It’s still March and the season has yet to start but that doesn’t mean the closer carousel isn’t in full swing. From here on out, as teams whittle down their major league rosters and we get more information on bullpen usage, we will be updating the BR regularly.

• Red Sox closer Koji Uehara has been on the shelf with a hamstring injury lately and it acted up again in a bullpen session Monday. While Uehara’s injury isn’t major, he’s still 39 years old without a clean medical bill. Uehara won’t be out for too long but it’s important to note Uehara said “I don’t know when I’ll be back […] It’s a day-to-day process. I have to do what I have to do to get ready.”  In Uehara’s place, expect Edward Mujica to take over the ninth with a little Junichi Tazawa thrown in. Mujica should now be owned in all leagues, even shallow ones. He can’t be relied upon for particularly strong ratio help or strikeouts, but saves are saves and Mujica will be tallying them in the first month of the season.

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It’s my favorite time of the year here at RotoGraphs, the season of bold predictions. (My least favorite time, naturally, is late September, when I have to atone for these forecasts.) As usual, the trick here is to balance imagination against reality, the impossible versus the attainable, the speculative against the demonstrable. It’s a tough task that, for me, often results in happy predictions, but then again, it’s March — ’tis the season to indulge in some fantasy baseball fantasies, right?
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Yesterday, I took our bold predictions one step further by unveiling my bold hitter league leaders. It’s not easy picking a league leader that could both be considered bold, and yet still not outrageous. Today I turn to pitchers, who with two ratio categories, are perhaps a bit easier.

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With the news that Kenley Jansen is going to be sidelined into May after undergoing surgery on his landing foot, the Dodgers are going to need to find someone to close games for them in his stead. Over the past five seasons, Andrew Friedman has cobbled together bullpens in Tampa that ranked 11th in WAR in the majors. Not stellar, but definitely better than the 24th place the Dodgers have ranked over that same span. Has he given Don Mattingly the right mix to fill the hole left by Jansen, or is he going to go out and add a Rafael Soriano through free agency, or will he reach out to the Phillies and try to make a deal for Jonathan Papelbon?

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Suppose you think a team is going to improve significantly from last year’s performance. You’re not sure exactly how they’re going to do it, but you’re reasonably confident that they will. If you happen to live in the enlightened state of Nevada or are acquainted with a sports accountant, you can bet the team’s over-under. Is there any way to translate that belief into the acquisition of an undervalued player on draft day?

In forecasting team outcomes, we always like to look at a team’s record in 1-run games in the preceding season. The Elias Sports Bureau long ago discovered that (to simplify but not distort their insight) teams that perform poorly in 1-run games in Season 1 and then have a good record in the spring training games of Season 2 significantly outperform almost everyone’s expectations during Season 2 itself. The teams with the worst 1-run records in the majors last season were the Astros (17-28) and the Reds (22-38). Is there any reason—right now, before any spring training games have been played-to think they’ll do better in 2015? Yes, we think. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to talk to you about Dellin Betances.

Wait! Wait. No. No, I wouldn’t. I’d like to talk about Mike Podhorzer first. Mike has published a lot of great work covering the fundamentals of the xK% (and xBB%) metric for pitchers (and hitters), so if you are unfamiliar with or falling behind on his work, I recommend you first click here, here or here. But if you’re lazy, the short of it is: xK%, or expected strikeout rate, is an equation birthed from a linear regression that measures how a pitcher’s looking, swinging and foul-ball strike rates as well as overall strike percentage correlates with his strikeout rate. It doesn’t predict future strikeout rates as much as it retrospectively adjusts past strikeout rates; thus, it is a good tool for identifying pitchers who potentially benefited (or suffered) from good (bad) luck in a previous season – say, 2014.

Like many other metrics completely unrelated to xK%, however, there is evidence that certain players consistently out-perform (or under-perform) what their xK% rates predict their actual K% rates should be. (Mike alludes to this trend in his quip about Jeremy Hellickson, a xK% underachiever, in one of the articles linked above.) Similarly to how a power hitter will post consistently higher ratios of home runs to fly balls (HR/FB) than a non-power hitter, or how Mike Trout will probably post some of the highest batting averages on balls in play (babip) in the league for years to come, it appears there is some skill, or perhaps a particular characteristic, inherent to pitchers who consistently best, or fall short of, their xK% rates.

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It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

The Brewers lost half of what was a decent bullpen to free agency (Francisco Rodriguez, Zach Duke, and Tom Gorzelanny) and trades (Marco Estrada) this offseason and would enter the 2015 season pretty thin as currently constituted. That makes Milwaukee a relief corps in flux for fantasy. K-Rod recorded 44 of the team’s 45 saves last season, and Duke earned 1.3 WAR in a dominant campaign that featured 11.4 strikeouts per nine, which placed him in the top 25 of relievers with at least 50 innings pitched last season. Duke is now a White Sox and cannot return, but K-Rod remains unsigned. His return would mute much of the intrigue that centers on a likely new old closer.
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I am huge proponent of the pitch type work which has led to the Arsenal Score here are FanGraphs. One possible issue with pitch type data is a reasonable amount of data needs to be collected before any conclusions could be draw. I am going to take it a step further today and look for MLB ready fastballs knowing just the pitcher’s velocity and break. Just knowing how the pitch’s speed and trajectory, some conclusions can be drawn on how the pitcher will perform in the future.

This past summer, I found how to estimate a pitcher’s fastball ground ball (GB%) and swinging strike rate (SwStr%) knowing just the velocity and break. The ground ball rate was the same for all pitches while the swinging strike rate varied a bit. Well, I went into meld/average mode to come up with a method to find a simple way to determine how productive a fastball may be knowing its current break and speed.

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So many things happened. Everyone was traded. Everyone was released. And everyone was signed. It’ll fuel RotoGraphs pieces for weeks to come. You’ll see more in-depth pieces on these guys. But, with the dust settled, it seems like a good time to run all through some of the players that changed addresses, and talk a little bit about how they may have changed their fantasy outlooks for the coming season.

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Last week, I examined rookie pitchers Daniel Norris and Rafael Montero for my weekly Quick Looks piece. With both pitchers, they had several pitches which just got away from them. There was no way a hitter was going even think about swinging at them. These pitches put the pitcher constantly behind in the count. While I could use Zone% to determine the amount pitches in or out of the strike zone, I wanted to look a little further out of the zone to find pitches not even close to the strike zone and I ended up with, Way Out of the Zone Percentage (WOOZ%).

I have wanted to look into this subject for while after hearing Brian Bannister mention something in a Baseball Prospectus podcast. He said some pitchers can have problems with their grips as they transition from the higher seamed minor league baseball to the lower seamed MLB baseball. Specifically, he noted it hurt pitchers who throw four-seam fastballs and curve balls. Since starting Quick Looks, which concentrates on young, new pitchers, I have seen a ton of pitches not near the zone which may be caused by not having a good grip. I needed to find and solution and for now it is WOOZ%.

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