Archive for Head to Head

Episode 200

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Jason Collette discuss Chris Sale, Alex Guerrero, Addison Reed, Garrett Richards, Wil Myers, Dayan Viciedo, Michael Saunders and finish up by previewing the Pirates & Cardinals.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us or comment with fantasy questions.

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Thanks to Ian Miller, aka Teen Archer, for the intro music. Approximately 47 minutes of joyous analysis.

The Pod Projections are back! My projections are based on the methodology shared in my eBook Projecting X, and the process continues to evolve and improve.

If there was just one thing to be thankful for last year in baseball, it was Carlos Carrasco. I had written a lot about him heading into the season and his performance upon returning to the rotation prompted more articles salivating over the quality of his stuff. So he was a rather obvious candidate to earn the honor of my first starting pitcher receiving the Pod Projection treatment.

For those who forget (how dare you!), Carrasco posted the following line over his final 10 starts of the season:

Despite those sizzling results coming over a relatively small sample size, fantasy owners are going gaga over Carrasco. He is currently the 115th player off the board in the NFBC and is the 28th starter selected, ahead of more established veterans like Gio Gonzalez and Hyun-Jin Ryu. And no, I haven’t stuffed the ballots by joining every single NFBC league and drafting Carrasco.

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Episode 199

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris discuss Adam Wainwright, Michael Saunders, and Homer Bailey injuries, the Johan Santana signing, Jonathan Papelbon’s desire to go to Toronto, and Chris Davis playing some OF this spring. Then they discuss the strategy behind trading including some real life examples that Eno is currently mulling over, and finish up by previewing the Milwaukee Brewers.

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• OK, MASH will be twice a week for the seven or so months with all the baseball news coming in. There is just a ton of Fluff right now and useful new information is a little tough to find.

• Michael Saunders will be out until around the All-Star game with a torn meniscus in his knee. This is a mess for the Blue Jays. Right now they look to replace him with internal options.

… Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos said he expects to fill Saunders’ vacancy in left field with internal options. Kevin Pillar, Ezequiel Carrera and Andy Dirks are the early favourites to win the job out of Spring Training.

Here is the projected wRC+ for the trio.

Name: wRC+
Pillar: 92
Carrera: 83
Dirks: 99

Dirks looks to have the inside track statically, but he is current still dealing with a back injury which cost him his 2014 season. If the 28-year-old Carrera gets the job, he could be a sneaky SB play with 50 SB in 2014 between the majors and minors.

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I have never thought much about, or given much attention to, FanGraphs’ fan projections. It’s primarily a matter of stubbornness: I run my own projections, and I develop my own strategy, so why should I listen to you? At least there’s a trace of rationale behind it: I know how I created my projections (whether or not they’re any good is a topic for another day), but I have no idea how you created yours. Thus, I am more likely to blindly trust a computer-generated projection system such as Steamer instead of random fan projections.

Still, there is a sort of bizarre, secondhand wisdom to fan projections. For every person who is high on a particular player, there could be another person who is equally-and-oppositely down on him. Solicit and aggregate enough fan projections and you could produce a very reasonable prediction of a player’s performance by sheer chance.

Which is why fan projections intrigue me. If, for example, Steamer predicts the most likely outcome from a wide range of possible outcomes for a player, then the fans convey the anticipated outcome for a player. The difference between them, you could say, is what amounts to a market inefficiency (aka a price distortion). The larger the difference, the greater the inefficiency. We see these inefficiencies arise every year — 2014’s most prevalent example is probably Corey Kluber — and they typically manifest because of a lack of information about certain players.

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You know that I develop my own player projections, of which I have lovingly dubbed Pod Projections. With over 500 players projected, I thought it would be interesting to compare them with the Steamer forecasts. So Steamer and I is a new mini-series in which I discuss a pair (maybe more, maybe less) of players who I have projected for dramatically different results than Steamer. To do this, I simply compared my wOBA projections with Steamers’, calculated the difference and then sorted.

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I expected to follow up my xK% differential post from last week with a complementary xBB% differential post. For those who don’t enjoy surprises, I’ll let you know now that that didn’t happen. In its stead, I bring what I hope is good news — news that will not only influence a future xBB% differential post but also may impact general pitcher analysis henceforth and possibly international diplomacy.

The title of this post, however, is a tad misleading. I think I can say, with some degree of certainty — and I hope to demonstrate, with some degree of competency — that pitch sequencing indeed plays a role in a pitcher’s walk rate, as the devilishly handsome Mike Podhorzer has postulated. What I can’t describe, with any degree of certainty, is the magnitude of the role it plays. In truth, I desperately want to prove Mike wrong: there must be other factors, outside of pitch sequencing (and pitch framing, perhaps), that help explain a pitcher’s walk rate. For example, I have tried incorporating O-Swing% and Zone%, two PITCHf/x metrics provided by FanGraphs that I swore would fill in the cracks, but they offer little in the way of additional explanatory power.

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The Pod Projections are back! My projections are based on the methodology shared in my eBook Projecting X, and the process continues to evolve and improve.

For Pod Projectionee numero tres, I decided to take commenter Cason Jolette’s (Jason Colette’s mysterious brother?) suggestion to discuss former uber prospect, Astros sophomore outfielder George Springer. His coming out party was cut short by a quad injury, which ended his season two months prematurely. But he was quite impressive at the plate, posting a .352 wOBA, while displaying excellent patience and elite power. But coming off a minor league performance a year prior that included 45 stolen bases, he disappointed with his speed in Houston, as he swiped just five bags in seven tries. Let’s figure out what’s in store for Springer in 2015.

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Episode 198

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris discuss a potential position change for Kris Bryant, Joba Chamberlain back to Detroit, and Lucas Duda dealing with an oblique issue. Then they discuss Eno’s Pitcher Ranks and finish up by beginning the NL Central team-by-team previews with Chicago and Cincinnati.

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I spend a lot of time looking at pitching in any given offseason. Doing the starting pitching guide every year makes me fully aware of the pitching pool from top to bottom. I don’t have a similar exercise for digging as deeply into hitters so one thing I like to do is take a look at the part-time players, level set them at 600 PA, and see what shakes out. Let me be clear: extrapolation is dangerous. There is a lot of noise in small samples as there just isn’t enough time for everything to stabilize.

The purpose of this exercise is to unearth some potential playing time breakout candidates. Sometimes opportunity is the only real thing fueling a player’s breakout. I don’t just pick from the top of every leaderboard and tab those as potential breakouts. First off, I use 200-400 PA as the threshold so this will include a lot of injury guys. I think Troy Tulowitzki is on it yearly. Obviously we know about those guys.

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