The Braves made an early off-season splash by signing veteran third baseman Josh Donaldson to a one-year contract. He’ll take over at the hot corner and will likely hit cleanup behind a trio of established and rising stars. Now on his third team in one year, let’s dive into the park factors to figure out how the move might affect his hitting performance.
One of the keys to fantasy success involves finding when projections can be systematically off. The hard part for fantasy owners is that most of these findings, like pitch velocity, get quickly incorporated into projections. Since it’s difficult to find these discrepancies, I was intrigued when I saw this quote by Mitchel Lichtman (MGL) in an article he wrote:
So, the substantial under-projections seem to occur when a player gains speed but his wOBA remains about the same.
And by substantial, it was a 22 point difference is wOBA. This is a major difference and could point owners to some nice upside plays. I decided to go ahead and dive in.
Every pre-season, I compare my rankings to the RotoGraphs consensus (which excludes my ranking of course) to discover which players I’m apparently more bullish or bearish on than the others. I was strapped for time this year and so only published a bullish piece for hitters, dubbed Pod’s Picks. Let’s see how these hitters ended up performing and ultimately ranking. Remember that the rankings are positional and not overall, which makes this exercise a bit more difficult. I’ll be using the FanGraphs auction calculator to compare values.
The Hot Stove Season has not really begun in earnest yet, but with the Nationals reaching an agreement with Kurt Suzuki on a two-year deal on Monday morning, we have our first fantasy-relevant player movement since the five-player swap between the Mariners and Rays back on Nov. 8. The move could bode well for Suzuki’s value in 2019, as he currently has less competition for playing time in Washington than he did in Atlanta. Reportedly, his deal will pay him $10 million over the two years, so it is conceivable that the Nationals could have the resources to dip back into the catcher market for more help.
Read the rest of this entry »
Piggy backing on my research into previous season breakouts published on The Hardball Times, I identified and discussed 12 such men from 2017 as we pondered 2018 performance. Not surprisingly, I discovered that last season’s breakouts made for terrible investments. Of course, this was as a group in aggregate. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every prior season breakout will bust. But as a group, they don’t make for good draft day targets.
In addition to sharing my standard lists of potential BABIP surgers and decliners heading into the 2018 season based on my xBABIP equation, I also discussed hitters who seemingly posted repeatable BABIP marks at first glance, but a deeper dive revealed the potential for dramatic upside or downside. These were the guys whose BABIP marks were around the league average (appearing rather normal), but with xBABIP marks at least 0.030 points above or below. Let’s see how they ended up performing.
It’s rankings time so the comments are open for everyone to go batshit crazy about how a computer program and I are wrong. We are both ready for everyone’s best shot as neither one of us gives a flying f***.
As part of my soon to be released e-book, The Process, the Standing Gain Points formulas will be included for several league types. I took the one for The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational, merge it with Steamer projections, and created some overall rankings.
Yesterday, I reviewed the list of 11 potential BABIP surgers for 2018 I published in mid-February. Today, let’s look at my BABIP decliner list. Given my past successes with decliners vs surgers list, I’m betting this list is going to look good. Let’s see if that turns out true.
In mid-February, I identified and discussed 11 hitters whose xBABIP marks stood significantly above their actual BABIP marks. I dubbed the group the potential BABIP surgers for 2018. There are two important caveats to remember:
1) This equation, while the best currently out there for estimating what BABIP should have been given underlying skills, is still not great, leaving lots of room for batters skills not captured in the equation, and of course, lady luck
2) xBABIP is not predictive/forward looking/a projection. It’s backwards looking like SIERA, but it correlates with next year BABIP better than BABIP itself, which is quite meaningful.
Yesterday, I reviewed the list of hitters who might benefit from an increased rate of pulled flied balls heading into the season. Today, I’ll recap the hitters who already hit a ton of fly balls in 2017, but posted below average Brls/True FB and Avg FB Dist marks. The thinking here is they needed every bit of that FB Pull% to knock balls over the fence, considering they were below average in the other two metrics. Let’s see how they performed.
