I currently work in education and one of the subjects I used to teach was fifth-grade social studies. Something I would work on with my students is spectrum thinking. The idea behind this is that there are multiple perspectives when it comes to historical events. Instead of simply telling my students an event from one singular perspective, I tried to provide for them the multiple perspectives in the hopes they could draw their own conclusions about why certain events occurred and which positions were more justified. Admittedly, this was not always effective with all my fifth-graders as some of my students were not developmentally ready for this type of critical thinking. I imagine this would be more effective at a high school level.

The point of bringing this up is not to reminisce about my days as a teacher. In history, things are rarely black or white: there is a lot of gray. When evaluating players, the same can be true. Even when we are right about our predictions, this doesn’t mean that the prediction had an absolute certainty of happening or not happening. There are probabilities for certain things happening and nobody is 100% correct when making their pre-evaluations. I imagine this is not a new concept to those reading this. And even if it is, hopefully you will learn something new from this perspective.

Today, I am going to look at two first basemen who may become relevant depending on how deep your league is. It would be easy for me to dismiss their recent performances, which would make the point of this article pretty useless. I am going to attempt to go through some spectrum thinking by looking at the highs and lows of both hitters. More likely than not, I won’t be able to make any concrete conclusions, but you will hopefully be able to gain some additional perspectives on what values these players could potentially provide. Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor Bauer’s performance in 2016 has not jumped off the page, but after nine starts and a handful of relief appearances, he is enjoying a career best 3.69 ERA and 3.70 FIP. His strikeout rate has declined somewhat from 8.7 to 7.9 per nine innings, but his walk rate has declined more significantly from 4.0 to 3.0 per nine and is palatable for fantasy owners for the first time. If this is what Bauer is now, then he can finally be a fantasy asset, even if not quite in the form that many expected from him when he struck out more than a batter per inning in the upper levels of the Diamondbacks’ farm system.

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Who’s inducing more swings and misses? Let’s take a gander at the American League starting pitchers whose SwStk% marks have most surged versus last year. Perhaps it’s added velocity, a new pitch, or change in pitch mix driving the spike. Let’s find out.

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Injury replacements is the theme of this week’s waiver wire. It was probably the theme of last week’s too. And the week prior. Basically, if you don’t own the guy who got injured, injuries are good! Opportunities!

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I was mistaken yesterday in thinking this version of the Bullpen Report would come out early the next morning. Sorry if this caused any confusion, but this is good news for those night owls who will get the BR earlier than expected. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I discussed five players whose early season home run totals have like totally shocked the world. Clearly, I missed a couple of obvious names and some of you commented reminding me of such. So let’s get to the rest of those shocking hitters sitting on home run totals we never expected at this point in the season.

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Good morning! Coming at you from a different time after a late slate of games, and the same may be true for the 14th. Apologies to all the night owls, who may just need to pull a couple of all-nighters. Ok, onto the report.
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Contrary to what you might assume given my status as a veteran RotoGraphs writer and member of the Tout Wars and LABR leagues, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to players on none of my fantasy teams. So every so often, I express surprise, or perhaps even shock, when I peruse the day’s box scores and notice a batting average or counting stat from a player at a level far off from our expectations. “Player X has 15 homers already?!?!” is how I will frequently react. Let’s discuss some of these players.

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Yesterday I had mentioned that the Rockies had not announced a closer. Well, that was wrong as Weiss named Carlos Estevez as their closer while McGee is out. This came after Estevez recorded his first save and Weiss had said earlier that Estevez would be sharing duties with Jason Motte. Must have been nice for Estevez owners to hear their guy would get most of the saves, right? That was until Boone Logan got the one out save today, after Motte started the 9th off retiring the first two batters. He then walked his third hitter, and then Weiss called on Logan to get the last out as he earned his first save of the season. This wasn’t a case of Weiss going against his word. Instead, Estevez was due some rest after throwing 28 pitches on Friday and closing out last night’s game despite Weiss saying he wanted to avoid that. This was just a normal day of rest for Estevez, and he should be getting the rest of the save opportunities. I left it at Yellow because it is a Colorado pitcher and I don’t think the Rockies will hesitate to pull him if he began to struggle in the 9th.
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I understand that BABIP data is not necessarily complete data. However, I do think there is some value in looking at what players’ BABIP looks like relative to their careers. For this article, I just explored qualified 1B according to Fangraphs data and took out rookies (think: Byung Ho Park) since we don’t have past data to compare it to. Again, this data should not significantly alter your fantasy plans, but is worth considering when looking to buy or sell the MLB qualified first basemen.

For this table, I simply subtracted Career BABIP from the players’ 2016 BABIP. I could’ve included more players, but I wanted to start small instead of filtering out every single player with 1B eligibility regardless of sample size. A positive difference means that a player is outperforming their BABIP, whereas a negative difference means the opposite where a player is underperforming their career BABIP. Here is what the table looks like:
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