In his debut season last year, Ryan Schimpf enjoyed one of the most extreme set of underlying skills I have ever observed. He posted the second highest fly ball rate over a single season since 2002, the first year we have data for. He also hit a ton of pop-ups and few line drives. Oh, and he struck out over 30% of the time and walked at a double digit clip. He was a man of extremes.
Note: this article was written prior to Lucas Duda’s exit from Wednesday night’s game with what is being described as a hyperextended elbow. The severity of the injury, which we don’t yet know, obviously impacts his viability moving forward. But as this latest episode now represents the second time within about a year that this author has endorsed Lucas Duda shortly before an injury befell him, take any future endorsements from him with a giant block of Himalayan salt.
Has anyone noticed what Lucas Duda has been up to? Apparently not anyone who plays in Yahoo or ESPN formats where he’s still available in nearly 85% of leagues. This is despite his 4 homers, .393 wOBA, and perhaps most importantly, 49 plate appearances over which he’s paraded his newly healthy back. Duda has played in 12 of the Mets’ first 14 games, starting in 11 of them, and thus far sat only against lefties, Jaime Garcia, Wei-Yin Chen, and Adam Conley.
It’s far too early in the season to draw any conclusions about his batted balls or production so let’s just acknowledge that he’s stroking the ball well, pairing a ton of fly balls with convincing exit velocities. The takeaway shouldn’t be that Duda appears back and as good as ever but rather that three weeks into the season, Duda’s back appears as good as ever.
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Just before the season started, the FanGraphs staff (including RotoGraphs contributors) was asked to make its official predictions for the upcoming season. We took our best shot at predicting the playoff teams, MVP and Cy Young Award winners, and Rookies of the Year for 2017. Perhaps in the coming weeks we will check in with the top picks for MVP and Cy Young, but in this article, we’re going to look at the top rookies.
Our staff picks on the American League side had Andrew Benintendi (40 votes) as the overwhelming favorite to be named the league’s top rookie, with Jharel Cotton (4) and Mitch Haniger (4) rounding out the top three.
Over in the National League, Dansby Swanson (27 votes) was the favorite by a wide margin, followed by Robert Gsellman (12), Manuel Margot (5), and Hunter Renfroe (4).
While it’s extremely early and still much too soon to make any concrete statements about who will win this year’s awards, let’s take a look at the wide-ranging early season performances of the players we expect to be the game’s top newcomers: Read the rest of this entry »
If you follow great hair in sports as closely as I do, you already know about Taylor Motter. In Spring Training, he unleashed a hair flip so fantastic that it spawned the Mariners’ new between-innings “Hair Flip Cam.” Sadly, when I looked for footage of the Hair Flip Cam, I only found a handful of Twitter mentions. Trust me when I say that it exists and is awesome.
Acquired in a relatively minor trade with Tampa in November, Motter is a 27-year-old without a whole lot of prospect pedigree. Here at FanGraphs, Motter slotted in as the No. 11 Rays prospect pre-2016, and Seattle’s No. 18 guy this year. In short, he’s not the type of player you’d expect to be the subject of a fantasy column in April.
I struggle enough with pitcher analysis this early in the season, but it’s even more difficult to evaluate hitters. At least for pitchers, we have pitch metrics, such as velocity and movement, along with pitch mix and batted ball distribution that stabilize relatively quickly. We have no such metrics with which to analyze hitters, so it’s difficult to conclude with anything other then “small sample size, expect regression toward career averages” for each hitter. Let’s see how well I could avoid such a phrase as we take a look at the six hitters that have been added the most in CBS leagues over the last week.
With about a week of 2017 baseball data in the books, there are already thousands of innings, plate appearances, and batted balls to parse through. We’ve seen a perfect game bid, a cycle, multi-home run performances, and a huge lead blown in the ninth. Unfortunately, something else we’ve seen are injuries to key players. Like the crack of the bat and pop of the glove, injuries are a part of the spot. They’re bad for the player, the team, the fans — and fantasy owners.
When a key player on your fantasy roster gets injured, it often leaves you scrambling to fill the unexpected hole. The following exercise is designed to help you survive such situations. We’re going to look at viable players who are readily available in most fantasy leagues. To qualify for this list, a player must be owned in less than 50% of all Ottoneu fantasy leagues, based on the Ottoneu Average Salaries page. He also must be able to help your team right now (i.e., no prospects).
Getting right to the list, here are of five players worth a shot in an emergency who are owned in less than 50% of Ottoneu leagues, along with their positional eligibility, average salary, and owned percentage: Read the rest of this entry »
“Deep League Hitter Pickups.” So promised a bulletin we received, unbidden, from America’s Leading Fantasy Sports Aggregator. Likewise “Under the Radar Waiver Wire Pickups.” These communiques used to annoy us, because, absolutely without exception, every player thus recommended was long gone in every league we played in. But then we realized: these bulletins from ALFSA are for people who play Fantasy baseball the way we play Fantasy football: join a small league with shallow rosters, prepare for your draft the day before it happens and no earlier, check waiver wire recommendations on Tuesdays, check again Sunday mornings to make sure your players remain alive and ambulatory, and that’s it.
All in all, a sensible way to do things, but when it comes to Fantasy baseball, prudence and we are strangers. And this season, our folly has led us to a couple of leagues where the number of teams, limited player pool, and shortness of roster space produce only three choices when one of our players gets hurt, gets sent down, or is terminally disappointing: (1) a vacant roster spot; (2) an occupied roster spot that might as well be vacant; and (3) a roster spot whose occupant, though widely shunned for excellent reasons, has a faint chance of doing something useful.
Unfortunately, though the season is in its infancy, we’ve already had occasion to wonder who might be behind Door Number Three, and we thought we’d share with you the fruits of our research. Here, then, are five hitters—one at each position, with the middle infielder qualifying at both spots—whom we either would get, did get, or tried to get when in extremis. All of them are owned in fewer than 50% of NFBC leagues, which means they are more likely than not available to you. Hope you don’t need them.
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Yesterday, I discussed five players whose spot in the batting order was a surprise, to me at least, and perhaps everyone else as well. I didn’t include everyone though, so let’s take a look at six more hitters whose value is in line to change if these new lineups stick.
As difficult as it is to keep up with during the spring, my Pod Projections reflect a hitter’s expected position in the batting order. For the best projections, they must, as all the counting stat forecasts are affected by a hitter’s spot. And yet even when we think we know where a hitter is going to slot in, when the games finally start to matter, there are always surprises. So here are a bunch of hitters whose spot in the batting order differs from my projection and whose value would therefore be affected meaningfully if it sticks.
Leading off and playing shortstop for the Seattle Mariners on Opening Day was one of the most compelling players to watch in 2017. From 2012 to 2015 with the Milwaukee Brewers, Jean Segura batted just .266/.301/.360 with a .290 wOBA and 78 wRC+, amassing 3.4 WAR. In 2016 with the Arizona Diamondbacks, he had a .371 wOBA and 126 wRC+ on his way to a +5 WAR season. What should be made of the breakout? While many people seem to expect heavy regression from Segura, there are compelling reasons to believe he is an entirely different hitter than he was in the past. Read the rest of this entry »