Author Archive: Jeff Zimmerman

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While this article is a little shorter than normal, I combed through all the recent articles and got caught up. I’m out the first part of the week but will see how much information is available for a mid-week article.

General

• Hitters could struggle without the needed reps against pitching.

Shelton said the Pirates are more concerned with transitioning their position players back into game-type activity, as it could be a shock to their systems to face live pitching for the first time in three months.

American League

Indians

• The starters will be ahead of a normal Spring Training schedule with one pitcher up to five innings back in May.

Indians pitchers pledged months ago to arrive at Spring Training Part 2 — Summer Training? 2 Spring 2 Training? — more prepared than they would be for a traditional spring ramp-up period. By the end of May, one Indians starter had already built up to a five-inning workload. But with an abbreviated schedule and expanded rosters, will teams even deploy pitchers in a customary fashion? The Indians could get creative, given their depth. Before injuries intervened, they had three starting pitchers — Plesac, Plutko and Aaron Civale — jockeying for the final two rotation spots.

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Some random ideas to think about.

• Normally, I don’t care about the opening day starters, they could give owners an edge with the league having an opening weekend. The top-three starters will be the only pitchers getting starts to give some owners a head start.

• Managers with playoff bullpen experience could be at an advantage.

”Managers who have managed in playoff situations probably have a little bit more advantage with how to use their bullpens and things like that,” Shelton said.

American League

Angels

• Shohei Ohtani will throw just once a week and never be a two-start pitcher.

Shohei Ohtani will be utilized similar to how he would in a regular 162-game season. He'll still pitch once a week. Maddon said he expects as a six-man rotation as a result.

— Rhett Bollinger (@RhettBollinger) June 24, 2020

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My initial goal was to determine the amount of variation in pitching stats in a short season. What I found was a stipulation filled mess. It should have been simple. Just take the first two months and compare how the pitchers performed to a full season. The short answer is that they did great because they pitched in cooler weather and were 100% healthy. Instead, should the results from August and Septemeber be used, by that point in the season, many had broken down and the breakouts (e.g. Lucas Giolito) emerged. There is no perfect way to answer my original idea, so I’ll try to provide several possible answers.

To limit the focus, I’m going to implement the following guidelines. It’s a lot and when I was setting them, I was questioning any possible findings. By changing any one of them, the process to find the results and the actual final results differ.

• Assumed a 12-team league and used SGP (Standing Gain Points) equation from The Process.
• I used historic Steamer projections to set the preseason valuation.
• I only examined WHIP and ERA. Most of the hot takes I’ve heard involve not wanting to deal with the possible variation in these rate stats.
• Ignored closers. They are their own beast.
• Focused on the 7 starters for 12 teams.
• Used April to May data and then August to September. Both aren’t ideal but the differences can then be analyzed.
• Anyone who didn’t pitch during the two-month time frame got zeros across the board.
• I just did 2019 and kept the mess to one season.

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Note: About 95% of this article was finished before the news that MLB is going forward with a 60 game season.  I finished it knowing that more imporant work needs to be done. This series now comes to an abrupt end and I will return to the series once the season is over one way or the other.

I’m continuing my quest to predict pitcher injuries and their effects as best as possible. I started grinding through the process last week and found through some additional work that injuries from just the past two seasons drag down production. Today, I’m going to go over some other possible other injury causes and provide updated injury ranks.

While I’ve done quite a bit of my own work on pitcher injuries, I decided to scour the web come up with some new ideas. Here are some possible ideas ranked by how I’d like to investigate them.
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With so much sabermetric work already completed, I’m creating a ton of work for myself to see if a hitter’s athleticism influences how they age? Additionally, do these “athletes” age better? I tried to jump the gun a few nights ago with an ill-fated Twitter thread where I thought about reverse-engineering the stats. Instead, I’m going to put a value on a hitter’s athleticism using some readily available metrics.

I began my search by using some advice from Bill James who commented on my Tweet.

Let's assert as Point A that "athleticism" consists of four things: Speed, strength, agility and quickness. "Strength" is the most troublesome, because you can have strength in many different body parts, and people who are strong in one area may be relatively weak in others.

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) June 7, 2020

He just rattled the traits off and since he’s likely forgotten more about baseball than I’ve ever learned, I’ll just focus on them. I’m guessing he’s already investigated the subject.
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Projecting pitcher injuries and their effect seems like the Holy Grail for fantasy analysis. From years of research on the subject, I find it’s just a frustration filled enterprise with no firm resolution. Until a start to the 2020 season has been agreed upon (or I eventually find an acceptable answer), I plan to continuously grind for a workable understanding of pitcher injuries.

First, this article will be a work in progress as I try to find answers to various questions. I can’t fill the RotoGraphs article list with a new article every time I make a change or add more information (Ed. note: Sure you can, Jeff, we’ll post all of ’em!). Every few days or so, I’ll summarize the findings from the previous article’s work and keep moving forward. The series will come to an abrupt end if the framework exists for a start to the season since other analysis will then take priority.
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First off I hate that the season could be so short and it’s total B.S. that the players and owners are still negotiating a season. They should have started once the season was shutdown.

Also, I can understand if an owner or league just wants to sit out this season. This is especially true since other sports who have their sh…stuff together will be playing meaningful games soon.

With those two caveats out of the way, I am interested to see how a short season plays out since none of us have a playbook for it. The owners’ 48-game schedule is even more intriguing if Manfred decides to immediately implement it. The major impact for fantasy owners will be the games per week pending on where he sets the season start date. Here is how those 48-games could get divided up.

If it’s six games a week, that doesn’t change many player valuations. Anything less than that, it gets interesting. With around 5 or fewer games per week, everything will have a playoff feel. Aces will be thrown at every opportunity and suspect starters will have shorter leashes, if they’re starting at all.

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