Archive for Rankings

The Sleeper and the Bust Episode: 642 – 1B Preview Pt. 2

2/12/19

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 19, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER19!

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Notable News

  • PITCHERS & CATCHERS HAVE REPORTED!!!!!!!!!!
  • Francisco Lindor injury (9:40)
  • Kyler Murray peaces out to football (22:40)

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Francisco Lindor: Value Adjustment

News broke on Friday that Francisco Lindor would be out seven to nine weeks with a strained calf. The reaction to the injury was swift. In NFBC’s Online Championship before the injury news, he had a 4.8 ADP in ten contests. In the two contests over the weekend, his ADP dropped to 16.5 after Jose Altuve, Javier Baez, Alex Bregman, and Trevor Story. So, is the drop deserved or did they drop him too far or not far enough? I’m going to fully breakdown how much I would change his value in a sample league.

With so many league variations, I need to pick a lane with his value adjustment. I going to take a 15-team roto league using AVG. For this league, I’ll use the Standing Gains Points (formulas in my book) as a shortcut to help determine his value and use couple tools to help speed along the process.

Add in replacement level

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The Sleeper and the Bust Episode: 641 – Fireside Chat: SP Rankings Breakdown

2/9/19

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 19, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER19!

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2018 Top 100 Prospects: A Fantasy Spin Review

It’s prospect season (thank goodness, as nothing else is happening).  Nearly one year ago I borrowed from the great work by Eric and Kiley here and applied some fantasy context to their overall Top 100 prospect rankings from 2018.  We’ll do something similar for 2019, but before the full frenzy of this season’s prospect rankings reaches it’s peak, I thought it prudent to review prospect perceptions from this time last year to see if we can learn anything.

From last year’s post, the same purpose applies:

The goal here is simply to each prospect’s grades and scouting reports and then translate those skills into “what could be” for fantasy context (for example where “upside” might represent an 80%+ outcome on a prospect’s potential).

For comparison, last year’s comments are at the top, followed by a value trend and general update on where things appear to be for each prospect heading into 2019.

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Justin Mason’s Top 121 Starting Pitchers

Over the next ten days, I will release the rest of my positional ranks for the 2019 season. ADP is from NFBC sorted by 1/1/2019 through 2/7/19

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Top 120 Starting Pitchers

For me, the end of the Super Bowl is the official start of the fantasy baseball season. Obviously, I never really take my attention away from baseball even after the World Series, but I’m definitely an outlier. There are plenty of big time baseball and football fans who close the book on the diamond for the pigskin come October (or even September if their fantasy team falls out and their favorite team doesn’t make the playoffs) only to return once football is done.

Well, it’s done!

With that, it’s time for a new SP ranking update. I’d be hinting at an update coming sooner than later, so I appreciate your patience. I’ve got a list running 120 deep with colored bars denoting some talent breaks. There is still a substantial Glob™ where the distinctions between pitchers become thinner. I don’t have an ironclad case for #80 over #106 the way I do #16 over #42. These are my preferences, though. I’m not leaning on The Glob™ to shirk accountability for my rankings, but it’d be foolish not to acknowledge how wide-open SP ranks become around 70 or so. In fact, there’s an upper tier Glob™ from around 35 to 79 and then the standard Glob™ from 80 until maybe even 150 or so, but I decided to cut it at 120.

I’ll have plenty more on pitcher rankings in the coming months, including lists with commentary on most (if not all) pitchers, lists for attacking The Glob™, my biggest buys, my biggest fades, and more! Justin and I will have a two-part positional preview pod on starting pitchers, each likely approaching two hours if I had to guess. But for now, enjoy this list and let me know what you think in the comments below.

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Plate Appearance Disagreements: Part 1

It is projection churning season and today, I’m going to investigate hitters in the top-200 who have the largest variation in projected plate appearances. I’m trying to see who seems off and any adjustments I’d make to their projections.

Normally, I just use a plate appearance average of several unique sources for my projections. I don’t have time to adjust each player. For now, I’m using five sources who constantly update their projected playing time. One is FanGraphs but I’m not going to reveal the other four as I don’t want to debate their merits. More importantly, it’s tough to know for sure who is wrong and who is right. In most instances, a reasonable explanation can be drawn for any total. Besides the players with the larger variation, I’ve included my top-300 hitters at the article’s end with their plate appearance differences.

Note: I ignored catchers and will look at them in detail at a later date.

Eloy Jimenez
Range: 336
Standard Deviation: 238
Average: 446

I’m not surprised with Jimenez being divisive. I sort of expected projections to have him being promoted either in mid-April (extra year of service) or early June (miss July two cutoff). One source was extremely low with a sub-300 value increasing the range. For me, I’d split the possible callup dates and go with a 525 plate appearance total and adjust it as more news becomes available.

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Steamer vs NFBC ADP – Home Run Bargains

Last week, I uncovered potential undervalued speedsters by comparing the Steamer projections to the current NFBC ADP. Today, I will go through a similar exercise for power.

In 2018, just three players launched at least 40 round trippers (K Davis 48, J.D. Martinez 43, J Gallo 40). Eleven additional players smacked at least 35 dingers, and all together there were 25 players who amassed at least 30 homeruns. Let’s dive into the players with a HR projection of 25+.

For these draft value comparisons, I match:

  • The player ranks as computed by the FanGraphs Auction Calculator with Steamer projections (standard NFBC 15 team roto league settings).
  • The current NFBC ADP (of Draft Championship leagues from December 15, 2018 to present).

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Setting the Hitter-Pitcher Split to Create Overall Rankings

It’s time to get nerdy. Very nerdy. While I’m going to post some auction values end the article’s end (I just lost 99% of the readers), the focus of the words is to concentrate on setting a pitcher-hitter split by just using Standings Gain Points (SGP). It’s not going to work with every league type. Not even close but it’s a theoretical solution which can help an owner the best chance to get the most value out of every draft pick or auction dollar. It’s definitely a better option when trying to set in-season values.

The following process is definitely ripe for discussion and argument. While writing The Process, Tanner and I debated this idea and even brought in others to determine if the pitcher-hitter split can be done by using SGP values. We published without including the concept as we were still ironing it out. We are still not in 100% agreement but here is the idea.

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Catchers … What a Dumpster Fire

Catchers … what a dumpster fire for a fantasy position. I can’t remember it being worse. It probably was at some point but with the increased knowledge of pitch framing, more horrible hitting catchers are accumulating plate appearances. Today, I’m going to go through the natural catcher tiers for various league types and show where owners need to buy for the best values.

Before I go any further, I need to explain a few concepts. I’m going to be using Standing Gain Points (SGP) to differentiate the various players. The main reason I like to use SGP is it takes all of player’s Roto stats and combine them into a single value. This important with differentiating the value of a speedster leading off or a middle of the lineup slugger. Additionally, I’m using The Process’s 15-team, two-catcher formula for all the following comparisons. It may not be the perfect formula when comparing different league types but it will provide a nice baseline.

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