We’re living through an era where pitching is king. Nobody disputes it. A number of reasons have been cited. Velocities are increasing due to better training. Teams and players better understand the relationship between strikeouts, walks, and success.
One cause may stand above them all, the strike zone has grown in recent seasons. The zone has increased by 40 square inches in the last five years, according to Jon Roegele. The growth is in one direction, down. As this becomes common knowledge, the league may discover a simple solution to inject more offense into the game – shrink the strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »

With the cut deadline behind us, now is the time to start prepping for your auctions. One thing to do is identify your targets, but another is to suss out the competition. Who has cash to spend? How much? Who is building a new roster and who is filling just a couple holes?

I started by taking a broad look at my three leagues to see how much cash was kept and I was intrigued to see how different the three auctions are set to play out.

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I originally planned to write about something different today, but 125 comments have compelled me to revisit yesterday’s topic. I intentionally left out a lot of details, league history, and my own thoughts so you could work on attacking the problem with as little framing as possible.

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It’s time to start talking about keepers. We’ve reached the point in the offseason when fantasy owners have to consider who they plan to keep and cut. While much of the fantasy baseball industry can be fit into neat bundles – for example, the majority of leagues cater to 5×5 roto or H2H – keeper rules are non-standardized. Each league has its own custom assortment of rules, costs, and considerations. With that in mind, it’s easier to teach how to handle keeper decisions than it is to pen a one-size-fits-all guide.

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We’re going to do two things today. First, I am gathering all articles about Ottoneu keepers into one semi-sorted place. This should give you plenty of resources to prepare for Cut Day on January 31. We’ll also delve into more keeper related decisions in the next two weeks.

Please use the comments for any ottoneu keeper or roster construction questions. I would like to keep things focused on ottoneu and keepers, but we can delve into other subjects too.

One last reminder: it usually behooves you to hang onto all of your players until sometime near the keeper deadline. I may want to dump my $7 Jason Grilli today, but what if a shark eats Craig Kimbrel’s foot tomorrow?

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Every season brings with it a new crop of breakouts; some are real, while some are mirages. Oftentimes, a “breakout season” ends up being that player’s career year, and I think we saw that with several players this year. What I’m going to do today is just briefly touch on three players that I think played themselves into unreasonable expectations for 2015.

Danny Santana

I really like Santana. In fact, I really like everyone I’m writing about in this column, I just see significant gaps between their actual skill level and perceived 2015 fantasy value. Santana is pretty much the posterboy for this mindset, as I was thoroughly impressed by the 23-year-old this year. I think he has a future as a very valuable utility knife, he’s just not a top-five — or likely even top-ten — fantasy shortstop.

Santana was indeed a top-five fantasy shortstop from the moment he took over as the Twins’ leadoff hitter at the beginning of June — he was ranked No. 10 overall for the season, but was easily top-five from June on. His lowest on-base plus slugging in any given month this year was actually in June, when he put up a .773 OPS. Aside from that month, he was well into the .800s all year.

The problem is, Santana probably won’t be a top-ten fantasy shortstop next year, because he was pretty clearly playing well over his head this year. Through 692 plate appearances between Double-A and Triple-A, Santana hit two home runs. This year in the majors, he hit seven in 430 PA.

I believe in the speed, and think he can be a 20-25 steal guy annually, although I’ll be curious to see if he can replicate the success rate of his 20-for-24 mark from this season. From 2011-2013, Santana stole 71 bases, but was also caught stealing a somewhat startling 39 times.

I’m clearly not buying the power, and he’ll likely never pile up the runs like he did this year, either. While his .319 batting average this year was very impressive, this is a career .273 minor-league hitter in 2,352 PA. His batting average on balls in play in the majors was .405. Furthermore, his ugly plate discipline (4.4% BB-rate, 22.8% K-rate) is uninspiring, to put it mildly.

I think most of you came into this column knowing that Santana isn’t quite the player he looked like this year, but keep in mind when planning for 2015 that he played above his actual talent level in nearly every category this season. Santana is a classic regression candidate in just about every way possible.

Josh Harrison

The 27-year-old Harrison is much the same story as Santana, in that he likely played above his head in many ways this season. It’s not that he’d never shown power before, it’s that he had never shown much over-the-fence power. Harrison has always produced his fair share of doubles and triples, keeping his isolated power well above .100 for most of his minor- and major-league career.

However, coming into 2014, Harrison had never hit more than seven homers in any given year of his professional career. Whether Harrison’s 2014 approach is sustainable or not is one question, but it’s certainly fair to look at his 13 homers — nearly twice his previous career high in the majors or minors — as a bit of a fluke.

Furthermore, if/when his .353 BABIP from 2014 regresses, he doesn’t have the plate discipline to compensate. Harrison’s 4.0% walk rate this year was actually a massive improvement from his career 2.6% walk rate coming into the season, and it was still awfully low. This all, of course, means fewer opportunities to steal bases and score runs.

Like Santana, I think Harrison has a long, productive major-league career ahead of him as a super-utility type, but I fear we’ve seen his best season.

Johnny Cueto

I’m not going to get too long-winded about Cueto, as Mike Petriello wrote a great column on him just a couple weeks ago. I’m just going to throw my own two cents in. Seeing as Cueto has maintained a sub-3.00 ERA for four years now, I’m obviously not referring to his season as a “breakout” — Cueto’s breakout came in 2011, and it was legit. It’s hard to doubt that he’s a truly elite fantasy commodity, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that we’re probably not going to see his career-high 8.94 K/9 strikeout rate again.

Cueto didn’t really do anything all that different to explain why a guy with a career 7.30 K/9 in nearly a thousand innings coming into 2014 suddenly started striking out a batter per inning. Which is why I just can’t trust it at all. As Mike pointed out in the above-linked column, Cueto generated a ton of whiffs with his change this year, but his overall 9.8% swinging strike rate wasn’t far off his career mark of 9.1%.

Batters swung at 35.6% of Cueto’s pitches outside the zone, a career high, and he threw more first-pitch strikes (62.9%) than ever before. However, just like the change-up whiff rate, both of those marks were very minor improvements on the numbers he’s been putting up for the last few years. I guess I can explain why Cueto suddenly spiked his strikeout rate; he was just a little bit better than he usually is in a few different ways, and the sum of those parts was a career-high strikeout rate.

This year was pretty much the idealized version of an already-great pitcher. I just can’t quite see him ever again having as much fantasy value as he did in 2014.

The curtain has not yet come down on the 2014 regular season, but if you’re like me, flushed out of the playoffs with not a whole lot to do except look ahead to next year, you’re probably already mulling over your keepers. For me, no one quite draws my eye like Travis d’Arnaud, who I took in the last round of my 12-team, mixed H2H single-catcher league as a stasher and rode through what’s been a roller coaster-like season for him.

A keeper backstop is an uncommon and risky venture. Catchers, after all, get hurt. They don’t steal bases. They don’t hit for a high average. It’s a rare bird who notches more than 20 home runs, and rarer still the ones who knock in more than 80 RBIs. It’s a position that typically offers a terrible return on investment, which makes keepers a premium commodity — especially when they come at a post-hype price tag.
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If you use large samples and go looking for pitchers with many different plus pitches by whiff type that aren’t yet fully appreciated by the masses, you’ll get guys that we’ve been talking about all year here: Carlos Carrasco, Garrett Richards, Homer Bailey, Jake Arrieta, and Marcus Stroman, to name a few.

But if you relax the samples a bit — in this case down to thirty pitches thrown per category — you get some names that might be interesting to dynasty leaguers looking to the future, or deep leaguers looking for a sneaky late-season play. Or even mixed leaguers looking for names to stash for next year.

So here are a few interesting pitchers that have at three non-fastball pitches that qualify as ‘good’ by the benchmarks set by Jeff Zimmerman and I.

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With the trade deadline passed in ottoneu, the only way to improve your roster – for now or the future – through free agent auctions and waiver claims, which means cutting players, rather than trading them. In some cases, this is easy. That $37 Allen Craig you picked up at auction last spring, expecting a bounce back (one which I, myself, expected) is probably not hard to cut loose right now.

But what about the overpriced stars you plan to cut in the off-season but who are still productive? The problem here is that while a $60 Giancarlo Stanton might not be worth a keeping at $62 next year, if you cut him, another owner can start an auction and someone could end up paying him as little as $32 next year.

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There are a few exciting names up today. You’ve got your Maikel Franco in Philly, your Joc Pederson in Los Angeles and your Daniel Norris in Toronto. They’ve been called up to the bigs! But, due to innings limits on young arms, and roster crunches on teams now as much as 50% larger, it’s fair to ask. Will any of these youngsters play regularly?

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