This month last year, Connor Kurcon of Six Man Rotation set out to quantify the location aspect of command (or “LRP”). By establishing an accounting system that credited and debited pitchers for changes in ball-strike counts based on the attack zone of and hitter’s disposition (take? swing? ball in play?) for every pitch, he effectively created an alternative to Pitch Value (PVal) that rewards optimal movement through ball-strike counts but with much more pitcher and hitter context.

His findings are as you’d expect: Jacob deGrom and Justin Verlander lead the pack, with Gerrit Cole, Max Scherzer, and Clayton Kershaw not far behind. Other budding aces like Jack Flaherty and Mike Clevinger pepper the list, and some pleasant surprises (such as Brendan McKay, Caleb Smith, and, for those still thirsting, Jake Odorizzi) are scattered throughout as well. Out of the bullpen, newly anointed relief ace Nick Anderson led the pack followed by the underrated Emilio Pagán, breakout reliever Giovanny Gallegos, and others.

Near the end of his post, Kurcon includes a subhead dedicated to Kyle Hendricks where he highlights how Hendricks, widely respected as a command artist, fares lukewarmly by measure of LRP. He then reminds us “LRP doesn’t paint the full picture of command.” True that.

Fortunately, Kurcon has left the door open for me to tie up loose ends with find Gs I’ve been meaning to write up for a couple of months now. Never fear, Hendricks is the command artist we know and love — it’s just that he relies heavily on incurring contact in optimal pitch locations. It is a needle very few pitchers can thread, but Hendricks does it masterfully.

Read the rest of this entry »

To say the least, the 2020 fantasy baseball season will go down as a one-of-kind. A late start led to a 60 game sprint. Seven-inning double-headers. Weeks of rescheduled games because of COVID-19 positive tests. The National League DH. Twenty-eight-man rosters in September. Each of these on its own would fill the headlines. With the changes coming all at once, they felt overwhelming. I’m hoping to calm everyone if any and hopefully not all of the changes happen again. Here is some advice on how to handle the changes.

The help divided up into league setting and individual manager focus. While I inserted plenty of my own advice, I wanted to make sure as many people as possible contributed so Tweeted out and asked during my chat for input.
Read the rest of this entry »

Some previous research, including my own, has pointed to changes in Sprint Speed being a sign a player’s talent has changed. I decided to investigate changes from 2019 to 2020 to find who could be struggling and why. Many hitters are experiencing a drop and just a few are up.

In some way, the following information should be picked apart for a longer research article with some miraculous/groundbreaking/made-up claim that batters came to this season out of shape and that is why offensive production is down. I don’t care. All I want to know is who are the hitters who could be breaking out or down. Figuring out why is for the offseason. It’s now time to wins leagues.
Read the rest of this entry »

Opening day is finally here!

In 2020, we had two distinct draft seasons – both in February/March as well as in June/July. Some fantasy teams of mine were drafted four or five months ago, while others were assembled just this past weekend. We typically spend all winter longing for the time when our fantasy teams finally start accumulating statistics. This year, due to the tragic global pandemic of COVID-19, we had to wait even longer. We are now finally here. Tonight the standings go live!

I am well aware that there is still much suffering in the U.S. and in the rest of the world from the disease. I do not mean to make light of the world’s situation by any means in my enthusiasm for baseball’s return. At the same time, watching our nation’s pastime played day in and day out, may aid the morale of the country. Although there will be many challenges, I am hopeful that the MLB will be able to start and finish the abbreviated 2020 season without major hiccups.

Read the rest of this entry »

There is no argument that if two position players would be guaranteed to produce the exact stats, the one with multi-position eligibility should have more value. The added flexibility would be helpful while drafting or setting lineups. The question of how much value does it add remains unanswered? Todd Zola and I have attempted to answer the question with Todd coming to the conclusion of “adding $3 or $4 to each player in mixed formats, and a couple bucks in single-league formats.” That’s fine in theory but I wanted to see how the market values the flexibility in this short season by matching similar players with and without extra positions. In the end, the results matched up with Todd’s findings.
Read the rest of this entry »

Name value is a helluva drug in the fantasy game and often leads to overvalued players going several rounds higher than comparable players. Sometimes the name value is indicative of a star-level player who has shown heights in his past that are worth betting on at a loftier pick than his would-be equal counterpart, but a lot of times it’s just an opportunity to scoop comparable skills much cheaper.

Here’s one such case at each position using The BAT X projections:

CATCHER

Yasmani Grandal 116 ADP | Projection .235 AVG, 27 HR, 71 RBI, 71 R, 2 SB

Salvador Perez 158 ADP | Projection .255, 28, 81, 62, 0

A big part of this difference is that fact that Perez missed all of 2019 due to Tommy John surgery. Prior to that, Perez put up four straight seasons of 20+ HR with strong RBI counts (for the position) and decent R totals which is exactly what Grandal has done in his last four years. In standard leagues, Perez is arguably better thanks to spiking some useful batting averages over the years while Grandal is always a drag in that position (OBP leagues are a different story as Grandal has a career 14% BB rate). This three-round difference is almost certainly based on the fact that Perez is returning from injury and despite being a Grandal fan, I’ll take the discount.

Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous article, I gave an update on my Weighted Plate Discipline Index (wPDI) metric. wPDI arises from the core ingredients of plate discipline – looking only at zone rates, swing rates and contact rates.

An important distinction regarding wPDI, is that its sample size is quite a bit larger than other statistics. Many other stats are based on innings pitched, or even per plate appearance. The denominator of wPDI is pitches. While batter outcomes such as strikeouts and walks stabilize fairly quickly, wPDI can work even faster.

Let’s now take a look at the 2019 leaderboards for wPDI, to see if we can find some undervalued players.

Starting Pitchers

Above is the 2019 wPDI leaderboard for starting pitchers.

Blake Snell lead all starting pitchers in wPDI in 2019. The key to Snell’s success was his “out of the zone” plate discipline. In particular, Snell’s Outcome A (out of the zone, swung on and missed) was the 2^nd highest of all qualified pitchers in baseball. In 2019, Blake produced a K% rate of 33.3%, the highest of his career. He logged a whopping 147 strikeouts in just 107 innings pitched. Both FIP and xFIP (3.32 & 3.31 respectively) agree that his 4.29 ERA last year was somewhat unlucky.

Read the rest of this entry »

My initial goal was to determine the amount of variation in pitching stats in a short season. What I found was a stipulation filled mess. It should have been simple. Just take the first two months and compare how the pitchers performed to a full season. The short answer is that they did great because they pitched in cooler weather and were 100% healthy. Instead, should the results from August and Septemeber be used, by that point in the season, many had broken down and the breakouts (e.g. Lucas Giolito) emerged. There is no perfect way to answer my original idea, so I’ll try to provide several possible answers.

To limit the focus, I’m going to implement the following guidelines. It’s a lot and when I was setting them, I was questioning any possible findings. By changing any one of them, the process to find the results and the actual final results differ.

• Assumed a 12-team league and used SGP (Standing Gain Points) equation from The Process.
• I used historic Steamer projections to set the preseason valuation.
• I only examined WHIP and ERA. Most of the hot takes I’ve heard involve not wanting to deal with the possible variation in these rate stats.
• Ignored closers. They are their own beast.
• Focused on the 7 starters for 12 teams.
• Used April to May data and then August to September. Both aren’t ideal but the differences can then be analyzed.
• Anyone who didn’t pitch during the two-month time frame got zeros across the board.
• I just did 2019 and kept the mess to one season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Note: About 95% of this article was finished before the news that MLB is going forward with a 60 game season.  I finished it knowing that more imporant work needs to be done. This series now comes to an abrupt end and I will return to the series once the season is over one way or the other.

I’m continuing my quest to predict pitcher injuries and their effects as best as possible. I started grinding through the process last week and found through some additional work that injuries from just the past two seasons drag down production. Today, I’m going to go over some other possible other injury causes and provide updated injury ranks.

While I’ve done quite a bit of my own work on pitcher injuries, I decided to scour the web come up with some new ideas. Here are some possible ideas ranked by how I’d like to investigate them.
Read the rest of this entry »

With so much sabermetric work already completed, I’m creating a ton of work for myself to see if a hitter’s athleticism influences how they age? Additionally, do these “athletes” age better? I tried to jump the gun a few nights ago with an ill-fated Twitter thread where I thought about reverse-engineering the stats. Instead, I’m going to put a value on a hitter’s athleticism using some readily available metrics.

I began my search by using some advice from Bill James who commented on my Tweet.

Let's assert as Point A that "athleticism" consists of four things: Speed, strength, agility and quickness. "Strength" is the most troublesome, because you can have strength in many different body parts, and people who are strong in one area may be relatively weak in others.

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) June 7, 2020

He just rattled the traits off and since he’s likely forgotten more about baseball than I’ve ever learned, I’ll just focus on them. I’m guessing he’s already investigated the subject.
Read the rest of this entry »