The beauty of life as waiver wire fodder is that you don’t need to be great, or good, or heck, even a full-time player to gain entry into the club — you merely need to show up with a job opportunity to take center stage here. In the case of our two contestants this week, their long-term playing time is far from certain, but they’ve been given a chance in the immediate term to contribute in fantasy, and given their past success, that might be enough to make them worthwhile in deeper leagues.
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Yesterday, I discussed the April batted ball distance surgers. So naturally, today I’ll check in on the decliners. Because regression to the mean is such a powerful force, a distance decline sticks more often than a surge does. In other words, I would be more concerned about a decliner than excited about a surger.

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• Velocity changes from 2013 to April 2014. Enjoy.

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Contract year. He got skinny. He’s 27 years old. This will be the Panda’s year. This will be the year Pablo Sandoval puts it all together.

So far, so not good. Sandoval’s power is down, his strikeout rate is up, his swing metrics are all messed up, and his owners are considering dropping him in mixed leagues. What’s up with this skinny sad Panda?

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We’re a month through the season, and fantasy owners are already jumping to huge conclusions regarding the 2014 season. These tiered rankings attempt to capture the production from the first month of the season, moving some players up and down where I felt it was necessary, but largely, I attempted to refrain from getting too caught up in the ebbs and flows of single-month performance. There are five months remaining in the 2014 season. Lots will change, and I didn’t want to make the tiered rankings a simple “who is performing well right now,” as that’s not overly useful.

Anyway, here we go.

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Now that we’re more than a month into the season, we finally have enough data to start taking batted ball distance numbers seriously. When developing my latest xHR/FB rate equation, I limited the player population to include only those who recorded at least 20 home runs and fly balls. At this point, the majority of the leaderboard sits between 20 and 25, so let’s dig in and start by looking at which hitters have experienced the largest increase since last season.

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First a look at the running totals through half of week four:

8-4 record
3.44 ERA
8.6 K/9
2.9 K/BB
1.15 WHIP

Not a bad start. Here’s a look at this week’s recs, with team wOBA in parentheses:

LHP Jon Niese – 12.1% ESPN/16% Yahoo!/68% CBS (52% start) – @ MIA (.327), v. PHI (.305) Read the rest of this entry »

This past Sunday, I headed to downtown Oklahoma City to see the Redhawks, Houston’s Triple-A affiliate, take on the Nashville Sounds. The starting pitcher for the Sounds was Jimmy Nelson, the top pitching prospect in Milwaukee’s system. I hadn’t yet gotten the chance to see Nelson pitch in person, and I was looking forward to seeing him do so against a strong Oklahoma City lineup that included Jon Singleton, Domingo Santana, Max Stassi and Robbie Grossman.

Nelson is a pretty imposing figure on the mound, standing 6’5″ and weighing 245 pounds. The University of Alabama product has the type of frame that I can easily picture handling 200+ innings a year; he tossed a total of 162.1 frames in 2013.

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Coming into the season, much of the hype surrounding young pitchers centered on guys like Danny Salazar, Masahiro Tanaka, Gerrit Cole, Archie Bradley, and Noah Syndergaard. The Kansas City Royals, however, opted to hand over the fifth-starter role to the flame-throwing righty, Yordano Ventura, who had limited hype and never rocketed his way up draft boards.

He burst onto the scene in 2013, consistently hitting triple-digits with his fastball and striking out over a batter per inning in Double-A and Triple-A. The 22-year-old struggled slightly after being promoted to the big leagues, which stifled the hype as we approached the 2014 regular season, but fantasy owners who swiped him late in their drafts are celebrating Ventura’s stellar month of April. He has compiled a 1.50 ERA (2.69 FIP) and has been a quality source of strikeouts.

The goal of this brief article isn’t so much to tout his first five starts of the 2014 season, as it’s rather to isolate a couple factors that lead me to believe Yordano Ventura is poised to find significant success as a major-league starter throughout the remainder of the year.

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Yesterday, I ran out of time while writing my MASH Report to look at how the possible effects of diminished velocity could have on Clayton Kershaw. Well, using a couple of untested, but promising ideas, it seems he will be may not struggle with less fastball speed.

The worries with Kershaw stem from this tweet.

89-91, touched 92 a few times. RT @gq2scoops: Anybody know how Kershaw’s velocity was tonight?

— Dustin Nosler (@DustinNosler) May 1, 2014

He could be getting some of his strength back, but a possible 2+ mph drop could mean trouble for him. Kershaw’s fastball has at least averaged 92.5 mph in each of his six previous season. By looking at how he has produced previously at times with a lower velocities my indicate how he will do in the future.

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