Archive for Head to Head

Episode 212

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris have news about Curtis Granderson, Coco Crisp, Justin Verlander, and Rusney Castillo. Then they play a little game that essentially tries to identify some sleeper-types who could bust out in a big way.

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• No velocity reports again today. Instead, I will go over the past two weeks of available Pitchf/x data and report them in my Quick Takes slot tomorrow afternoon.

• Early this offseason, I notice the Orioles have seen a huge drop in elbow and shoulder related injuries since 2009. Brittany Ghirolli at MLB.com just wrote a nice article on the subject. One key for the Orioles is more rest between starts.

The Orioles, who haven’t had a player on the 25-man roster undergo Tommy John ligament-replacement surgery since manager Buck Showalter took the helm in late 2010, aren’t on to anything new. But perhaps what sets them apart from other organizations is that they are unrelenting in keeping their guys out of harm’s way. The biggest complaint Showalter heard while serving as an ESPN analyst was about the way bullpen guys were managed. To that end, every pitch an O’s reliever throws — be it in warmups or in the game — is tracked by the team, their workouts and exercises adjusted by the trainers based off of that.

• I am a guest on today’s Effectively Wild podcast by Baseball-Prospectus doing an anti-Tommy John surgery draft. Good stuff all around except maybe Sam’s picks.

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Dan Rozenheck recently published some interesting research via the Economist regarding the significance of spring training statistics. For the TL;DR crowd, there is some legitimacy to spring training breakouts and disappointments, although they correlate with only marginal improvements to in-season performance in terms of on-base plus slugging (OPS) and earned run average (ERA).

Our own Mike Podhorzer also conducted similar research of his own a couple of years ago. He found that a pitcher’s spring training strikeout and walk rates carry some significance in regard to in-season performance.
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Yesterday, I opened 2015 Pod’s Picks season with my infield bullish and bearish selections. Today I’ll finish my look at hitters by moving into the outfield. The bullish group will only include those I ranked within my top 60 and the bearish only players the consensus ranked within their top 60.

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Episode 211

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Jason Collette have news about Billy Butler, Brandon Morrow, and Clay Buchholz before finishing off the Outfielder Preview.

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I participated in two drafts this past weekend. Both were 10-team auctions, one a season-long rotisserie keeper league (“LOWV,” henceforth), the other a head-to-head points redraft league (“Sandlot”). They are just home leagues, not renowned leagues such as Tout Wars or LABR or anything like that, but hey! Breaking down any draft can make for good insight, and if it helps just one person clarify his or her strategy, perhaps it did some good.

“So, Alex, how did you in your drafts?” Great, thanks for asking! I love both my teams. Love them. Except I made the same mistake in each draft: I left some money on the table. Like, $20 in one instance. It became a running gag: “Don’t question Alex — it’s all part of his master plan!” But here’s the catch: I arguably have the best team, per the projections, even after managing my budget so poorly.

So where did my strategy go wrong? Honestly, I’m not sure it did. (Or maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better.)
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Due to the busy preseason schedule of posts I had to publish, the 2015 version of Pod’s Picks is being unveiled later than ever before. But I refuse to skip a year because it’s always fun comparing my rankings to the rest of the rankers and discovering who was closer at season’s end. Rather than drag things out by posting just one position a day like I have in the past, I’m grouping them into infield, outfield and starting pitchers to bring us into the start of the season (finally!).

I calculated the average rank of the three rankers in the Rotographs Rankings Update and then compared to my ranking within each position. As usual, I will limit my Bullish picks to those I have ranked as startable players in a standard 12-team league and Bearish picks to those the consensus has ranked as startable.

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Episode 210

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris have news about Anthony Rendon, Ryan Rua, Justin Verlander, Wil Myers, Carlos Rodon, and Domonic Brown before kicking off the Outfielder Preview.

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We have been touring the diamond here at Rotographs with our first round of positional tiers. Here are the ones that have been posted so far:

• Shortstops
• Third Basemen
• AL Outfielders, NL Outfielders
• AL Starting Pitchers

Some guys took some creative license with the naming of their tiers (specifically David w/the AL OFs and Mike w/the AL SPs) and I’ll do the same naming my 10 tiers after 10 characters from my favorite movie ever: Rounders, the 1998 Matt Damon and Ed Norton vehicle centered on poker just before the poker craze hit.

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It’s my favorite time of the year here at RotoGraphs, the season of bold predictions. (My least favorite time, naturally, is late September, when I have to atone for these forecasts.) As usual, the trick here is to balance imagination against reality, the impossible versus the attainable, the speculative against the demonstrable. It’s a tough task that, for me, often results in happy predictions, but then again, it’s March — ’tis the season to indulge in some fantasy baseball fantasies, right?
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