Your voices have been heard. Tallying six big votes for the next pitcher to be Pod Projected was 2012 breakout starting pitcher, Jeff Samardzija. I owned him in all of my leagues last year after scooping him up post-draft during spring training and I know how to spell his name without looking it up! Impressive feat, I know. So what will the “Shark” do for an encore?
Last Thursday, fellow RotoGrapher Chris Cwik tried to make sense of Justin Ruggiano’s half a season breakout performance last year. Chris primarily focused on historical comparables and concluded that it is unlikely that Ruggiano will continue to enjoy above average offensive performance. Looking at historical comparables is a good idea and tells us that Ruggiano is indeed facing long odds. However, I want to take that analysis one step further and dive into Ruggiano’s specific skill set to determine whether he’ll experience a better fate than the majority of the group in Chris’ sample.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have published several of my hitter projections with a detailed explanation of each metric projected. Today, it’s finally time to switch over to the pitching side. Kris Medlen returned from Tommy John surgery with a bang last year, posting a microscopic 0.97 ERA and 0.81 WHIP as a starter. A performance like that will grab the attention of fantasy owners and it has vaulted him up the ADP charts, as he has been getting drafted 75th overall and 14th among starting pitchers on Mock Draft Central. With a limited history, projecting him is tough. Let’s go through the process, of which you can read more about here.
Phew. After a nearly four and a half hour snake draft online, I have officially completed the earliest draft in my fantasy baseball career. LABR stands for League of Alternative Baseball Reality, and along with Tout Wars, is one of the two most publicized “expert” leagues. In the past, LABR has had only two leagues, an AL-Only and NL-Only, with both formats using a live auction in Arizona to select players. Last year, a mixed league with an online draft was formed and I participated in the inaugural season as well. With that background out of the way, let’s get into more league specifics.
I’m happy to announce the fantasy values have come to FanGraphs+! Based on Steamer projections, these values are for standard, OBP, and “only” leagues based on the following descriptors: 12 teams, 23 starting lineup slots, $260 budget. They will appear on the projections’ leaderboard for FanGraphs+ subscribers ($4.99/yr).
The methodology for these values has long floated around the site, but there are a few minor changes that have been made to better the accuracy and efficacy of these values.
The replacement levels have been altered to cover a full league’s worth of players. In the past, we had assumed that the last round of two contained replacement players, but discarding this assumption leads to fuller, more accurate auction values. Now, the top 276 players are worth a combined $3120, which is the full budgeted amount for a 12-team auction draft.
In the past, we’d limited results to players that met a certain at-bat or innings threshold. This is no longer the case. However, there is still need for a baseline uninfluenced by low counting stats, the league averages and standard deviations were calculated using the players with at least 350 ABs or 40 IP.
FanGraphs+ Giveaway!
Name the player the following player capsule describes in the comments and win free access to FanGraphs+!
The 33-year-old [Player] is past his “prime.” While he used to provide some power ([number less than ten] homers in 2010), he looks to be done. He never hit for average (.232 career), but it dropped to [number less than .232] this last year. Two pitchers, Hamels (.217) and Kershaw (.207), had better averages in 2012 (70 minimum plate appearances). Also, the power disappeared, as he ended the season with only one home run. Finally, he stole two bases which was only one off of his career high. Basically he is not good enough to play and when he does, he produces no value. (Jeff Zimmerman)
In what is likely to be my last hitter Pod Projection, Desmond Jennings topped the list of remaining vote getters. The sophomore was a bit of a disappointment last season and was hampered by a knee injury that cost him nearly a month. I have been a big fan of Jennings in the past. Let’s find out if we can expect him to rebound this year and enter the upper echelon of fantasy outfielders.
Before diving back into this, after our long weekend away, I want to let you know what to expect this (hopefully this) week: Part 5 is clearly here right now, and Mike and I are working on parts 6 and 7 as we speak. In Part 6, I’ll be looking at the equations Mike came up with the other day along with one other equation that smarter statistical minds than mine are currently developing. Ideally, part 6 will be something of a wrap on our attempt to find an equation for expected HR/FB within a season. In Part 7, Mike will take a deeper look at a handful of players, and see how useful this new equation really is.
Today, I’ll be looking at another piece of the puzzle – what happens in future years to guys who show breakout distance on their fly balls.
Yesterday, seemingly out of nowhere, the Astros acquired first baseman Chris Carter from the A’s. Carter was a one-time top prospect in the White Sox system, boasting elite power and above average plate patience. Of course, that came with its share of strikeouts, making Carter the prototypical slugging first base prospect. Carter is no spring chicken though, he is already 26 years old as he moves onto his third team. Sadly, last year represented his most expanded audition in the big leagues, even though he recorded just 260 plate appearances. His massive power was on full display, though, as he launched 16 homers to notch a .275 ISO. So now in Houston, does he shoot up sleeper lists?
It’s been nearly two weeks since I posted my last Pod Projection after the journey to estimate/project HR/FB ratio took over my life. Surprisingly, Jason Heyward tallied nary a vote when I first asked you readers who you wanted me to publish a projection breakdown for next. Instead, fellow RotoGrapher Howard Bender requested Heyward, while kickin’ rocks of course. Big things were expected of Heyward as a rookie and big things are still expected. As such, I thought he was a hitter more than worthy of a statistical dissection.
**For those of you who have listened to the Fantasy Baseball Roundtable radio show in the past, I wanted to share that we are officially back on the air! And if you have never listened, well here’s your chance to hear my manly voice talking about nerdy stats. Listen live every Wednesday night at 9-10 PM EST.
The quest continues! On Monday, Chad Young and I set out on a journey to try utilizing the fly ball and home run distances and angles found on Baseball Heat Maps in an attempt to answer several questions regarding a hitter’s HR/FB rate. As expected, we found a strong correlation between it and batted ball distance. But, distance alone wasn’t telling us the whole story. Chad decided to incorporate batted ball angle and the previous season HR/FB rate and that certainly improved our equation. Then yesterday I took that another step further and found that including the HR/FB rate from two seasons ago was even better. But, I wasn’t satisfied. A hitter’s HR/FB rate in 2012 should not be affected by how he performed in the metric in previous years. We pinpointed what we thought may be one of the major hindrances and that was the way the angle data was presented as an average.
