A week ago, I was able to hold on a win to win my first Tout Wars league. The extremely gratifying experience was the culmination of too many years of managing fantasy baseball teams. From the early auction to the results coming down to a Christian Yelich at bat, the season was great. I am not going to talk about the team in detail because no one wants to hear about someone else’s fantasy team. Instead, I will stay away from the details and go over some of the keys to winning the league.

Know and exploit the rules

This idea is hard to implement in leagues which have the same set of rules for years, but in new leagues with unique rules, this is the biggest key to winning. Since it was my first year in Tout Wars, I was added to the lower/experimental league. Tout Wars has four other leagues, AL-only, NL-only, mixed-draft, and mixed auction. If any rule is being considered for any of the other four leagues, like moving from batting average (AVG) to on-base percentage (OBP), it is done first in this league. The league got hit straight on with new rules this year with net steals, net Saves, K/9 vs strikeouts, and a head-to-head format (detailed in a previous Rotographs articles).

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Today it starts. I am going to try to find an easier way to take current prospect evaluations and turn them into usable information for fantasy owners. Since none of the prospect information is far from perfect, the following will be an imperfect science, but hopefully, some of the prospect guesswork can be removed. The hope is to eventually see a prospect’s grade and/or ranking and have an idea of what type of production to expect from the player. Additionally, I plan on having a method of taking prospect grades and comparing it to present major leaguers.

From the little work I have done, I find it is so much easier to work with hitters versus the pitchers. I am going to start with them for a couple of weeks getting a decent groundwork done with them. When I get to the pitchers, the work is going to be a little slower moving as I translate pitch grades to a players value.

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• Michael Brantley is in the news after an article by Jon Heyman stated:

Sources familiar with Cleveland Indians outfielder Michael Brantley’s shoulder surgery suggest they believe it is quite serious, and that he could in fact miss significant time next season.

Word based on those sources is that “they had to re-anchor the muscle to the bone.”

This was news to Brantley and the team and they shot back with:

“Our expectation is that he’ll be ready for spring training,” said Chris Antonetti, Indians president of baseball operations. “We were told after the second surgery that the timeline (for recovery) would be four to five months. As far as I know, nothing has changed.”

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2017 Preseason Assessment: Jonathan Villar (Fantasy MVP)

Villar was a generally not sought after in most leagues since many people expected him to struggle and get replaced by Orlando Arcia around the Super 2 deadline. I picked him up in Tout Wars as a fill in for Jung-ho Kang since Kang was expected to miss a couple months after having surgery on his leg. To say Villar filled in just fine is an understatement. He had 19 HR, 62 SB, and a .285 AVG. In the final rankings, he ended up with being the 4th highest ranked hitter.

For next season. I expect some heavy regression from the 25-year-old, but I don’t expect him to fall off a cliff. His batting average has been fairly steady the last two seasons with a .284 value in 2015 and .285 in 2016. With his speed, I could see him continue to post BABIP around .350 so I will go with a .270 AVG. For his walk rate, a 10% value will work so a .345 OBP seems reasonable.

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First, a few words about my offseason writing at Rotographs. Besides reporting any possible relevant fantasy news, I plan on systematically going through two groups of players and work on their 2017 values. I will start at the top of the 2017 rankings and also somewhere in the middle and work my way down each list. I may be able to do a handful of players each article or I might by limited to just the two players. Either way, I will start putting together a 2017 draft ranking.

Additionally, I will try to follow Eno’s schedule for the other writers (e.g. players on playoff teams for the next couple of weeks). If they are looking at outfielders for that specific week, I will also look at outfielders.

The other project I will work through is being able to put a better evaluation on prospects for fantasy purposes. I will use the evaluations of various prospect writers and publications and put their evaluations into something which can be used in fantasy circles. I have some ideas of what I want to accomplish, but I am sure there will be some roadblocks and detours on the way. I will start this series Friday.

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Andre Dawson became a free agent after the summer of 1986 and he had just one request, his new home field must have grass. After 10 years of playing on Montreal’s artificial turf, Dawson’s knees were destroyed forcing him to move to from center field to a corner outfield spot. I saw him in the 2012 All-Star celebrity softball game and it was painful to watch him move. No one knows for sure how much production was sapped from Dawson by the turf, but I will try to find out. Today, I am going to look into the past and possibly future on playing on how turf ages a player.

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Freddie Freeman is beating the shift

A few seasons ago, all people could talk about is shifting and its effects. Even though shifting is not in the news as much, but players are still getting shifted. Here are the 2016 leaders for facing a traditional shift:

One name and his stats strike out. Freddie Freeman is the player and he currently has a 29-game hitting streak. The shift is supposed to take away hits, but Freeman has decided to use the center of the field to beat the shift. He is not swinging inside out and trying to go the opposite way. Instead, he is putting the ball in the middle of the field. Here are his Center% and wRC+ by month.

Month: Center%, wRC+

• Apr: 27%, 106
• May: 27%, 94
• June: 22%, 175
• July: 34%, 136
• Aug: 47%, 198
• Sep: 40%, 222

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Quick Looks at Gray, Hoffman, and Stripling

I decided to catch one of Vince Scully’s last games and went with Friday’s game. With the game, I was able to collect my thoughts on a few pitchers.

Jon Gray started for the Rockies and this is the first time I have intently watched him since he was in college. He didn’t have his most productive game and it was off from his last start when he went nine innings and had 16 strikeouts. While he was still was able to get 10 K’s in four innings of work, he was completely inconsistent. Here are my thoughts on the game.

• Plus hair.
• FB: 94-98. He cranked it up and did a few times going for the third strike. Has a little release-side run. The pitch is only speed with almost no break.
• SL 89-92 mph, 11-5 break, Damn this pitch is nasty at 90 mph. It has a 24% swinging strike rate on the season.
• CB: 80-81 mph, It has 12-6 break. While he could throw it for strikes, it was inconsistent.
• CH: 84-86mph Petty much straight, but slow. Gets nice results with hitters trying to catch up with his fastball.
• Inconsistent delivery in the 1st inning in which he needed 38 pitches to get through it. His main issue was that he couldn’t control his fastball enough to get it over the plate to the point he walked the pitcher.

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Quick Look: Blake Snell

I was fairly high on Snell coming into the season, but not as high as others because I didn’t manage to get him in any league. Snell is 18 starts into his pro career with mixed results. He has a decent ERA at 3.65 and a 9.8 K/9. The bad is that he is walking 5.2 BB/9 which is the worst in the league (min 80 IP).

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Today’s MASH edition is brought to you by some questions I hand listening to Ringer’s The MLB Show podcast featuring Ben Lindbergh and guest Stan Conte (former head Dodgers’ trainer). I would recommend listening to the entire podcast as there is quite a bit of information on injuries. From the podcast, a couple of pieces of information were mentioned by Conte I just wanted to verify them.

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