Archive for Meta Analysis

I like a lot of pitchers who have unperformed this year. With strikeout and walk rates (K%, BB%) of 20.5 percent and 7.0 percent, respectively, Drew Hutchison delivers everything I want from a mid-rotation fantasy starter. With a 5.19 ERA and a 1.47 WHIP, however, he delivers a flaming bag of feces to my doorstep.

The same can be said for Taijuan Walker who, after a terribly rough start to the season, dazzled for seven straight starts before recently tossing three stinkers. With plate discipline ratios better than Hutchison’s and just 22 years old, Walker demonstrates the skill set and ceiling that have earned him consensus top-20 honors on prospect lists from 2012 through 2014. Yet his 5.06 ERA and 1.29 WHIP have left fantasy owners not only disappointed but also reeling.

Hutchison and Walker share a common trait: their ERAs dwarf their fielding independent pitching (FIP) statistics. FIP was designed to demonstrate a pitcher’s true performance in light of the events he can control — that is, events independent of balls put into play at the mercy of the defense supporting him (among other things).

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“I had rather be right than President,” famously stated Henry Clay, even as he was (1) going out of his way to be wrong, in order (2) to become President, a ploy that (3) still didn’t work. We ourselves had rather be trapped in Tartarus with only George Steinbrenner and Bill O’Reilly for company than President, but we’d rather be right than pretty much anything else. And there’s an extra frisson of pleasure for us if we happen to be right when most other people aren’t. So it pains us not only when we are outright mistaken, but also when we are less than certifiably correct, and the consensus comes closer to the mark than we do.

We are nonetheless committed to giving you a precise assessment of the accuracy of our in-season opinions. The opinions in question are those with respect to what we call Pick Hits (if they’re players we suspect you don’t own but might want to) and Muscular Boys (if we suspect you might own them and won’t miss them, should you need to clear a roster spot). To keep ourselves contrarian, our Pick Hits aren’t owned in more than 25% of Yahoo leagues, and our Musts to Avoid aren’t owned in fewer than 50%.

Our opinions probably can’t be described as comically erroneous, though go ahead if you insist. But we are forced to admit that only one of them demonstrates the preternatural shrewdness to which we aspire. Otherwise, once we mentioned them, the guys we mentioned did pretty much what the common run of pre-season predictions envisioned they’d do, however well or badly they’d done theretofore.

We are undaunted, though, and at the very end of this installment, we roll out our latest Pick Hit, Tomas Telis, whose promotion by the Rangers we hoped for last week. Our wish was granted. First, though, the bookkeeping. The dates in parentheses are the dates on which we identified these guys; the stats are this season’s, starting with those dates.

Pick Hits

Jake Marisnick (April 22nd). 181 AB, 18 R, 15 RBI, 4 HR, 8 SB, 3 CS, .221 BA, .266 OBP. Buoyed by his past minor league success, his hard-contact improvement in the second half of 2014, and his superb spring, we thought Marisnick would be a mainstay in the Astros’ lineup and hit about .270, with perhaps 10 home runs and 20-plus stolen bases. Instead, he lost his center field job to Preston Tucker, went on the DL, and hasn’t hit well since his return. He’s doing about what everyone besides us thought he’d do—a little worse, actually—with about the same strikeout and hard-contact rates as in past seasons.

Brett Oberholtzer (May 12th). 38 1/3 IP, 2 W, 2 L, 2 QS, 44 H, 17 W, 19 ER, 27 K, 1.59 WHIP, 4.46 ERA. Only one of his eight starts was really bad, but only one of them was really good, and now he’s in the minors. We haven’t given up hope on him, and can imagine flagging him again if he returns to the bigs. The difference between what we thought he’d do and what he did is largely attributable to his ballooning walk rate. This sudden spike has happened to him a couple of times before, in the minors, and he’s always managed to correct whatever was wrong. His starts at Fresno since his demotion suggest that he’s doing so again.

Jose Urena (May 19th). 39 1/3 IP, 1 W, 4 L, 4 QS, 39 H, 17 W, 16 ER, 19 K, 1.42 WHIP, 3.66 ERA. We expected a bit better, because, like the rest of his rooting section, we keep thinking he’ll convert his 97 MPH fastball into strikeouts. As you see, it didn’t happen. But he didn’t pitch badly at all, and may attract our interest again, if he finds himself with a team that can get him more than 14 runs in 7 starts, which probably isn’t the 2015 Marlins.

Welington Castillo (May 26th). 1118 AB, 15 R, 15 RBI, 5 HR, .261 BA, .328 OBP. This one worked out even better than we’d hoped. When last we discussed Castillo, he’d just been traded from the Cubs, where he was the third-string catcher, to the Mariners, where he was the second-string catcher, but figured (we thought) eventually to work his way into some sort of job-sharing with Mike Zunino. Our expectations were modest, and our reasoning wasn’t abstruse: Zunino is overused, and Castillo’s a good catcher and at least as good a hitter as Zunino. We failed, however, to reckon with the fabled acumen of the Mariners’ brain trust. Castillo played one game for Seattle, then got shipped to the Diamondbacks in the Mark Trumbo trade. He won the Arizona job by virtue of having a pulse, and then started channeling Yasmany Grandal. Meanwhile, if you don’t own any of the three Seattle players and want a sadistic chuckle, check out the June/July stats for Trumbo, Zunino, and Castillo’s replacement Jesus Sucre.

Jefry Marte (July 15th). 15 AB, 2 R, 3 H, 1 HR, 4 RBI, .200 BA, .250 OBP. So far, so not too bad. Brad Ausmus seems to like the idea of having Marte in the lineup against lefthanders, in which role we think Marte will thrive. Hope you followed our exhortation and had him last week against J.A. Happ, whom he destroyed. Hope you didn’t have him this week again against J.A. Happ, whom he didn’t destroy.

Musts to Avoid

Mat Latos (April 22nd). 4 W, 3L, 7 QS, 72 2/3 IP, 62 H, 19 W, 30 ER, 64 K, 1.12 WHIP, 3.72 ERA. Latos’s first three starts of the season were so awful that we figured the guys who noted his declining pitch velocity were on to something. The pitch velocity is still down, and it’s not like his post-April stats have healed the sick, raised the dead, and made the little girls talk out of their heads, but he’s performed roughly to consensus preseason expectation, which means he’s had some value.

Anthony Gose (April 29th). 216 AB, 30 R, 10 RBI, 1 HR, 10 SB, 6 CS, .273 BA, .318 OBP. We weren’t exactly wrong about what this guy would do, but we were wrong about what its effect would be—so far. Gose had a very fast start this season—an artifact, we felt, of his otherworldy April BABIP of .500. Invoking his career OBP of .302 and 30% strikeout rate, we surmised that he’d hit a slump and lose his job. He had an epochally horrible June–.169/.213/.183, with no RBIs in 71 at bats—but kept his job, and now he’s hot again. We defiantly insist this can’t continue. Gose’s BABIP, even excluding his hot April, is .364, which figures to go down, and his batting average and OBP figure to go down with it. His SB rate is nothing special, and his fielding stats suggest that he’s not doing what got him the center field job in the first place. We expect another slump, and don’t think the underperforming Cabreraless Tigers will be able to carry his bat the way the underperforming Cabreraful Tigers could. And as before, Rajai Davis is ready to take Gose’s job whenever he’s done with it, or it’s done with him. Will that happen soon enough to make him worth jettisoning now? Who knows?

Ian Kennedy (June 4th). 2 W, 4 L, 5 QS, 45 1/3 IP, 42 H, 11 W, 15 ER, 37 K 1.17 WHIP, 2.98 ERA. Kennedy’s had a pretty soft schedule since June 4th, and some of the 9 unearned runs he’s given up since then are due to his decompensation once his fielders got things rolling. So perhaps he hasn’t pitched as well as his numbers suggest. But still: could we have been more wrong about him? We concluded that the Ian Kennedy of 2014 (a pitcher who could get left-handed hitters out) had vanished, and the Ian Kennedy of 2012-2103 (a pitcher who couldn’t) had returned. As of June 4th, lefties’ slash line against him was .297/.366/.637, which over the course of an entire season would make Lefties Against Kennedy the MLB MVP. Now, the slash line is .245/.311/.511—but for the occasional home run, he’s been unhittable against them. We were lucky: we had enough dead spots on our roster that we didn’t have to unload Kennedy when we went shopping, so we’ve still got him. If you listened to us, we apologize.

Melky Cabrera (June 10th). 131 AB, 12 R, 15 RBI, 3 HR, 1 SB, 0 CS, .313 BA, .366 OBP. It looks like we got this one wrong. We concluded that Cabrera could no longer hit (1) fastballs, and (2) left-handed pitching. He’s still having trouble with fastballs, but he’s started to hit left-handers again, just like he used to (Melky’s OBP against them since we slagged him is .450 in 40 plate appearances, which elevates him roughly to his norm for the season). Is the old Melky back? His power seems to be gone, probably for good, but he can apparently still hit.

So in light of the foregoing, why would you listen to us about Pick Hits or Muscular Boys? Beats us. But just for yuks, bear with us as we add Tomas Telis to the Pick Hit list. Telis is a 24-year-old switch-hitting catcher, just promoted by Texas to replace the injured Carlos Corporan on the roster. We first mentioned him during the pre-season. He’s being labeled a back-up catcher, just like Corporan. We see him the way we saw Welington Castillo: as a guy who could easily find his way into a job-sharing arrangement with supposed first-stringer Robinson Chirinos, and maybe even become the undisputed starter. Chirinos is 31 years old, and essentially a career minor-leaguer. He’s a right-handed hitter with a slash line of .214/.304/.429, which means he’s got some power but that’s about it. He’s nothing special at throwing runners out (30% caught-stealing rate), and ranks near the bottom of the league in pitch-framing. Telis doesn’t have much power, but he can hit: .291/.327/.404 at Round Rock this year, .345/.377/.489 last year. (In 2013 at Round Rock, Chirinos was .257/.356/.400.) The knock on Telis has always been his catching skills. But he’s been throwing out 48% of would-be base-stealers this season, as opposed to 18% last season, so he seems to have figured something out. Has he also learned to frame pitches? We don’t know; but how bad would he have to be at it to neutralize his other advantages over Chirinos? Can the Rangers possibly see themselves not only as contenders, but also as contenders whose contention depends on having Chirinos in the lineup? We propose not, and we’d make Chirinos an official Muscular Boy if he had enough Fantasy owners to qualify.

Next week, we’ll forbear posting on our customary Wednesday, preferring to wait until Saturday or Sunday, August 1st or 2nd, on the theory that we might have something to say in the wake of the July 31st trading deadline that everyone else isn’t saying. If you can’t stand the unaccustomed wait, please stop by @birchwoodbroth2 on Twitter.

Dynasty leagues are great. In a time of year where standard leagues are losing interested members by the bushel, dynasty leagues have one last big question that keeps everyone at the table. Is it time to sell? Do I look to the future right now, or do I buy? What should the buying look like?

These things are hard to prove with numbers, but maybe some recent experience, and some help from our readers, can flush these out better for those of staring at that very decision. It’s really a look at two essential questions that face us when we’re not in the top three slots in our league, in the end.

For those of you not in dynasty leagues, the first part will still be useful — we’ll look at what sort of numbers you’ll need to show in your rate categories if you want to undo the terrible that you have done so far. If you can’t push that boulder, maybe you should re-focus on other parts of your standings.

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“Who knows how his audit stands save heaven,” says Hamlet as he contemplates offing Claudius in light of the latter’s prospects for a pleasant hereafter. We’ve always loved the idea of God as the ultimate IRS agent: dissemble as much as you like, but he knows that you’ve been paying the nanny off the books and that you made out like a bandit at your garage sale.

We think of this now because it’s time to review our first-half ledger, and since by definition we’re examining how the players we’ve recommended in this blog have done, there’s no place to hide. This week, we’ll take a look at players we recommended during the pre-season, either in our Cold Predictions post or at some other point—everyone we went out of our way to discuss and promote before April. We don’t think we missed anyone; correct us if we’re wrong. Next week, we’ll give a full statistical report on our in-season Pick Hits and Muscular Boys, who are the guys we’ve been endorsing or dispraising if you need, respectively, to fill or unplug a roster spot. We may also issue a progress report on our preseason list of “Unusual Prospects,” who were huge-longshot minor leaguers to consider in abyssally deep drafts. But the only takeaway worth taking away on that one is that you may want to grab catcher Tomas Telis if the Rangers ever get around to promoting him, as they should. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Sunday, an uncrewed Space X Falcon 9 rocket was launched in Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. As you may know, it didn’t quite get there. We’re complete ignorami on the subject of aerospace flight—this is rocket science—but here’s what we saw. About a minute after liftoff, a cozy-looking white glow appeared at the top of the rocket, whereupon the flame at the bottom began to eat the rocket, and if you think that’s just a weak metaphor, check out the video. The rocket tilted from the vertical to the horizontal, and then back to the vertical, but not in a good way. When there was no more rocket for the flame to consume, everything exploded, and within a few seconds there were nothing but small fragments glittering in the sky.

A lot of time, talent, energy, and money were invested in this project, which, we feel safe in assuming, was a dead-weight loss. Moreover—and we’re not making this up—if the ISS astronauts don’t get a grocery delivery pretty soon, they’re going to have to come home for dinner. But still, you’d have to be a NASA employee, Elon Musk, or comatose not to find the video of this launch pretty spectacular. The visual part is plenty amazing, but what turns the video into a work of art is the voice-over. The voice in question is that of George Diller, who’s had this gig for NASA for more than thirty years. You’ll probably recognize it: that calm, somewhat intense, slightly hushed Chuck- Yeager-cum-golf announcer voice that is meant to be, and is, the opposite of Herb Morrison’s, who handled the play-by-play on the Hindenburg.

Diller was, shall we say, nonplussed by the turn of events, but he kept his cool. “We appear,” he observed, as rocket fragments twinkled like snowflakes in the moonlight, “to have had a launch vehicle failure.” And yes, Diller told us, after a further long and pregnant pause, just in case we had been thinking that the vaporization of $133 million worth of rocket and supplies was what everyone had had in mind all along, “the range confirmed that we have had a non-nominal flight,” “nominal” evidently being aerospacese for “not according to plan.”

Our Fantasy Baseball flight, too, can justly be described as “non-nominal.” This is a high-concept blog—Two Dabblers Take on the NFBC Main Event With Their Own Money—and though the blog has transformed us from dabblers to obsessives and gone places we hadn’t envisioned, we remain mindful of our vow to keep you abreast of developments with our team. Now it’s time for a midterm report, and, as we watch the gleaming shards of our pitching staff fall to earth and think about the sleek and powerful rocket of a team we’d hoped for, “non-nominal” seems about right, though if you prefer “launch vehicle failure,” we won’t quibble.

To descend (LOL) to specifics: We are 7th of 15 teams in our Main Event league and 189th of 450 overall in the Main Event. In the league, we’re at the top of a tier of teams, but far behind the top six (12 points to 6th, 35 points to an in-the-money finish of 3rd), and we don’t see ourselves closing the gap. Our hitting has been fine: if our pitching had been as good as our hitting, we’d be 11th overall. On the other hand, our pitching has been dismal: if our hitting were as bad, we’d be 416th. In short, it looks like we’re stuck with a mid-pack squad.

We discussed our draft results in our April 8th and April 15th posts, so we won’t do more than summarize them now by way of background. We drafted in 4th position, and our draft strategy was unorthodox but straightforward: Get a slugger in the first round, take Billy Hamilton in the second round and remove steals from the must-have list, get two elite closers early (3rd/4th/5th/6th round, depending on what the other owners are doing closerwise) and a closer-in-waiting later on, don’t draft any starting pitchers until the 8th or 9th round, but draft four or five in a row once we begin. Towards the end of the draft, grab some outfielders who can be spotted or “platooned” in the semiweekly-transaction world of the NFBC to take advantage of matchups. All in all, trying clumsily now to translate draft position into auction dollars, we estimate that we spent two-thirds of our “budget” on hitters and one-third on pitchers, with one-third of that third (or maybe a bit more) devoted to closers and CIWs.

To bring you up to date on our post-draft flailings with free agents: Among the original draftees, Travis Snider, Jose Ramirez, Jake Smolinski, Gregor Blanco, Pat Neshek, and Trevor Cahill are gone. We turned Snider into Todd Cunningham, whom we then turned into Randal Grichuk. We turned Jake Smolinski into Carlos Peguero, whom we then turned into Ben Paulsen. We turned Jose Ramirez into Brad Miller, whom we turned into Derek Dietrich. We turned Pat Neshek into A.J. Ramos, and Steve Cishek into Tony Cingrani, whom we turned into Junichi Tazawa. Free agent Andy Van Slyke is just gone. Among the now-departed starters who have graced the Team Birchwood roster are Shawn Marcum, Brett Oberholtzer, Travis Wood, and Jose Urena; with us now are Matt Wisler and Brandon Beachy.

So the roster as it now looks consists of:

C: Russell Martin
C: Yasmani Grandal
1B: Jose Abreu
2B: Derek Dietrich
3B: Nolan Arenado
SS: Alcides Escobar
CI: Carlos Santana
MI: DJ LeMahieu
OF: Seth Smith
OF: Brandon Moss
OF: Randal Grichuk
OF: Billy Hamilton
OF: Ben Paulsen, or Melky Cabrera when we can stand him.
UT: Alex Rodriguez

P: Dallas Keuchel
P: Alex Wood
P: Gio Gonzalez
P: Ian Kennedy
P: Mike Leake
P: Drew Hutchison
P: Chase Anderson
P: Aroldis Chapman
P: A.J. Ramos

BN: Ender Inciarte
BN: Martin Prado
BN: Ken Giles
BN: Junichi Tazawa
BN: Brandon Beachy
BN: Matt Wisler

So, like the puzzled Space X engineers, we’re asking ourselves: What did we do wrong? Is there any answer other than “you drafted the wrong guys”? If that’s the answer, how did the owners who drafted the right guys (Shelby Miller, A.J. Burnett, Yovani Gallardo, Jake Odorizzi, and Carlos Martinez all went in the 15th round or later in this league) find them? If we used the wrong strategy, what part of it was wrong? Going after closers too soon? Overvaluing steals? Allotting too little of our budget to our starting pitchers? Was it our in-season management? Should we have been more aggressive and free-spending in going after high-priced free agents like Eduardo Rodriguez or Lance McCullers? Or perhaps quicker off the mark with cheap, haveable guys like John Axford or Brad Ziegler? Or is that just a variation on the “wrong guys” conclusion? And how (RIP Philip Austin) do we make our voices do this?

If we have any answers to these questions, we’ll share them next time. Meanwhile, we yearn to hear yours. Also next time, unless more pressing matter supervenes, a clear-eyed evaluation of how we’ve done with players we’ve recommended or disrecommended over the months so far. Preview: The results have been mixed, which is more than you can say about the bargain-basement daily-play suggestions we occasionally make on Twitter, @birchwoodbroth2, which have been pretty uniformly bad. Still, just like Elon Musk, we plan to keep trying.

As you are likely (hopefully) aware, I’m not a fan of small sample size analysis. In fact, it could be argued that I’m far too patient, requiring the sample size to be quite significant before I change my opinion/projection on a player. But a pitcher’s SwStk% is different. It’s a per-pitch metric, so it stabilizes rather quickly and conveys very useful information. So with that in mind, let’s browse through the SwStk% leaders over the last 30 days and look to uncover any surprise names.

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If you guessed this post might relate to BABIP, you would be right. Last year, the highest BABIP by a qualified start in either league was .339, followed by four between .320 and .330. This season, the Major League average BABIP for starters sits at .297, while for American Leaguers it stands slightly lower at .295. The five starters below lead the American League with the highest BABIP marks. There doesn’t even need to be any deep analysis done to say with near certainty that better BABIP days ahead. But of course, that would be lazy, so analysis there shall be.

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Among the peccadilloes and eccentricities that we’re willing to confess to in this forum, perhaps the most embarrassing is our continuing thirst for 80’s synthpop, which we were too old for even the first time around. The sillier and stupider the better, as far as we’re concerned: Human League, Soft Cell, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Human League, A Flock of Seagulls, Men Without Hats, and of course post-Vince Clarke Depeche Mode, goth-synth titans so dumb they make Ozzy Osbourne look like Harold Bloom. (Come to think of it: Have you seen Oz lately? Even with the makeover, he does look kind of like Harold Bloom, who’s looked pretty much the same for the last 40 years.)

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I haven’t forgotten about you National League only owners! Because I play in the American League Tout Wars, it’s far easier for me to come up with deep league names in that league. But it’s time to give you NLers some love.

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Yesterday, I dissected the batted ball distance leaderboard by looking at five hitters whose distance has validated their HR/FB rate surges. Today, I’ll look at those bringing up the rear, with five hitters whose HR/FB rate declines are supported by a dip in batted ball distance. This doesn’t necessarily mean doom and gloom the rest of the way, but that their current poor performance isn’t just bad fortune.

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