Earlier this year, we began looking for new writers and the interest was truly remarkable. I want to thank everyone who took the time to apply. This was my first time going through a hiring process here at FanGraphs and it was incredible to see so many talented people get involved. Of course, this abundance of talented folks meant the decisions would be difficult and, in the end, they absolutely were.

I want to reiterate a note Meg had in the front page welcome. If you weren’t part of this hiring run, continue writing. There will be other opportunities, whether here or elsewhere, and not only that, but it strengthens the outlets you currently write for as they grow their footprint in the baseball world. The expansion of the baseball writing community since I started 412 years ago has been amazing to watch and helped cultivate an amazing pool of candidates.

Let’s get to know our new class of Rotographs writers officially joining the team on April 1st:

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I’m going to continue my analysis of NFBC Main Event drops, but this first week will be a one-off. The NFBC ran its first FAAB bids last night but not all the leagues have drafted (I have my final one tonight), so the adds and drops not have the normal diversity and depth. Some of the information is still useful. With the limited number of teams and with the drafts so close to the season’s will dive into some of the players on the move (minimum three moves).

Note: I use the NFBC Main Event movement because it’s a decent number of identical leagues. Additionally, the owners stay engaged longer since each spent over $1700 per team.
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Most drafts are in the books and the NFBC even ran their first waiver period last night. It’s time to start focusing on the future a bit. Not too far out, April is our focus. Here are a couple guys to put on your watchlist and monitor in the early part of the season. Most platforms have a feature where you can click something by the player’s name to put them on a virtual watchlist.

It is smart to use this feature before the season starts because once it starts you will likely be sorting by certain stats and you could miss out on someone you really want about to get a new role because you sorted by PA and he just didn’t show very high.

SHALLOW LEAGUES (mixed leagues – 10 or fewer teams)

Trevor Rogers | P, MIA

I got to write the profile blurb for Rogers in this year’s Baseball HQ Forecaster and I pointed out how he allowed 13 of his 19 ER across two hideous outings while showing off above average swing-and-miss stuff in the other successful five starts (2.57 ERA, 32% K rate). The 23-year-old lefty has good velocity and three reliable pitches.

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3/28/21

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to our Patreon!!

Follow us on Twitter

• @justinmasonfwfb – Host/Producer
• @jasoncollette – Co-host

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This weekend is the last big push of drafts so it’s time for one final update of my SP ranks. Lots of movement as it’s time to lock in and put together our rotations.

The blue bar represents the START of a new tier. Yes, deGrom is his own tier.

You can also get up to the minute rankings of every position on our Patreon.

UPDATE(S):

• I didn’t adjust Carrasco for his groin issue, so I put him at 102.5 right now because I’m not able to update the table right now and he’s going to slot in after Thor, but I wanted to note Carrasco’s drop. Thanks to Mike from Twitter for catching that.

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With drafts beginning to ramp up, it is important to monitor where players are being drafted on a regular basis. Throughout draft season, I will be doing that work for you with regular updates on the Average Draft Position on NFBC up until Opening Day. You can find all the pieces in this series here.

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3/25/21

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to our Patreon!!

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer – Host
• @justinmasonfwfb – Co-Host/Producer

NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS/INJURIES/RUMORS

• Kirby Yates update: getting TJS (5:25)
• Eloy Jiménez may “miss significant time” w/shoulder issue (10:40; 39:52)
  • Adam Engel/Leury Garcia (41:30)
• Andrew Vaughn trending toward breaking camp (15:10)
  • Joey Votto ranking (17:10)

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The NFBC runs all kinds of contests ranging anywhere from $50 to $5000. Two of their main contests are Online Championships which are mainly $350 (qualifiers are available) and their Main Event which is a $1700 buy-in. The attractiveness of the NFBC is that there is an overall prize meaning you can win your league and try to beat everyone else in all of the other leagues for a huge score.

As a fun exercise below, I took the ADP since March 1st for both the Online Championships and the Main Event to compare the two. It’s worth noting that historically the Main Event always pushes up starting pitching. More importantly in Main Events, participants aren’t afraid to get “their” guys. Meaning they will jump ADP by a few rounds to make sure they get a player they love. Here are some players who have taken a noticeable jump between the two leagues. 

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Transcript is now live!

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Blah, blah, some intro stuff on some guy that goes on too long. And here are the hitters who might be changing their launch angle (i.e. groundball rate).

Using Spring Training Ground Outs divided by Airball Outs (GO/AO), some possible swing plane changes might already be detectable. To find possible change, I found the hitters who had a combined 50% GB% and at least 300 PA from 2019 to 2020. Then, I removed those with fewer than 30 spring plate appearances and got the GO/AO values for the rest. Next, I converted the GO/AO to groundball rate (GB%) using the formula in this article. Finally, I just calculated the greatest differences and here are the results.

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