Every week for Sportsline, I write an article on available starting pitching and I lucked into a nice find. Using the criteria of owned in 60% or fewer leagues, increasing ownership, and they’ve never been profiled, Joe Ross met the criteria. I noticed Joe Ross reinvented himself as noted here by MLBDream.

Joe Ross throwing a curveball [h/t @jeffwzimmerman] and upping his sinker usage

👀 @JSpauny 👀 pic.twitter.com/LtkrEQc1CI

— MLBdream (@MLBdream) August 14, 2019

Today, I going to go through some lowly owned starters (in the majors and not on the IL) and see if any have made any positive or negative changes to their repertoire to utilize for the final quarter or the season. I’m going to look at pitchers owned in 16% to 30% of Fantrax leagues (Joe Ross was at 31% ownership).

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Today’s list is a weird group of players. Most should have been dropped last week once the ramifications of the trade deadline were known. Discrepancy Theory #1 is that about 20% of the owners blew off the post-trade deadline FAAB period (tough to miss this one) and finally caught up. If there was any week to be paying attention, it was the previous bidding period.

Or Theory #2 is that these owners were sheep waiting to see what other owners did with their drops. Most of the drops (e.g Tim Beckham) I would consider obvious, but maybe these owners need confirmation on making their moves. Or they use the platform’s ownership rate to see who to drop. I’m not sure if it’s wrong or right to wait a week on dropping someone. Waiting might be the correct move. It’s interesting and I’ll ponder the delay a bit more.

Also, if anyone happened to missed the last few articles, I’ve been trying to improve this article’s content. The major change is that I’m concentrating on players dropped in six to nine leagues. For now, this range seems the most useful for fantasy owners.

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For those few owners with any FAAB left, it looks to be another interesting week of bidding with The Punisher likely getting the top bid. Besides Aristides Aquino, some other players should face a high demand with J.D. Davis and Mike Tauchman on the hitting side and Aaron Sanchez and Aaron Civale on the pitching front. Besides the top adds, check-in on several bullpens to see if there is anyone to add.

The projection guidelines:

• The ownership rates are from CBS since they have some quickdraw waiver wire leagues where players can be picked up at any time.
• The FAAB estimates are based on the 2018 15-team mixed NFBC leagues which used a $1000 FAAB budget. Owners are going to need to convert these values to their own league.
• The ownership values were taken from Saturday and lots can happen in between when they publish and FAAB bids run.
• Only players owned in 50% or fewer of CBS leagues are examined.

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Angels

• Overall, it has been consistent for weeks but with Andrelton Simmons on the IL, David Fletcher has been the full-time shortstop and Matt Thaiss has taken over at third. While a 35% K% will limit Thaiss’s AVG (and OBP), he has shown some power hitting five homers in 65 PA.

Astros

• The lineup is the same with Josh Reddick getting most of the starts (13 if 16) in right-field.

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I had some doubts about this list’s usefulness a couple of weeks back and yesterday I tried to find ways to improve it. I came to the conclusion that players in the 10% to 25% dropped range were the most interesting. This works out to players dropped in four to nine leagues. Before, I was just looking at those in 10 or more leagues. I was way off target.

After looking over the players, I’m going to squeeze the range a little more from those dropped in six to nine leagues which works out to 34 players this week. I’d like to focus on 20 or so players each week but know that there was a post-deadline frenzy pushing the total up.
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First, sorry about no drop list article last week… more on that later. Second, today’s experiment stems from HappyFunBall’s comment from a couple of weeks ago.

I was well into the analysis last week and found I was not answering the right question and had the wrong data. The drop comparisons need to be a little forward-looking, not backward. The data collected from the sites was after the NFBC FAAB ran. The other sites I used allow daily or quick-draw pickups, so some of the news from the Monday was getting baked in. I wanted the rates to be taken from similar timeframes.

My original question focused on which players I should analyze so owners can gain an edge. The edge could be knowing who to drop because they are no longer fantasy-viable. Also, the hope is to find some players whose owners gave up too early on. The hope is that one of the other platforms can provide more insight than the NFBC Main Event.

Several issues exist with this study. First, it’s just one week and a busy week at that with the trade deadline. The increased activity may help to offset the lack of moves since it’s later in the season. I’m not 100% sure but I may run the same analysis again but I need to do it before the head-to-head playoff start and main teams get abandoned.

Finally, the table is a mess. A big one. What Happy Fun Ball and I hoped for didn’t materialize but a few interesting observations can be made.

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Angels

• The lineup is fairly consistent.
• One of Albert Pujols, Luis Rengifo, and Matt Thaiss must sit every game.

Astros

• The lineup has been set since Carlos Correa returned from the IL.
• There is a possibility that Josh Reddick (vs RHP) and Jake Marisnick (vs LHP) are in a platoon.

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Life has come at me hard the last couple of days and I’m actually happy to spend some time writing about baseball as a distraction. The problem is that I need to prioritize my efforts. I’ve decided to just post the projected values (no analysis) and instead focus on my efforts on my weekly AL Lineups article. If I have the time and effort later today, I may come back and add some more details.

The projection guidelines:

• The ownership rates are from CBS since they have some quickdraw waiver wire leagues where players can be picked up at any time.
• The FAAB estimates are based on the 2018 15-team mixed NFBC leagues which used a $1000 FAAB budget. Owners are going to need to convert these values to their own league.
• The ownership values were taken from Saturday and lots can happen in between when they publish and FAAB bids run.
• Only players owned in 50% or fewer of CBS leagues are examined.

Read the rest of this entry »