Recently here at Rotographs, we released our rest of season rankings for starting pitchers, I had Tim Lincecum rated as the sixth-highest fantasy pitcher. To say the least, I took a little heat for that ranking. I will try to justify the ranking today.
Stephen Strasburg is possibly the best starting pitcher so far this season. Here is a quick sampling of his stats:
11.6 K/9, 32% K%
2.6 BB/9, 7% BB%
2.82 ERA, 2.42 FIP, 2.60 xFIP, 2.60 SIERA
These numbers are good enough that I have him ranked as the best fantasy starting pitcher without taking the number of innings he pitches into account. The only knock against him is that he is not a ground ball pitcher with has led to a career BABIP 0.308. When he is on the mound, he is arguably the best fantasy pitcher in the in the game.
Starting pitchers. Man, there are so many of them. And every week, there’s a no-name that throws a shutout and burns bright for a few days. Those matchstick burns very rarely turn into anything substantial.
And yet we have to wait five days between starts, wondering what the next heaping pile of information will tell us. Imagine if a position player got 30 plate appearances every five days, we’d spend a lot of time thinking about them in between, too. Maybe this is the appeal with fantasy football, eh?
Off-topic. Point is, information about starting pitchers comes in leaps and surges. That makes them particularly tough to rank, but it also provides opportunity.
Rankings week is mercifully drawing to a close, with only the pitchers left for Monday. It makes sense to close the offense with catchers, in a way — they are the least likely position to make an offensive impact on your fantasy team. Sure, middle infielders hit for a worse batting line, but catchers are close, and they accrue fewer plate appearances. Their teams need to watch out for their knees and always employ a tandem at the position — only five catchers are projected to accrue more than 500 at-bats this year by the updated ZiPs, and that’s not a ton. By contrast, there are three first baseman that might crack 600 at-bats, and 21 that should cross the 500 at-bat threshold.
Catchers: not only are they doing it worse, they’re doing it less often. Maybe that’s a boon, actually. Sometimes, especially in two-catcher leagues, it makes sense just to leave that space unfilled. Many of these guys are just going to hurt your team more with every plate appearance.
Over the past few days, Eno Sarris has been rolling out our consensus ranking for players at various positions. To create my rankings I used ZiPS rest of season stats to compile my rankings. The only time I changed my ranking was because of expected time lost on the D.L. For some players who are having a good 2012 season (Josh Reddick, Jed Lowrie, Allen Craig, Edwin Encarnacion and Trevor Plouffe), my rankings are lower than most people expected. Today, I am going to look at one cause for a player to be out performing his projections: injuries.
Note: I will be looking at lack of past playing time and a measurable change in talent for the other two causes for a player out performing there projections.
Injuries and how they relate to player performance are one of the few last few frontiers in sabermetric studies. This off season, in two separate studies, Mitchel Litchman (MGL) and myself looked at how injuries affect a hitter’s performance. In MGL’s study, he looked at players who went on the DL and how they performed. He found that hitters under performed their SLG in the year of the injury, but the rest of their traits stayed constant. In my study, I looked at players who played through injuries without going on the D.L. and found the same conclusion. In the year after the injury, the player exceeded their projected power numbers.
Phew what a bear. Starting pitchers remain on the docket for Monday, but thankfully only catchers tomorrow. Because there seem like there are about a million outfielders.
Of course, not all of them are any good, especially in a mixed league. And we probably ranked about three times as many as we needed to for mixed leaguers. But at least all the relevant names are here. Even if there are too many to recap in any comprehensive way, they’re here.
These tiers are a bit later than the rest of the crew, as my vacation delayed my writing. All can breathe easily now as they have finally arrived! You can check out my June update here. A quick note: I have removed pitchers who were demoted to the minors since I have no idea when and if they will be returning to the Majors.
By now, you might have a favorite ranker among the four of us. That’s fine, we’re adults. We’ve gathered to give you four options for a reason. In fact, we’ve gathered these four guys in particular for a reason.
Jeff Zimmerman primarily uses ZiPs rest-of-season projections, with a few tweaks, and so he’s our Sober Suzy. ZiPs does use information from this year, weighted against information from past years, and it does include playing time projections, but it does not get caught up in the excitement of a player in a breakout. Zach Sanders has his own projections, which are more intuitive, and he uses his value calculator to stack the players up against each other. On the other end of the spectrum, you have me and Mike Podhorzer. We are more intuitive, and yet we have different ideas about the players and different levels of cynicism.
Taken as a whole, you should get a reasonable set of rankings that doesn’t get too caught up in a hot month, or too upset about a bad start. That’s the aim.
A commenter brought up a common refrain on a discussion of the first base ranks yesterday. That commenter asked if I would trade my Mark Teixeira straight up for Adrian Gonzalez, since I had ranked Mark Teixeira one spot ahead of Adrian Gonzalez. It was a simple question, but it brought into focus many of my feelings about these rankings.
First, there’s no such league that I’ve ever been in where I have offered or received an offer of one player at one position for another player at the same position. That doesn’t mean that it never happens, or shouldn’t happen, it just means that the hypothetical doesn’t really match up with reality in a useful way. Then again, if you felt strongly about those two players, perhaps you would make that trade.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have scheduled the rankings week during a vacation week, but this isn’t a normal vacation. My wife and our three-month-old are visiting her sister, her 18-month-old, and her newborn in Hawaii — it wasn’t going to be a vacation like most vacations. In fact, even though rankings are a grueling, thankless task, they offer a respite (a vacation, perhaps) from my vacation.
