Archive for Head to Head

It’s no secret that I loved Carlos Carrasco heading into the 2014 season. His spectacular performance over his final 10 starts last year vaulted him into the not actually a sleeper sleeper territory during this year’s draft season. By this I mean that he was hyped as a sleeper by just about everyone, but that meant that everyone who paid attention knew how awesome and legit he was and bid him up to or drafted him at fair value. But his first eight starts of this year have not gone the way we all expected. His ERA sits at a disappointing 4.98 and he has averaged just about 5.4 innings per start.

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Rubby de la Rosa twirled a gem Monday night.* It was a night of several unlucky fantasy pitching performances: Corey Kluber, Chris Sale, Matt Harvey and John Lackey together struck out 34 batters and allowed only three runs in a combined 32 innings pitched, and the Twitterverse made sure everyone knew.

Yet there was de la Rosa, plugging away against the Marlins (and against Dan Haren, who admirably tossed eight innings of two-run ball in defense), needing only 94 pitches to get through a full nine innings of play. Rubby, too, settled for a no-decision, his due to a poorly timed two-run homer allowed to J.T. Realmuto in the 7th inning.

I was reluctant to invest in Rubby at first, remembering his wholly disappointing 2014 season. (In his defense, he was never really a touted, let alone highly touted, prospect, even within the Dodgers and Red Sox systems, so the term “disappointment” is used loosely here.) However, I have bought several shares of Rubby in the past couple of weeks due in large part to a smattering of injuries but also a series of respectable performances by de la Rosa.

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Often times I get my player ideas for this column from the bids in AL Tout Wars. Unfortunately, that means my recommendations typically learn toward American Leaguers, rendering National League owners $hit out of luck. My apologies. But you’re in luck! This week actually features a player from each league.

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Our deep league trek this week takes us to two hurlers who have found their way into their respective teams’ rotations and stand to pick up wins for their fantasy owners. As a reminder, the recommendations in this column are mostly for mono leagues, and I use CBS for the ownership percentages.
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Yesterday, I discussed the hitters who have enjoyed the biggest increases in their batted ball distances this season. The list should mainly be used for validation purposes as for the most part, it should confirm a power spike. Today it’s time to look at those hitters who have experienced the largest declines in their distances. Owners must hope these drop-offs are merely small sample size flukes.

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Last week, I discussed the hitters whose average batted ball distances suggest significant HR/FB rate upside. This time, I’ll share a list that is to be used for validation purposes. Is that batter currently enjoying a power spike hitting the ball much further than last year? Let’s find out.

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Episode 229

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer talks to himself for a little while! He covers the injury news involving Jean Segura, Wil Myers, Jake McGee, Kenley Jansen, Kelly Johnson, Jon Jay, and Justin Masterson. He talks about guys playing well who he believes in like Shin-Soo Choo, Prince Fielder, and Edwin Encarnacion. He spends what feels like an hour talking himself into Todd Frazier as the best candidate for the 2016 Election a top 10 fantasy player the rest of the way before moving onto pitchers Corey Kluber, Jose Quintana, and finally Sonny Gray.

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Yesterday, I noted that Carlos Gonzalez’s isolated power, as determined by my expected isolated power (xISO) equation, mirrored his current production. This would be great news if we were talking about CarGo circa 2013.

Unfortunately, we’re talking about the 2015 incarnation of CarGo, he of the .109 ISO, .188 batting average and .233 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). The latter-most statistic might be the first talking point a proponent of his brings up in his defense: CarGo’s BABIP is atrocious right now — it’s just a matter of time until his bad luck turns around. Indeed, there may be some truth to this sentiment.

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I have essentially stripped the terms “buy low” and “sell high” from my vocabulary, so I now prefer to call the former buy low guys acquisition targets. One would think that offering for a player off to a slow start would have to come at some sort of discount, even if a minor one. And since slow starts are usually just that and have little predictive value for the rest of the season, getting anyone at a discount to his pre-season value should yield a nice profit.

As usual, the easiest way to identify your targets is to calculate the difference between a pitcher’s ERA and SIERA and then sort. Those pitchers with SIERA marks most below their ERAs are typically your targets, though that’s not automatically the case. Often times a pitcher could be carrying an ERA over 7.00, but still sporting a 4.50 SIERA. Sure, he’s been unlucky, but he also hasn’t been very good either! So you still don’t want him on your team.

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Last week, I introduced xISO, a metric that calculates a player’s expected isolated power based on his batted ball profile (per FanGraphs’ recently added batted ball data courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions). Having looked at a handful of underachieving National League outfielders for its induction, I’ll expand the analysis of xISO here today.

I’ll reiterate some key points. I used all 12 years’ worth of batted ball data for all player-seasons in which a hitter qualified for the batting title. The OLS regression specified pull rate (Pull%), hard-hit rate (Hard%) and fly ball rate (FB%) as explanatory variables and produced the following equation, which I deliberately omitted last week:

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