Archive for Head to Head

The other day, while looking for starting pitchers to stream in one of my leagues, I stumbled across Michael Wacha on the waiver wire. (This league only has one DL slot, so players who miss considerable time are often dropped.) I was pretty pumped about this and picked him up immediately.

I told my co-owner Seth, and he was significantly less excited than I was. “He’s not going to pitch enough to matter,” he said. Wacha’s rehab assignment after missing nearly three full months was limited to just one 34-pitch start in Double-A, and he tossed just 50 pitches in his return to the major-league rotation. With so little time left in the season, I figured we should probably look into whether Seth was right. Would that roster spot have more value if we continued to use it for streaming?

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Derek Holland is back. Two starts in, things look pretty good. He still owns a 4.30 career ERA, and is coming off of major knee surgery. Is there anything in his profile that should make us worry?

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Usually all topics for posts come to me while in that hazy state between sleep and not sleep. On many an occasion an idea has snapped me out of that haze and sent me reaching for my phone in order to email the idea to myself so it can be remembered in the morning. But with football season in full swing, most ideas from the haze involve an oddly shaped brown ball right now. With my inbox devoid of any baseball ideas, it was time to scour random groupings of stats hoping something would stick out.

The first hopeful source of inspiration was my recently updated “contact management” list where each pitcher’s OPS allowed on only batted balls is calculated relative to league average (sOPS+). After sorting the list to display the starters with the most plate appearances against in an effort to make sample size less significant, Chris Tillman was the first pitcher who has allowed a lot of balls in play to have an sOPS+ on batted balls that was quite a bit away from average. With 100 being league average, Tillman’s sOPS+ on batted balls is 77. That makes him a top 15 starter in that category among qualified starters. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a while since my last Roster Trending post, so with less than a month to go in the season, it’s time to take another look at who you’re all rushing out to pick up in CBS leagues. Are you making the right decision?

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Episode 164

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is now live!

Jason Collette and Nicholas Minnix talk, among other topics, Aaron Hicks; Domonic Brown; Rafael Montero; Nick Tropeano; the Washington Nationals’ new source(s) of saves; Edward Mujica and Koji Uehara; by request, Derek Holland, Joey Gallo and Joc Pederson; and, of course, a couple of picks for two-turn pitchers.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us or comment with fantasy questions so that we may answer them on our next episode.

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Some quick news and notes from Friday’s games:

On Thursday I noted that the Red Sox were considering shutting down Koji Uehara, but I was hesitant to make the change in the grid because I was waiting to hear the same from additional sources. At this point, it’s clear that Uehara has been stripped of his ninth-inning role, leaving Edward Mujica to take over. Mujica is 3-of-4 in save chances this season with a 12% K-BB% and a 4.05 ERA, which isn’t exactly pretty. But, he’s been named the closer for the time being and is available in 81% of Yahoo! leagues.
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Just a couple of pitchers this week. Between an extended Labor Day weekend and a computer crash, I could only view two guys.

Kyle Hendricks

Why I watched: A rookie with a 1.91 ERA who doesn’t throw over 90 mph

Game Watched: 8/29 vs Cardinals

Game Thoughts
• Man he throws slow. He has one huge set of balls to keep throwing his fastball in their, which he does with confidence. His sinker was 86-87 in the game I watched. He just isn’t going to strikeout many batters as seen by his 15% K%.

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Normally, I produce tiered second-base rankings for my first piece of each month. Now that it’s September and trade deadlines have passed in 99.9% of fantasy leagues, it’s not very useful for me to fill this space with my thoughts on players that owners cannot acquire. Therefore, I scoured waiver wires to find three lightly owned middle infielders who could help fantasy owners over the season’s crucial final weeks.

Joe Panik (15% Yahoo, 20.8% ESPN, 26% CBS)
194 PA – .318/.366/.397, 23 R, 1 HR, 15 RBI, 0 SB

Despite providing consistent production that has him at No. 7 among fantasy 2B over the last month, Panik’s ownership rates are far from widespread. Eno Sarris wrote a great piece yesterday in which he interviewed Panik about his approach at the plate, so I’m not going to get too long-winded here, but we should definitely still take a moment to discuss his fantasy value.

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On 9/3, I posted Adjusting Fantasy Value with expected (x)BABIP and xHR. These were used to adjust batting average, OBP, SLG and OPS for your different leagues’ formats.

Based on xBABIP, Michael Brantley and Anthony Rendon jumped in value sandwiching in Mike Trout as the top 3 adjusted Fantasy Values for standard 5×5 formats (HR, SB, R, RBI and AVG).

Here, I’ll attempt to verify the BABIP potential for standard 5×5 leagues. I am therefore using column 2 (sum of the 5×5 descriptive/actual z-scores: HR, SB, R, RBI and AVG) and comparing it to column 3 (sum of the 5×5 expected z-scores: xHR, SB, R, RBI and xAVG). SB, R and RBI are not adjusted even though they should be so consider this a way to play down the overall effect.

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With the minor league regular season now over, this marks the end of this series but you can read the previous pieces here: the Impact Catchers, the Impact First Basemen, the Impact Second Basemen, the Impact Third Basemen, the Impact Shortstops, the Impact Corner Outfielders, the Impact Center-fielders, the Impact RH Starting Pitchers (Tier 1) and the Impact RH Starting Pitchers (Tier 2). Keep an eye out next week as my annual “A Minor Review of…” series gets under way and reviews the 2014 season for all 30 clubs. Read the rest of this entry »