A few days back, I determined the replacement levels for hitters who will miss some time this upcoming season. Today, the pitchers take center stage.

It’s tough to give any pitcher a full season of innings with almost half of them heading to the IL. Today’s focus is to find those pitchers who won’t see a full workload for one reason or another. Workload limits. Injuries. Time in minors. Since the missed time is known, an owner can the fill in the rest of the season with a replacement pitcher. It’s time to dive in.

Injured or coming off Tommy Surgery

Note: The standard minimum return time from Tommy John surgery is now 14 months. No one in years has come back in 12. I’m skipping any pitcher who had a mid-season or later surgery since they may just be back for a few September starts. I’m not going to worry about September starts in Spring Training.

Brandon Morrow
Out until: ~May 1st

While it may be a mistake, I’m fading Morrow hard. He’s an injury-prone pitcher who is starting the season hurt. And for a closer, he’s good (~2.00 ERA the past three seasons) but not great (9.1 K/9 in 2018). I could see Pedro Stroop take the job and run with it over the first month. When Morrow returns, he may never get another Save. He’s a late round DL stash for now.

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News broke on Friday that Francisco Lindor would be out seven to nine weeks with a strained calf. The reaction to the injury was swift. In NFBC’s Online Championship before the injury news, he had a 4.8 ADP in ten contests. In the two contests over the weekend, his ADP dropped to 16.5 after Jose Altuve, Javier Baez, Alex Bregman, and Trevor Story. So, is the drop deserved or did they drop him too far or not far enough? I’m going to fully breakdown how much I would change his value in a sample league.

With so many league variations, I need to pick a lane with his value adjustment. I going to take a 15-team roto league using AVG. For this league, I’ll use the Standing Gains Points (formulas in my book) as a shortcut to help determine his value and use couple tools to help speed along the process.

Add in replacement level

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Injuries analysis is becoming a pain in the butt. First, MLB goes and changes the days missed from 15 to 10 thereby nullifying several projection models. And now they’ve gone and renamed the Disabled List the Injury List. I think of naming it the BDL (Broke D__k List). I’ve been waiting for a few more seasons of DL data to create a new formula which will become obsolete with the 12-day DL but why wait. I have two seasons of 10-day IL information to create a few comparisons, especially for pitchers.

While I’ve historically collected the data, Ryan Brock jumped in and completed the 2018 season. I’m not sure if I would have gotten to pulling it together because when I normally do it (post-season), I was finishing my book. I can’t thank Ryan enough.

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The Sunday night chats are back in business and I’ll begin answering questions at 8 CST Sunday night with the queue hopefully opening up one hour earlier. During the season, I’ll normally focus on FAAB and waiver wire questions but anything goes for now. -Jeff

The “Beat Jeff Zimmerman League” date has now been set for February 22th at 8:00 PM ET. It’s an NFBC 12-team, FAAB league with a $115,000 grand prize. Click here for more details.

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I’m finally at the point where I need to start working in replacement level production into my projections. Today’s focus is on hitters will miss a set time frame or just assume will miss some time. I’m not going to work in players who will miss time here and there (e.g.the Ryan Braun special) for this or that nagging injury. Instead, I’m focusing on batters who can be DL’ed and someone else can take their place.

To evaluate these players, their time off needs to be determined (my goal today) and then replacement level stats can be added in for these off weeks. The replacement level stats will be an average of the available waiver wire batters. While these replacement level players aren’t great, they will provide some production until the rookie/injured/suspended player returns. With every league being unique, owners are going to need to find this talent level for their own league.

And remember, these are my estimates (link to on-going updates). Each owner should make their own adjustments for their own risk tolerance.

Injured with a known time frame

Gregory Polanco: He had shoulder surgery in mid-September and had a seven to a nine-month recovery time frame with a mid-April to mid-June return.

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Yesterday, I examined some hitters with the largest plate appearance projection discrepancies using five separate sources. Today, pitchers take center stage.

I’m using the projected playing times from FanGraphs Depth charts and four other sources. Again, I won’t name them as I don’t want to debate the merits of each. My goal is to just find and evaluate different takes on the same players.

The differences aren’t nearly as drastic as the hitters, especially for the top arms. Most of the major differences involve around unknown roles and injury risks. I listed the top-200 at the end while the values for free agents and foreign signings may be off or missing. I’m going to focus on the biggest differences in some top-ranked pitchers.

Ross Stripling
Range (Max-Min): 67
Average: 112
Standard Deviation: 33

I’m not surprised one bit on Stripling. Unless the Dodgers get hit with a ton of injuries to their starters, he’s going to begin the season as a reliever or in the minors. He’s got the talent to be a top-20 starter but the number of starts he’ll get is unknown. Owners can draft him and hope his talent forces the Dodgers hand. The other issue is that he’s on the Dodgers who manipulate their roster to give pitchers scheduled days off via demotions or “injuries”. Good luck guessing right with him.

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It is projection churning season and today, I’m going to investigate hitters in the top-200 who have the largest variation in projected plate appearances. I’m trying to see who seems off and any adjustments I’d make to their projections.

Normally, I just use a plate appearance average of several unique sources for my projections. I don’t have time to adjust each player. For now, I’m using five sources who constantly update their projected playing time. One is FanGraphs but I’m not going to reveal the other four as I don’t want to debate their merits. More importantly, it’s tough to know for sure who is wrong and who is right. In most instances, a reasonable explanation can be drawn for any total. Besides the players with the larger variation, I’ve included my top-300 hitters at the article’s end with their plate appearance differences.

Note: I ignored catchers and will look at them in detail at a later date.

Eloy Jimenez
Range: 336
Standard Deviation: 238
Average: 446

I’m not surprised with Jimenez being divisive. I sort of expected projections to have him being promoted either in mid-April (extra year of service) or early June (miss July two cutoff). One source was extremely low with a sub-300 value increasing the range. For me, I’d split the possible callup dates and go with a 525 plate appearance total and adjust it as more news becomes available.

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The amount of stats available to analysts today is overwhelming. At least it’s getting that way with me. I’d prefer everything to be available to investigate an idea. But no one has the time to go over every single stat to see if a player has changed for the better or worse. I’m going to eliminate all but 10 stats to focus on those few that matter the most.

The key behind my analysis is to find if a pitcher or hitter has changed. A few dozen projection sets exist to set a talent baseline but once the season starts, most people want to throw them out (some even before the season) if a hitter is batting .150 or a pitcher has a 6.00 ERA. Players are human and creatures of habit so most won’t change. But some do and being able to focus on these few can help to find values.

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I love the idea, almost to a fault, of taking one or two of the top 5 SPs in the first and/or second round. The reason I like getting these top arms is that they provide a ton of strikeouts with great ratios. This base in ratios allows me to ignore pitching for almost 10 rounds and then bottom feed. One problem I’ve run into with this strategy is that I won’t have this option available if I’m picking in a draft’s first few spots. I’m not passing on the five-category hitters and according to the current NFBC ADP (average draft position), the top Aces will be gone by the time my second pick comes around. If I’m forced into this situation, I’m considering going with the what I’ll call the “Streaming WHIP” plan.

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