On Wednesday I explained why Joel Hanrahan is a bit undervalued in comparison to John Axford. The next step I decided to take is to evaluate Hanrahan’s fastball to elaborate on why his success last year should continue this season as well. After all, Hanrahan had 269 innings in his career before the 68.2 he threw last year. Standard thinking would force one to believe his 209 ERA+ season was an outlier, as his career ERA+ is just 106.

However, as I explained in the article earlier this week, Hanrahan altered his approach on the mound. He turned into a fastball dominant pitcher, moving away from the fastball-slider combination he had utilized for the majority of his career. At least some credit must be given to Ray Searage, the Pirates pitching coach, and the rest of the group that decided this would be a much more effective way for Hanrahan to pitch.

Read the rest of this entry »

After part one of the auction for the Second FanGraphs Staff League, I took some time to look back at the strategy I set up going into the auction, and to re-strategize for day two, based on where I was.

And looking back, I’d have to say I executed pretty well, although not always in the ways I expected.

Read the rest of this entry »

The trouble with writing up any type of offseason primer or plan is that, inevitably, something changes with a player, rendering the writing useless. For example, Edinson Volquez and Yonder Alonso were traded the morning after I’d written up their player caps for FG+. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that mere hours after I wrote a section on David Aardsma as a free agent and possible midseason pick up, he would sign a two-year contract with the Yankees. Oh well, C’est la guerre.

Spring Training is a time for small stories to become huge stories simply because there aren’t really good things to talk about yet. Yes, pitchers and catchers finally reported, but unless PFP is the kind of the thing that really revs your engine, good stories are still few and far between. This is how something minor like Tim Lincecum’s tight back briefly becomes a serious concern. Another of these tempest-in-a-teapot spring stories is Mariano Rivera hinting that 2012 may be his last season. I get that for Yankees fans, it means a storied career coming to an end and there’s always some sadness with that, but the man is headed into his age-42 season. This was going to happen sooner or later with sooner as the early favorite.

It’s with an eye toward the post-Rivera future that Yankees GM Brian Cashman has signed Aardsma to be an option for the possibly vacant 2013 closers role. Unlike Rafael Soriano in 2011, however, Aardsma won’t be spending his 2012 racking up  innings as an uncloser and waiting for his chance. The 30-year-old right-hander is still working his way back from the Tommy John surgery that was performed in late July of last year. That means there’s virtually no way Aardsma comes back before August 1 and while one year is the commonly accepted timeline for return from Tommy John, newer research suggests that the figure is probably just a little longer than that, which would push Aardsma closer to a mid-August return.

This makes him unusable in redraft leagues, and to be frank, I don’t even see him as a waiver option this season. He’ll be facing major league hitters for the first time since the end of 2010 at the end of the fantasy season and beginning of the fantasy playoffs, which introduces an awful lot of risk for a player who may need 3-4 low leverage outings to get his feeling back. I think there’s every reason to believe he’ll be more valuable for the Yankees than he is for fantasy players in 2012.

For keeper and dynasty players, however, the calculus is a little different. Is Aardsma worth stashing in a DL spot for most or all of 2012 to have the potential Yankee closer on your roster for 2013? The short answer is that I doubt it. The way Aardsma’s deal is structured is such that it’s not actually a two-year deal, it’s a one-year deal with a team option for 2013. So, if Aardsma looks good in the minors and pitches well down the stretch, the Yankees will retain his rights and put him in the mix for the closers job next year…if Rivera does retire.

There are four options regarding Aardsma’s 2013 status based on his performance in 2012. If he doesn’t pitch well or doesn’t get healthy, the Yankees won’t retain him and his fantasy value going forward is virtually nil. If he pitches well, there are still three options. First, the Yankees choose not to retain him anyway because they feel confident with their younger bullpen options and let him go back to free agency. Second, the Yankees do retain him, but either Rivera comes back for 2013 or they choose to give the closer’s job to David Robertson, Joba Chamberlain, or some other reliever, who may not even be on the roster at this point. Third, Aardsma pitches well in 2011 and gets the job for 2013. So, that’s three potential negative outcomes compared to just one potential positive outcome, which to me seems too risky, even with the upside of having the Yankee closer stashed away at a low cost. As always, your mileage may vary.

I’ll be interested to see how Aardsma looks after watching Joe Nathan struggle a little bit coming back from Tommy John last year. We know that relievers fatigue differently from starters and, at least according to the Journal of Anecdotal Medicine, seem to be prone to less predictable returns from surgery. If Aardsma does return to pitch well in 2012, he’ll definitely be on my radar for 2013 drafts whether he’s with the Yankees or not, but there’s enough ambiguity in his future that I’ll be watching from afar this year rather than taking him on as risk.

The consensus around the fantasy industry seems to be that John Axford is a top tier closer while Joel Hanrahan is more of a second tier guy. Among closers, Axford has been drafted third in standard mock drafts on Mock Draft Central and fifth in expert drafts, while Hanrahan sits at eighth and tenth respectively. To me, there seems to be a bit too large of a gap between their draft positions.

Hanrahan has posted two consecutive sub-3.00 FIP seasons, though his ERA dropped almost two full runs from 2010 to last season. The drop in ERA had a lot to do with Hanrahan’s pitching approach, as he threw his fastball over 15% more than his career average. This resulted in a 10% increase in ground balls and only one home run allowed compared to his yearly average of six long balls given up.

While his career BABIP of .318 and 8.2% HR/FB ratio point to a regression, — he posted a career best .282 BABIP and 1.9% HR/FB ratio last year — his new approach seems to be a good counter-point against his numbers reverting back to career rates. Even if you do expect a regression, he should maintain similar success on batted balls with his new fastball heavy method.

Read the rest of this entry »

The newest out of Reds camp — other than the completely unsurprising fact that noted veteran-lover Dusty Baker won’t declare Devin Mesoraco his number one catcher yet — is that the team might try Aroldis Chapman in the rotation. From a team value standpoint, it makes all the sense in the world. From a fantasy standpoint, however, his prognosis is mixed.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week, we’ll be giving away one FG+ membership per day by playing the FG+ Over/Under Game. The wrinkle on this game is that it’s subjective: we’ll provide a player and a number, and you use the comments section to make your best argument for the over or the under. The RotoGraphs staff will pick a winner every day, and that person will get a free subscription to FG+, which includes 11 full-length fantasy strategy articles, 1100 player caps on the player pages, and ongoing access to the FG+ blog, which features the writing the FanGraphs team provides to ESPN Insider on a weekly basis all year.

For our fourth over/under game, let’s take a look at closers in general. Every year, a gaggle of new closers are minted.

The over/under for today’s game is nine. As in, will there be more or less than nine new closers next year? For our purposes, let’s define a new closer as one who will accrue over 20 saves more than he did in 2011.

If you had a subscription to FG+ right now, you could consult Jack Moore’s excellent piece that attempts to use shutdowns and meltdowns to predict closer changes. You would even see a little more about the following figure:

But since you don’t have any more background than a simple tally of the last three years — and yes, I’m suggesting that current FG + subscribers take a back seat and allow those without your knowledge to compete for this — you’ll have to do the best you can to predict the number of closer changes coming in 2012. Use any methods at your disposal.

Have at it!

There were only a handful of relievers who pitched as well or better than Greg Holland did over the course of last season. He was one of just seven two win pitchers, and could have finished near the top of the league had he not thrown 21.2 innings at triple-A.

Holland is more-or-less a classic two pitch reliever, but he relies more on his slider than most of his peers. According to his Brooks Baseball player card, he threw his slider on 42% of his pitches last year compared to the 50% rate that he threw his fastball, which is a rather high slider to fastball ratio. In generating an astonishing 30% whiff rate even with such a high frequency, his PITCHf/x slider value of 12.2 ranked second in the league behind only Mike Adams.

Not surprisingly, Holland went to his slider much more frequently than his fastball in one and two strike counts. Getting ahead with his high velocity fastball then moving to the top notch slider provided great dividends for Holland and any fantasy owners last year. His contact percentage was third to only Kenley Jansen and Craig Kimbrel, the top two strikeout arms in the league.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the ways a closer can lose his job is to not get hitters out from both sides of the plate. If a right-handed closer is only able to get RHH out consistently, teams will begin to stack the line-up with as many LHH as possible. Here is an in depth look at closer handedness splits.

I got the list of current closers from MLB Depth Charts a couple of days ago. Currently, several teams have shaky situations at closer, so this list will likely change before the beginning of Spring Training. I will try to give an update on it with the changes later.

Read the rest of this entry »

Only five relievers have a higher WAR than Rafael Betancourt since 2009, Matt Thornton, Mariano Rivera, Jonathan Papelbon, Brian Wilson, and Sean Marshall. Despite ranking up there with the best relievers in the league over that time period, Betancourt, who will close for the Rockies this season, has been receiving little love in mock drafts this year.

While his ERA of 3.09 since ’09 is not spectacular, he does have two seasons with an ERA under 2.90 in three years. He has also tallied 223 strikeouts in 180.2 innings, or 11.11 strikeouts per nine. Of relievers expected to close next season, only Carlos Marmol has a higher strikeout percentage than Betancourt’s 31.3% rate. Only Thornton has a lower xFIP of expected closers, and Addison Reed may end up being the man in the ninth for the White Sox. Betancourt’s 10.13 strikeout-to-walk ratio over the past two years of is double that of all but two pitchers’, Edward Mujica at 6.75 and Mariano Rivera at 5.53.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a Colorado Rockie, Matt Lindstrom was persona non grata in fantasy circles entering the 2012 season. Stuck behind Rafael Betancourt, Matt Belisle and Rex Brothers, Lindstrom had about as much chance of racking up saves as the squirrel that presumably inhabits Todd Helton’s beard. But Lindstrom’s hopes of closing out games perked up on Monday, as he was traded to the Orioles along with Jason Hammel in exchange for Jeremy Guthrie. While he will likely take a back seat to Jim Johnson initially, Lindstrom’s improved control and Baltimore’s lack of ‘pen depth make him worth monitoring.

Read the rest of this entry »