Archive for Closers

The playoff hangover must have been still lingering in Washington and Rafael Soriano is apparently the salve.

You could hear the cries of Tyler Clippard and Drew Storen owners all across the fantasy landscape when the news of the Nationals inking Soriano to a two year, pile of unnecessary cash deal, was announced. But there were apparently enough concerns over Storen’s health, his playoff meltdown versus the St. Louis Cardinals, and/or Tyler Clippards forgettable second half, that bringing in Soriano to put out fires was necessary.

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Most of the time, you can determine if pitchers were unlucky over the course of a season by looking at few factors like LOB%, BABIP or HR/FB%. Today, I am going to look a little further to find pitchers who may have been even more lucky or unlucky on batted balls by looking at their wBABIP.

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Joel Hanrahan is headed out of town, and since it’s Boston as the destination, he’s likely to remain the closer. Andrew Bailey’s loss must be someone’s gain, however — there’s a vacuum behind The Hammer in Pittsburgh. Who will fill it?

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Jose Veras signed with the Astros. Dude’s 32 and has a career walk rate around five per nine. His career swinging-strike rate is below average. Why does he deserve a post again?

Opportunity. Opportunity and reliability.

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On Monday, I looked at the top hitters according to the recently added Bill James Handbook Projections. Today, I will see how the projection system sees the pitchers performing this season.

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The Tigers — Hanshin, not Detroit — have lost their closer. After years of trying to convince his team to post him, the 32-year-old Kyuji Fujikawa is a free agent now and touring the United States. Though he’s got an interesting arsenal, there’s already some decline in his Japanese numbers. His future depends, as it does, on his landing spot.

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There is a difference between a bad year and a disappointing one. Plenty of players were terrible this year, but since no one expected anything less, no one was disappointed, and that’s not really where the confusion lies. When a player is expected to do great, amazingly wonderful things and instead only does good, above-average things, it’s not uncommon to hear that he had a bad season when the reality is that his production was adequate, it was just not as good as expected. (There is, of course, the third category of player who was expected to do well and in fact does very badly. At that point, either branch of criticism is fair game; take it away, Dr. Zoidberg!)

Given the expectations heaped on him after 2011’s tour de force, Alex Avila definitely had a disappointing season, there’s not much disputing that, but did he actually have a bad one? That largely depends on whether or not the driving number of your league is average or OBP. In any holistic sense, Avila was an effective enough offensive player. His wRC+ of 104 isn’t going to win him any awards, but it does mean he was slightly above average offensively speaking at a position where it’s still acceptable to hit poorly provided the player defends and/or commands the pitching staff well. So, given that he stayed healthy enough to qualify for the batting title and finished with an above-average wRC+, why is Avila ranked 20th out of the 26 catchers who qualified in Zach Sanders’ rankings? Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the predictions I made heading into 2012, there was not a single one I had more total confidence in than “Javy Guerra would lose his closing job in Los Angeles to Kenley Jansen.” After all, Guerra was an unheralded prospect who collected 21 saves in 2011 largely due to being the right place at the right time on a Dodger team which had already lost Jonathan Broxton, Hong-Chih Kuo, Vicente Padilla, & Jansen to injury. Jansen, meanwhile, was merely coming off a season which he set a record for highest K/9 rate (min. 50 innings).

It didn’t take long before we saw that prediction come true; Guerra blew several April saves and lost his job to Jansen by the first week of May, never to regain it. Jansen became one of the more dominating closers in the game when healthy—and more on that in a second—and so you’d think that he’d enter 2013 secure in his role racking up saves. Well, think otherwise, at least if GM Ned Colletti’s comments to Ken Gurnick of MLB.com about Brandon League can be believed… Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, I took a look back at the hitters who I boldly predicted would lead the league in each of the 5×5 fantasy categories. Well, I made those same predictions for pitchers as well in the pre-season. So, let’s see if I did just as poorly or had some better luck.

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As the RotoGraphs fantasy awards trickle out, there are many interesting debates. Was Jake Peavy or Chris Sale the better bargain in the American League? Just who was the best buy-low in the National League? However, a couple votes needed far less deliberation — one of those was the National League’s Bull Cy; the relief pitcher for your fantasy squad who cost you the least but brought you most. As such, let’s jump right to the staff voting.

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