Archive for Injuries

In my last article, I contemplated if fantasy owners care too much about who to add and not enough on who to drop. I’m going run an experiment over last few weeks of this season to see what can be extracted from league drop trends.

For reference, I’m going to analyze the 34 leagues in the NFBC Main Event. These are 15-team mixed leagues using batting average and no trading. With each team putting $3K on the line, more of these owners haven’t thrown in the towel than in most leagues.

This first week, I went through the 30 most dropped players. The reasons behind the most dropped players were obvious, mainly they were hurt, lost a role, or demoted. Next week, I may concentrate on the players dropped between 5 and ten leagues. These players aren’t the most obvious drops and analyzing them may be the most helpful.

Name: Number of teams who dropped him (of 31)

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This past weekend, I attended the always incredible SaberSeminar in Boston. It was great time catching up with friends (Dave Cameron sighting) but also to take in some innovative ideas. I decided to share some fantasy applicable topics which were discussed.

Pitch Tunneling

Experimentally determining the “Commit Point” – Evaluating the time it takes a hitter to check his swing by William Clark and Joe Petrich

Pitch Tunneling, Pitch Calling and Expected Outcome: A Former Pitcher’s Perspective by Dan Blewett

Pitching tunneling was brought up several times by several speakers but these two came to the same conclusion. The reaction time for a batter to determine the pitch type may be less than previously calculated. It was thought that a hitter had around 225 ms to 275 ms to decide to swing. It’s possible that the time may be under 200 ms and the batter may be keying off the release point.

Also, if a pitcher is struggling, it might be worth looking over at his release point charts (example with Jon Gray). Make sure all the pitches are clustered together and haven’t been recent moving around.
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Yesterday, I examined hitters who owners missed on preseason and what could be done to prevent such mistakes in the future. Today, the underachievers go under the microscope. In my previous article, I used Paul Sporer’s “All First Half” articles for reference. With no underachieving articles out yet, I will look for players with differences in ADP and current rank using our auction calculator.

Extended Injury Stays

Daniel Murphy

I lamented last offseason about missing out on J.D. Martinez’s great 2017 season. I didn’t want to miss out again and was willing to take a chance on Daniel Murphy’s discount.

When I created his projection, I account for six weeks off but it was on the short side. Additionally, once he returned, he wasn’t productive for a few weeks but has a .859 OPS in July.

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We are all learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. -Charlie Munger

It’s time to see if I need to adjust my fantasy baseball beliefs by analyzing the first half busts and breakout lists. While it’s great to acknowledge these players, owners need to sit down and figure out why everyone missed on them. By hitting on one or two of these breakouts, a team could be competing for the top spot. Here are the groups and how to identify the breakout next preseason.

For the player situations I analyzed, I’m used Paul Sporer’s First Half All Value Stars and Fantasy Team for inspiration. I looked for actionable traits or tells which can be used next season.

Unknown Playing Time

Jesus Aguilar

Everyone understood coming into this season that the Brewers playing time situation was going to be a mess, so not owning Aguilar is understandable. He was to be in a platoon with Domingo Santana with middling projections. The deal with Aguilar, he really didn’t have a horrible platton split. It was .372 wOBA vs .338 wOBA in 2017. It’s .444 vs .405 this season.

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Fastball velocity changes may be getting beat to death but they are one of the few stats in which stabilize early in the offseason. I’ve created a couple tools which I use during the season to help find which pitchers to evaluate further using velocity. I have one which grades fastballs and a new pitcher injury finder.

Fastball Grades

This tool simply gives an ERA and 20-80 grade to a fastball based on its projected results from its velocity and spin. The velocity component is simple to understand. It’s hard to hit fast flying small objects. It’s even harder to hit faster flying small objects. Understanding the spin component is a little tougher.

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Last week I wrote about a few lesser known opportunities within Ottoneu to maximize salary cap space, which is important to understand before your fantasy season begins.  However, by the time you read this post the fantasy season will have already begun, so I want to focus your attention today on strategies that will help you in-season as you attempt to squeeze every bit of value out of your team during what is sure to be a long but very fun Ottoneu season.

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A plethora of information is available to fantasy owners with most just a repeat from one season to the next. For this reason, it’s tough to find anything new or helpful. Joe Rosales has stepped forward this year to provide six pages of useful injury nuggets in the Bill James Handbook, especially relating to catchers. Here are some of the highlights

1. Baseball Info Solutions is now collecting detailed injury information

Finally, and good luck. Building a comprehensive database is the key component to really understanding injuries. From personal experience, it’s just a pain-in-the-ass to track in-season injuries and also compile the end-of-season database. While, I’m sure the information is not going to be free to the public, at least the information is being collected for someone like Mr. Rosales to compile.

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This means we’re actually getting close to official baseball, right? It’s bold prediction season and you know the drill (with an Ottoneu context), so let’s get started.

1. Freddie Freeman achieves 8.0 WAR

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Alex Reyes was considered to be a top-5 prospect coming into the 2017 season. Then his elbow gave out and he eventually needed Tommy John surgery. He’s nearing completion of his recovery and the Cardinals are considering when he’ll return and his role.

Wanting to protect their top prospect as much as possible, the Cardinals have set a soft target of May 1 as a likely return date for Reyes. What hasn’t been so explicitly defined, though, is what role he’ll fill upon that return.

Long term, the Cardinals have every intention of using Reyes to anchor their rotation. MLB Pipeline recently ranked Reyes as the seventh-best right-handed pitching prospect, and he likely would have been higher on that list had he not just missed a full season.

But given the recovery process Reyes has undergone over these last 12 months, the Cardinals intend to be cautious in 2018. Their preference, as stated multiple times this offseason by president of baseball operations John Mozeliak, would be to have Reyes first come out of the bullpen.

For fantasy owners, they could take a chance on having an elite arm as a starter or reliever. With so many possible unknown outcomes, the following is a breakdown of 2018 value.

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Well, I used to be able to create starting pitcher disabled list (DL) projections with the average chance hovering around 40%. Until this past season when DL estimate was off by 18%.

Even though the rates have climbed the past couple of seasons, it was nothing like the jump this past season and I 100% blame the 10-day DL. All my work to this point is moot.

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