Archive for Featured

Every Monday, this column will break down the most popular waiver wire and free agent acquisitions of the weekend.

Fantasy baseball managers know that our game is the ultimate test of grit, grind, tenacity, and patience. Unlike fantasy football, where league titles can be won with minimal in-season activity, fantasy baseball leagues require incessant attention and activity. Particularly when it comes to free agent adds and drops. Real-life baseball managers are constantly adjusting batting orders, players are frequently optioned to and promoted from the Minor Leagues, and injuries occur almost daily. There’s no resting on our laurels. We must always stay vigilant with league news and notes and remain active on the waiver wire if we want to win our leagues.

Every week, I’ll dig into the top adds on the ever-popular Fantrax and in the NFBC Online Championship (OC), a national mid-stakes contest with 240 total leagues of 12 and a six-figure grand prize. Reviewing player adds between the two should provide us with a well-rounded perspective and barometer of the fantasy baseball marketplace.

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Now that the foundations have been laid and the methodology explained in Part 1 of this series, we can dive deeper into some of these pitchers.

As noted in the previous piece, Corbin Young wrote two breakdowns of individual rookie starters that I will link below:

The first covering Nolan McLean, Bubba Chandler, and Parker Messick. Link here.

The second covering Payton Tolle, Connelly Early, Brandon Sproat, and Trey Yesavage. Link here.

So this will be more of a collective analysis of the rough groupings and what stands out from the composite rating, and whether any deeper stats can further support or provide additional context for fantasy purposes.

The composite z-score rating has provided a solid framework for assessing this group of rookies, and most have now logged enough innings to draw early conclusions from the metrics. It is these pitchers who will receive the bulk of the analysis in this piece, while Gage Jump has looked enticing in his two starts — 12 innings is not quite enough for meaningful metric analysis just yet, but well worth keeping a close eye on.

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Here is today’s chat transcript:

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Our esteemed RotoGraphs editor recently passed along a question to the team that came to him from a reader:

“If a player runs a high k-rate upon debut for a significant amount of time, how likely is it that they’ll ever be a viable fantasy hitter?”

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Streaming pitchers is a much cleaner exercise than streaming hitters. And oftentimes, the expected production is relatively more guaranteed. But in an offensive environment where hitting seems to be increasingly hard to find on the wire, then playing hot hands, and even better, trying to predict hot hands, becomes worthwhile. 

That’s what I’ll try and do in this article. At the team level, I’ll point you to the teams who are playing the most games this week, the teams playing in the friendliest hitter’s parks. Then, I’ll look more into platoon splits, playing time, and how hot they are heading into the week to try and identify a crop of hitters you should consider streaming. To limit the player pool to hitters who are likely to be available, I’ll only use hitters who are around 50% rostered or less in either Yahoo or CBS leagues.

This is my first attempt at this exercise. I’ll try and provide plenty of information to help you make decisions that apply to your league and team context, from position eligibility to rostership rates. 

Please let me know in the comments if there’s other information that’d be helpful, format changes, or any other potential changes!

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Though I’m not sure there’s a particular comparison study that makes such a definitive conclusion, it certainly feels like pitchers’ underlying skills are far more volatile during the season than batters. While that usually shows up in strikeout and walk rates, we also might see it in new stats like Stuff+. So it’s worth tracking recent trends to identify pitchers whose stuff has either improved or deteriorated as that could explain recent performance and potentially predict future performance better than if using stale Stuff+ marks.

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• Daily SP Chart archive
• 2-Start podcast episode
• SP Rankings (last update: 6/5 | next: July)

Welcome to the Daily SP Chart, click here if you’re new to get an idea of what I’m doing with these rankings.

It’s a pretty straightforward board today with some easy locks at the top and few decisions on the streaming front.

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What a way to end the game!

On the Agenda: 

1. Closer Chaos
2. Quick Hits
3. Various News and Notes
4. Streaming Pitchers

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7:33	Jeff Zimmerman:

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Christopher Hanewinckel-Imagn Images

In this article, I cover the players using CBS’s and Yahoo’s ADD/DROP rates. Both sites have the option for daily and weekly waiver wire adds. CBS uses a weekly change while Yahoo looks at the last 24 hours. Yahoo is a great snapshot of right now, while CBS ensures hot targets from early in the week aren’t missed. I start players being added at CBS who started the week on less than 40% of rosters.

The players are ordered for redraft leagues by my rest-of-season preference, grouped by hitters, starters, and relievers. Read the rest of this entry »