Shockingly, it has been nearly 100 plate appearances since Gary Sanchez was recalled by the Yankees for a full-time role and this is his first dedicated RotoGraphs post. Of course, in itself, not talking about a recently recalled prospect 24 games into his career isn’t noteworthy. Except, when that career begins the way Sanchez’s has.
Listeners of the podcast should be well familiar with this format. Paul Sporer and I try to come up with a few salient points about each player to help you make your decisions. So This week I thought I’d help as many of you as I possibly could with one article. So let’s take three (okay six) hitters and three pitchers from the twitter mailbag and have us some fun.
Cameron Rupp has been surging for the past month and a half, producing a .298/.353/.575 slash line over that period. Pretty solid numbers in their own right, and he has been one of the most valuable offensive forces in baseball over this stretch (ranked 29th by wOBA). It is even better when you consider he is a catcher with a 7% owned rate in the Yahoo leagues.
Following the conclusion of the 2015 season, during the end of season meetings, Pete Mackanin suggested Rupp may benefit from altering his bat path. During the off season, Cameron with the aid Chris Edelstein, a batting instructor he has known since childhood, went to work on shortening his bat path and focusing on the top of the ball. He came into spring training this season with a newly adapted swing, one in which he describes as having “a minor adjustment.” In early May, Rupp told Joe Harris, a contributor of MLB.com:
This week I am doing Part 2 of my ground-breaking, innovative, revolutionary, completely original piece from two weeks ago that no one has ever thought of before, but before I do I want to mention that it was pointed out to me that our very own Alex Chamberlain did some fantastic articles covering the exact same premise for DFS last season: Read the rest of this entry »
The two players I’m recommending this week share almost nothing in common. One is young, powerful, and crushingly enticing. The other is nearing the end of a magnificent career with the same fleetness of foot he enthralled us with 15 years ago. Endless potential versus a potential storybook ending. And if you own either of them right now, you’re likely playing in a very, very deep league.
Read the rest of this entry »
In this week’s edition of Deep League Waiver Wire, we take a look at a reliever and a catcher unclaimed in a vast majority of leagues yet worth a closer look.
Michael Feliz (7% Yahoo, 7% ESPN, 11% CBS) – 2016 hasn’t been a good season for fantasy owners who prefer to accumulate saves through the waiver wire. That there have been relatively few closer controversies during the first two months has forced the save-starved to speculate on relievers two or three promotions from the ninth. And Michael Feliz is no exception*.
The Closer Grid on Rotograph’s Bullpen Report has featured the same three Houston relievers for quite some time now: Luke Gregerson, Will Harris, and Ken Giles. But a reliever outside of those three leads the bullpen in K%-BB%, xFIP, and in limiting hard contact. And with 25.2 IP under his belt, he’s been there nearly the whole time, quietly dominating as the rest of the pen accumulated 9 blown saves. As you might have guessed, that reliever is THIS INANIMATE CARBON ROD! Just kidding, it’s Michael Feliz.
It was suggested that we should celebrate the day that stats stabilize. Today is Grounder Day! Eat a sloppy joe while sitting on a blanket. Drink one of these, or some of this, but I don’t know about having any of this. Grounder Day!
Well, we actually aren’t all the way there. Only about twenty players have officially reached the stabilization point for ground ball rate. But that’s fine. It actually serves as a reminder that stabilization is not something that magically happens at one point. Stabilization happens over a spectrum, and today we know a little more than we did yesterday, and tomorrow we’ll know a little more.
But! Relative to *other* stats on our leaderboards, we know a good deal about a player’s ground ball rate by now. And the beauty of that news is that just knowing a player’s change in ground ball rate can tell us a good deal about what sort of power we should expect from them going forward.
Let’s go deep down into the depths of your free agent pool. It’s where the risks are great and hidden treasures may emerge. Today’s theme is speculating on two guys that could remain worthless, but will cost you next to nothing to find out.
I just spent that last two weeks on vacation with my family. Hoping to escape the dreariness of the wettest Seattle winter on record, we embarked for the warm and artery-clogging bosoms of New Orleans and Miami. The first week of the season is always a cause for celebration in my house but I have to say watching the grand ol’ game with a mouthful of beignets made the start to this season even more special. I think players would be far more receptive to the tobacco ban if MLB replaced tins of Skoal with beignets from Café Du Monde or Morning Call.
I also picked up a pretty rad souvenir for my 8-month old son at the Miami airport. I know that Legos aren’t really age appropriate since he currently feels the need to fit absolutely everything he sees into his mouth so it’ll remain perched far above where his grubby little hands can reach for some time.
But it wasn’t all powdered sugar smiles and medianoches at mediodía. There was plenty of belt-loosening self-loathing, GERD, and of course, fretting over my fantasy teams. You see in my home league, a 14-team keep-6 now in its sixth year as a keeper format, I was the proud owner of both A.J. Pollock and Kyle Schwarber. And while I had tempered expectations for both entering this season, I didn’t expect to have to replace 1/3rd of my keepers before the first week of April concluded.
So as with my son’s new Lego Ichiro, I’m tasked with piecing together a team from the waiver wire in the hopes that it’ll ultimately prove greater than the sum of its awkwardly shaped plastic brick parts. And with that in mind, I’d like to recommend a few players available in deep leagues to replace the Pollocks, Schwarbers, and Tyson Rosses of the fantasy world.
Devastating news pierced through the fantasy baseball world on Thursday afternoon when we learned that Tuffy Gosewisch would be sent to Triple-A to start the season.
#Dbacks option catcher Tuffy Gosewisch to the Triple-A Reno @Aces.
— Arizona Diamondbacks (@Dbacks) March 31, 2016
Losing an early round pick like this can be crushing to a team before we even throw a single pitch in the regular season, but you’re not doomed to last place because of it. That said, you have to hold Gosewisch in all formats at this point. He’s too valuable a commodity to just cut willy-nilly. If fools in your league played themselves and cut him, you need to be ready to pounce. Here are the catchers I’d cut to get Gosewisch:
Kyle Schwarber, Brian McCann, Travis d’Arnaud, Salvador Perez, Russell Martin, Yasmani Grandal, Derek Norris, Stephen Vogt, Matt Wieters, Yan Gomes, Devin Mesoraco, Francisco Cervelli, Welington Castillo, J.T. Realmuto, Blake Swihart, Nick Hundley, Miguel Montero, and Wilson Ramos