park have unusual factors which allow them to play are both friendly and unfriendly to hitters based on handedness. Wrigley Field has strong wind effects.

Weather can affect the color coding. As we all know, Wrigley park is very pitcher friendly early in the season due to cold weather and inward winds. Once summer rolls around, the winds blow out and the balls fly. The park will usually be listed as green or red rather than yellow. Particularly unpleasant weather could bump any neutral park down to a pitcher friendly rating. A very fine day could bump a neutral park into the green.

We can use park factors in the offseason too – specifically for players who are changing venues. Last year, I used Josh Donaldson’s move from the Coliseum to the Rogers Centre as an example. We know how that went. This year, Neil Walker is moving from a park with a 76 factor for home runs to a stadium with a 104 factor. Aaron Hicks is swapping Target Field’s 88 home run factor for Yankee Stadium’s 122 factor. Other hitters who could benefit include Justin Upton, Jason Heyward, Mark Trumbo, Brett Lawrie, Austin Jackson, and Jimmy Rollins.

This year, two parks have new dimensions which means that the old park factors can’t be fully trusted. We should see a few more home runs in Miami while the Rockies are trying to cut down on big flies.

That covers the basics. Now, onto questions.

There is a time and place to be bold. Perhaps that time is now and that place is here. Perhaps not. It’s also said the meek shall inherit the earth. I’ve always taken that to mean you should hide in a bomb shelter during a nuclear holocaust rather than fighting and looting in the streets. It may also mean your best chance to win your fantasy league is to take no chances.

What follows are my 10 timid predictions for the 2016 season.

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How’s that for a clickbait headline? (Not so good). Yesterday’s post on the interaction between keeper values and inflation generated a lot of great discussion. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, I recommend wading into the comments.

As one commenter noted, when calculating inflation, the industry standard is to use pre-inflation price times the sum of one plus the inflation rate. Or written another way: Post-inflation price = Pre-inflation price * (1 + inflation %). Said commenter thought I preferred: Post-inflation price = Pre-inflation price ^ (1 + inflation %).

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This is a topic I probably should have brought up earlier in the draft season when more owners could use the concepts to select their keepers. I’ve decided there’s still a reason to talk about keeper value and inflation as it could inform your trade talks or how you think about the game in general.

A couple of my auction keeper leagues included hefty inflation this year. We’re talking prices over $10 above retail. As I’ve said in previous posts, the best way to handle the craze is to join the fray for a few big names then position yourself to be the king of dollar days. But let’s take a further step back. How should we prepare for rampant inflation before the draft even begins?

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Remember fantasy baseball before the PITCHf/x era? I fondly recall arguments over player valuations. “I think” was the primary selling point, usually followed by an outlandish projection based purely in wishcasting. Stats were found on ESPN or Yahoo. In other words, they were unsophisticated. Maybe you were already reading a fledgling FanGraphs where you could peruse any number of articles about how Player X will regress from high/low BABIP. We’ve all come a long way.

Nowadays, I can’t imagine evaluating a pitcher without the help of PITCHf/x. When another site asked me to rate dynasty starting pitching prospects, I basically told them it was a waste of time. There are the guys we already know about, i.e. Julio Urias. Then there is a mountain of muck to throw against the wall. Some of it will stick. Without minor league PITCHf/x (and MLB translations), I lack the necessary tools to find the next Jacob deGrom.

There’s another issue, and it’s the primary purpose of this article – pitchers are not static talents. Command can change suddenly, new pitches may be discovered, or the next Carlos Carrasco might spontaneously figure out how to use his already excellent repertoire. Previously dominant sliders can lose their tilt or hitters might adjust to a predictable high fastball.

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When your leaguemates start paying too much for closers, there’s only one thing to do – queue up your closer sleepers. The following is quick analysis of my favorite closers-in-waiting. You can use these guys as elite sources for holds or handcuffs to unstable closers. Yesterday’s post covered the NL, today we move to the AL.

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When your leaguemates start paying too much for closers, there’s only one thing to do – queue up your closer sleepers. The following is quick analysis of my favorite closers-in-waiting. You can use these guys as elite sources for holds or handcuffs to unstable closers. We’ll do the NL today and the AL tomorrow.

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Over the past two nights, I completed another two drafts – the 12-team MLBTR League and the 14-team experimental Fire and Forget. The following is a collection of player picks and strategic advice for unique formats. Let’s start with the easy one…

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Fantastic news folks, it’s Bold Prediction season. The premise is simple – we make 10 aggressive, fantasy-related predictions about specific players. Then, in the comments, you tell us they aren’t bold enough. Shall we?

1. Socrates Brito will be a top 60 outfielder

I was ready to go all in on Aaron Altherr this season, but he broke his wrist. Luckily (for me), Brito has been turning heads in the Diamondbacks camp. He has the tough job of beating out big money Cuban Yasmany Tomas, but I have little doubt Brito is the better overall talent. The potential for plus-plus defense, above average base running, and a league average bat easily exceeds Tomas at his best.

While Brito isn’t a finished product at the plate, I’m predicting a decent batting average to go with 10 home runs and 20 stolen bases. I see him as a poor man’s Christian Yelich.

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I had my first two “normal,” not-mock auction drafts over the past two evenings. The first was a fairly standard 12-team keeper league. The second was the 20-team Utility Wars – a very different experience. Today, I’ll cover a few of the challenges from the standard auction then dip into the details of Utility Wars.

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