Braves sign R.A. Dickey and Bartolo Colon

Well, the Braves used to be a young, rebuilding team. Now they are a slightly older rebuilding team. Signing the pair helps solidify the Braves rotation and suck up a ton of innings.

As for the changes in fantasy implications, I see none for Bartolo Colon. He is staying in the same division and still on a decent offense to get Wins. As long as he continues to command his 88 mph fastball, he will be playable in deep leagues and as a spot starter. I am pretty sure people know what they are getting from him at this point in his career.

The R.A. Dickey signing is a little more interesting. Dickey has been pretty much irrelevant in the past couple of seasons except for generating a ton of subpar rate stats for the teams brave or desperate enough to roster him.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago I made an initial stab at projecting a pitching prospect’s MLB value knowing their prospect grades. I failed miserably, but got some ideas in which to move forward on. Today, I will test some of those theories and see if I can tease out any information.

From the previous study, I found the following on pitcher grades.

1. Pitchers who are a few years from the majors are likely to change quite a bit before for they reach the majors. They could have arm surgery, find command, or add a pitch. Early grades have too much noise to be used for future results.

2. Fastballs are almost exclusively graded only on velocity. For a soft-tossing prospect to get a major call up, their fastball is likely better than just the velocity shows. They likely have plus movement and/or command of the pitch.

3. Almost all pitching prospects will get stuck with a future 50 control grade because getting graded less than 50 is a death sentence for their progress. Not all major league pitchers have average control. Exactly half don’t, so the control grade needs to be adjusted.

4. From some discussions with people in the game, I found that having one or two plus breaking balls can help carry a pitcher with an average fastball.

With these limitations, I decided to relook at pitchers by implementing the following guidelines for this study.

Read the rest of this entry »

One item is always hanging over my head once the season ends, is the final clean disabled list report in which I have published every year since 2010. This morning, I completed finalizing the list and it is now time to run some queries. Most of the general information will be available in my annual article at The Hardball Times later this month or early next month.

For today’s MASH Report, I am going to publish my yearly starting pitcher disabled list chances. For this report, I have always incorporate the following factors.

• Age: The older the pitcher, the more the injury risk (+1% point increase each year older)
• Injury history: Nothing predicts future injuries like past injuries (+10% points for each season of the past three on the DL).
• Games Started: A pitcher needs to show they can throw for an entire season without breaking down (-3% points for each full season up to three).

Every year the average disabled list chance hovers around 40% which works out to two out of every five starters in a rotation will miss some time. Some teams will get hit with more injuries while others less.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stolen Bases from Third Base

Third base is traditionally a position to pick up some of your team’s power and any stolen bases production was an afterthought. With the steady decline of stolen bases over the past decade, a third base position (or even a corner infield spot with first basemen on the decline) can be an opportunity to pick up some steals. The number of stolen bases from third basemen has shown the following trend:

The third base pool has its four big sluggers (Arenado, Bryant, Donaldson, and Machado), but not every team can roster these studs. Some teams will need to move down the food chain and roster the likes of Eduardo Nunez (40 SB), Jose Ramirez (22 SB), or Hernan Perez (34 SB). While some of these stolen base sources have multi-position eligibility, don’t be afraid to roster a speedster at third base or corner if a value presents itself in the middle infield. Using the 2016 15-team mixed LABR league as an example, it takes around 140 SB (11 per player) and 295 HR (23 per player). It doesn’t matter how an owner gets to these totals just as long as they do.

Read the rest of this entry »

Early ADP Results

This past week I was in Arizona watching some Arizona Fall League ball action and was at Baseball HQ’s First Pitch Forum as a presenter and taking in as much information as I could. I came back with a ton of articles ideas, but one piece of information I think people will find useful now is how owners are currently valuing players. Here are the top 30 players drafted in two NFBC drafts by a mix of experts and forum participants. Additionally, the entire first 23 rounds can be seen in these two images (sorry for the one image being almost too blurry).
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a strong opinion of Sean Manaea and Kevin Gausmann which is significantly below the industry’s opinion of the pair. I believe while they have some plus tools, those tools don’t work together well. I did a quick look at the pair to see if I should alter my opinion of them based on recent performance.

Kevin Gausman

My previous beef with Gausman was that his fastball is not effective even though it comes in averaging 95 mph. To see if anything has changed, I watched the soon to be 26-year-old’s start on September 27th versus the Blue Jays

Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Straily: 2017 Projection

Dan Straily was an interesting pitcher in 2016 as seen by the number of FanGraphs articles written about a journeyman 5th starter. Mark Sheldon at MLB.com summed up his entire season with data from a bunch of sabermetric websites.

What helped Straily perform well enough to earn one of those coveted spots? First, it was his effort over the previous offseason. He spent time in Washington working out at Driveline Baseball, a facility that emphasizes pitching data in training programs and uses — among other things — throwing with weighted baseballs to build shoulder strength.

“I literally can say after 31 starts that I never came in one day and was sore,” Straily said. “That’s not supposed to be that way. You’d have the little lingering stuff, but there was never a day where I didn’t want to pick up a baseball. I felt good the entire season.”

……
According to Statcast™, Straily had a very low spin rate on his changeup — the average of 1,444 RPMs ranked 80th out of 90 pitchers who threw at least 250 changeups in 2016. Changeups and fastballs with less spin generally have more downward movement. According to the heatmap, Straily was good at locating his changeup down and away to lefty hitters.

The heatmap on Straily’s slider demonstrated he could consistently locate it down and away to righty hitters. According to Fangraphs, the right-hander’s slider was worth 11.3 runs above average, making it his most valuable pitch.

I dove a bit into Straily’s yearlong results and came up with a different pitcher than the one who started the season. The big change happened after his May 25th start when he basically shelved his two-seam fastball (sinker) for the season.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I made my first attempt at trying to determine a pitcher’s value knowing their pitch grades. Since it was published, I have made some adjustments to the pitch grading scale. With the new scale in place, I have been working on comparing grades a pitcher previously received to their actual performance. The results have been extremely disappointing.

In the original article, created a framework to grade individual pitches with an ERA equivalent value (pERA) and a scouting grade on each pitch. While I liked the overall framework, one part really bothered me and I will address the issue first.

The change was to put some consistency in pitch grades, especially with fastballs. The problem was that a pitcher’s fastball is getting graded because of its velocity, but that velocity changes depending on if the pitcher was a starter or reliever. Relievers can really ramp up their velocity when moving to the bullpen.

Read the rest of this entry »

2017 Projection: Anthony Rizzo

Rizzo has been an extremely consistent the past three season almost to the point of being eery.

This type of consistency makes creating his projections easy. Except his 2016 projection didn’t seem easy with Rizzo swiping 17 bags out of know where. In his four previous seasons, he only stole a combined 16 bases. Does he keep the numbers going forward or will he go back to his old ways. The key when seeing an unexpected stolen base jump it to basically ignore it.

Here are some the numbers behind such jumps. In all, 16 under 30-years-old players have had a season with double-digit stolen bases which were higher than the three previous seasons combined. They would see an average drop in stolen bases by seven or to about 60% of the previous level in the following season.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I started this series which attempts to determine the projected fantasy value for prospects, I knew today’s step would be the hardest. The issue was converting various pitch grades (and control) into a workable framework for a pitcher’s overall production value. I thought I may not end up with a workable answer, but the following results have promise beyond just grading pitches.

I was able to piece together work from various articles and gave each pitch a grade based on the ERA scale. Combining per-pitch-ERA’s with a control value, it looks like we can estimate a pitcher’s overall value.

A pitching prospect is usually given a value on each of their pitches and a command and/or control grade. For example, the MLB.com’s grades for their top rated pitcher, Lucas Giolito, are:

Pitch: Grade
Fastball: 80
Curveball: 70
Changeup: 55
Control: 55

Read the rest of this entry »