It’s time to understand how ownership trends are playing out this year. I will start by breaking down one of the most common fantasy sites, ESPN. I will go over the batter ownership rates for different league sizes so owners know which players are applicable to them. Additionally, I will find the current replacement level player for each position.

With fantasy experts using ownership rates to help find potential waiver targets, it is important to know each league’s ownership level. Historically, I know I should only worry about players owned in 10% of leagues or less but not everyone plays in 15-team or deeper leagues.

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Current Trade Value: Eric Thames

The industry’s “Buy Low/Sell High” talk frustrates me because 90% of the time no context is given. Owners should expect to get some players at a discount but what are the player’s owners expecting and valuing in a rebound.

Ryan Zimmerman seems to be a sell high candidate. He’s having a great season with a .420 AVG and 11 HR. Pretty much everyone expects him to regress. But how much regression? Don’t guess. Do a little research and see how other fantasy owners value him by checking on actual trades.

The best source I’ve found to track 1-for-1 trades is Yahoo’s Trade Market. The site has a major limitation: only trades from that day are listed so it’s best to check in the evening. I will do a quick analysis of the league’s other hot hitter, Eric Thames.

Yesterday, I found Thames was traded straight up for Aroldis Chapman, Khris Davis, and Stephen Strasburg. Thames’s ADP was 182 or around a 15 round value. The other three had ADPs of 46 (Chapman), 50 (Strasburg), and 102 (Davis). They average out to around 66 with the two 50’s pointing to a possible higher value.

The players taken around 66 overall were Kyle Seager, Andrew McCutchen, Carlos Carrasco, and Kyle Hendricks. Good but not elite players. It’s still a huge move up for Thames.

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Our Dark Overlord, David Appelman, finally acquired a minor league pitch-by-pitch database as seen by the new minor league stats available like Contact and Groundball rates. I hoped it would help to better understand the disconnect between a prospect’s Hit tool grades and major league results.  I made some progress but created more questions than answers.

When I examined the database, I was hoping to find some batted ball information as Eli Ben-Porat used at the Hardball Times. No such luck. But there was some x,y data … for every pitch.

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Quick Look: Jordan Montgomery

Montgomery is probably getting a little more press than the average 24-year-old mildly-touted pitching prospect because he’s a Yankee. I decided to see what is behind the hype by watching yesterday’s start.

• He’s a left-handed pitcher with a high 3/4 arm slot and pitches straight to home. No weird left-handed pitcher angles going on here.

• Fastball (Four-seam: 30, 2-seam: 50): He has a two and four-season fastball which both sit at 89-92 mph. He’s able to command both of them around the plate, but the two-seamer should perform better. It has some nice late life as seen here.

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With the 2017 changes MLB Advanced Media implemented with their StatCast pitch tracking data, I’ve been scrambling to recode my pitcher injury finder. Well, it seems to be working fine and here are some pitchers it found to be concerned about.

Note: I have bumped up all 2016 and earlier values to be equal with higher 2017 readings.

John Lackey

It’s tough to tell if Lackey is hurt or he’s at a new, lower talent level. His last start was the most concerning. Here are his velocity and spin rates over the past two seasons.

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Creating Launch Angle from Batted Ball Data

While going over the minor league groundball leaderboard yesterday, this group of hitters intrigued me.

Those last five hitters are known for their power and mainly hit line drives or flyballs. I need to run a quick study to find out.

I took all MLB hitters from 2015 and 2016 and compared their corrected launch angle (from StatCast) to their groundball numbers (from Baseball Info Solutions). Here’s the graph (min 100 balls in play).

Note: Ryan Schimpf is the outlier with a 26-degree launch angle.

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 Note: Do to a calculation error involving popups, the values initially report were off by a small bit. Everything is corrected now.

Our Dark Overlord continues to install enhancements to FanGraphs. One item which he has sneaked in over the weekend in Swinging Strike (must add to custom dashboard) and Groundball Rates for minor league pitchers (example). With the data now available to query, it’s time to find the league specific baselines and compare some highly touted prospects. Today, I will just concentrate just on the batted ball data.

Anytime new data becomes available, the baselines values are the starting point for an analysis so comparisons can be made. First, here are the overall league ground ball rates from 2016.

There is some funkiness going on in Rookie Ball and the Majors but the general trend is for ground ball rates to drop as the level approached the majors. Generally, the numbers are steady. With the league averages out of the way, I will move onto pitchers.

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Tout Wars Thoughts:

In Tout Wars, I am currently last in both ERA (5.32) and WHIP (1.58). I knew I would struggle in these two categories but this lack of production is about impossible to replicate. The culprits are:

Name: ERA, WHIP
Corey Kluber: 6.38, 1.42
Rick Porcello: 7.56, 1.74
Adam Wainwright: 7.24, 2.20
Jeff Samardzija: 6.16, 1.42

Two of my closers aren’t much better:
Blake Treinen: 6.00, 2.00
Ken Giles: 9.00, 1.80

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This post on old broken men comes via Mario Mendoza when he asked about a few pitchers.

While I won’t cover all the pitchers today, McCarthy and Ryu intrigue me because they’ve been productive in the past but injuries cost them most of last season. While not listed, Lance Lynn and Brett Anderson fall in the same category. As a group, they averaged 15 IP in 2016. Here is a quick take on all four.

Brandon McCarthy (Dodgers)

Wow, I hope the other pitchers will be easier to analyze. McCarthy has been consistently inconsistent. I will start with the basics. His fastball’s averaging 93.2 mph. He’s been at this higher velocity the last four seasons after averaging around 90 mph before 2014.

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Quick Look: Mike Foltynewicz

The people spoke and I watched Foltynewicz’s start this past Friday.

Who should I watch (and then write about) this afternoon?

— Jeff Zimmerman (@jeffwzimmerman) April 7, 2017

I’ve seen him throw previously and nothing has changed. He’s got a hard straight fastball and owners seems to be hoping one or more of his non-slider breaking pitches eventually play up. I only tracked his progress for the first two or so innings and quit once the rain at the game started coming down. Here’s what I saw.

Fastball (Grade 55): 92-97. Straight. Some rise. Heavy early use. The ball comes in fast and sometimes leaves even faster.

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