Once a preseason, it appears, we decide we like a pitcher, don’t trust our own affinities, and neither write about him nor draft him ourselves. In 2016, it was Rick Porcello, who won the Cy Young award. Last year, less catastrophically, it was Anthony Swarzak. For reasons we’ll detail below, we liked Swarzak going into the 2017 season. What, after all, was there not to like about a 31-year-old middle reliever coming off a season in which he’d had an ERA of 5.52 and an even higher FIP, and spent a month on the DL and two months in Triple-A? Even for us, connoisseurs of the preposterous, this was too preposterous, and we paid no attention to Swarzak in Fangraphs or in our myriad drafts and auctions.

You know the sequel. Swarzak was magnificent in 2017, with a 2.33 ERA, a 1.03 WHIP, more than 10 strikeouts per 9 innings, and no earned runs relinquished in 18 of his first 19 appearances. According to Baseball HQ, he earned $12 in 5×5 Rotisserie—the same as Gerrit Cole and Dylan Bundy, and more than Trevor Bauer, Zach Davies, Masahiro Tanaka, and dozens of others. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a peek at the Diamondbacks reliever depth chart. Archie Bradley sits atop the pecking order. We project 22 saves. Free agent acquisition Brad Boxberger is penciled in for seven saves. Yoshihisa Hirano doesn’t have a player page yet and therefore is not listed. He’s definitely in the battle. The Diamondbacks will have more than 29 saves. Perhaps consider the rest as belonging to Hirano.

By NFBC ADP, fantasy owners believe Bradley will close. His 186 ADP is sandwiched directly between undisputed closers Brandon Morrow (185 ADP) and Blake Treinen (186 ADP). At this price, Morrow is the heist equivalent of successfully robbing Fort Knox, but that’s a subject for another day. Boxberger has a 321 ADP. Hirano is floating at a 395 ADP.

In The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational (#TGFBI aka Justin Mason’s baby), Bradley has a 177 ADP. Boxberger has only been picked in two of 13 leagues (295 ADP). Hirano has found love in three leagues (298 ADP). A lot of people play NFBC. Mason’s baby is comprised of 195 self-styled fantasy baseball experts. There seems to be a resounding consensus that Bradley will close.

I wonder if he’s even the front runner to win the job. There are three problems with Archie Bradley the Closer in 2018. Read the rest of this entry »

Changing a pitcher’s pitch mix seems to be the newest path to success. Having a pitcher utilize his two to four best pitches can help him focus his arsenal for peak results. Finding these pitchers can be a huge advantage and the great and wonderful Eno Sarris used the original work to find Carlos Carrasco. I’m going to step an owner through the procedure using a few examples from the news so they can find their own diamond in the rough.

The basic idea behind changing a pitcher’s pitch mix is to have them throw as many effective pitches as possible. The original studies focused on above-average pitches. This is a simple method and one I use when examining a pitcher. The pitcher’s pitch results can be found by going to their page at FanGraphs, clicking o the Splits tab, then the Pitch Type Splits tab (example).

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In combing through last season’s reliever rankings, something looked a little different. Among CBSSports.com’s top 25 relief-eligible pitchers in Roto value, there were five relievers with fewer than five saves and no more than one start who made the cut. If you toss in Mike Minor, who notched six saves, he joins Chris Devenski, Chad Green, Yusmeiro Petit, Andrew Miller and Matt Albers to make it an even half-dozen. In 2016, only Brad Brach and Nate Jones met those criteria and finished among the top 25.

What Brach and Jones had in common was tossing 70-plus innings with strong strikeout rates, decent control and low BABIPs. Brach also helped himself by vulturing 10 wins. From the 2017 cohort, Devenski and Petit both exceeded 80 innings, and Green threw 69 frames. Miller was limited to 62.2 innings, but he was still good enough to squeak in at No. 23. It’s hardly surprising that the number of non-closers in the upper echelons of fantasy relievers grew, given that starting pitchers threw fewer innings per start. The trend of managers relying more on relievers doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, so targeting the top non-closers now needs to be a part of the draft prep process.
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It’s tough to get excited about this year’s batch of rookie pitchers. One reason is that most of the top arms (Reyes, Gohara, Buehler, Flaherty) have already debuted in the majors. Many of the other top-ranked arms have not pitched in double-A yet.

With this year’s class looking down, there always seems to be a few pitchers who come out of nowhere like Luis Castillo did last season. He wasn’t picked among the top 600 players in NFBC and now he near a top-100 pick. Jake Faria and Dinelson Lamet were a couple other arms who were off owner’s radars. It just takes a pitcher gaining a couple ticks on his fastball or developing a new pitch to shoot up in talent.

I found it best to be aggressive on this these mid-season call-ups. They may be getting promoted because they are ready. Investigate any recent scouting reports and don’t be afraid to roster them if they’re talented.

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It’s tough to create a perfectly balanced team on draft or auction day. Owners are feeling the push-and-pull of trying to balance all five categories in a roto league. Mid-draft, many owners decide to drop a category with the hope of finding the needed stats on the waiver wire. Knowing which stats can be found can be tricky. By looking back at last season’s Tout Wars leagues, a decent idea of available stats can be determined.

One feature of the OnRoto.com fantasy league website computes the league’s final standings using just the drafted teams (nine pitchers, 14 position players). I took these draft values and compared them to the actual final values for each of the four roto leagues (12-team AL and NL-only and the two 15-team mixed leagues).

Some specific notes on these leagues. First, they are deeper than most leagues so every player who might be good is already owned. As for the timing of the mixed draft (the other three were auctions) happened a few weeks before the other three. Additionally, only the 23-man rosters were used used for the projected standings. Each team had an additional five or six-person bench.

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Alex Reyes was considered to be a top-5 prospect coming into the 2017 season. Then his elbow gave out and he eventually needed Tommy John surgery. He’s nearing completion of his recovery and the Cardinals are considering when he’ll return and his role.

Wanting to protect their top prospect as much as possible, the Cardinals have set a soft target of May 1 as a likely return date for Reyes. What hasn’t been so explicitly defined, though, is what role he’ll fill upon that return.

Long term, the Cardinals have every intention of using Reyes to anchor their rotation. MLB Pipeline recently ranked Reyes as the seventh-best right-handed pitching prospect, and he likely would have been higher on that list had he not just missed a full season.

But given the recovery process Reyes has undergone over these last 12 months, the Cardinals intend to be cautious in 2018. Their preference, as stated multiple times this offseason by president of baseball operations John Mozeliak, would be to have Reyes first come out of the bullpen.

For fantasy owners, they could take a chance on having an elite arm as a starter or reliever. With so many possible unknown outcomes, the following is a breakdown of 2018 value.

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Last Friday, I wrote about four of the most obvious closer sleepers. If I’m looking for the lowest hanging fruit, my eyes are on the Diamondbacks, Twins, White Sox, and Angels. That leaves us with plenty of other low hanging fruit. You’ll just need to overlook some minor blemishes.

In case you need justification to bargain hunt for closers, here’s my cold take on the subject:

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Paying full price for saves can make it challenging to build a dominant roster. Closers are among the most inconsistent of baseball assets. Not only do they have the injury and performance risks typically associated with pitchers, but they also have to remain the best reliever on their particular team. A guy like Hector Neris could stay exactly the same – i.e. acceptable but not exceptional – and lose his job.

Last season, 23 relievers had the closer role and then lost it. That’s excluding the handful of players who had the job, lost the job, and later recovered the job. In 2016, 25 closers were booted from the ninth. Only 21 got the ax in 2015. The good news is that many of those guys – like Tyler Clippard – were always meant to be temporary solutions. A handful of struggling teams often account for over half of the demoted closers.

Entering 2018, most of the league looks pretty set in the ninth inning. Even so, we’ll still almost certainly see the usual turnover at the position. Over the next couple days, I’ll cover some of my preferred closer sleepers, starting with the most obvious.

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Here in Fantasyland, relief pitchers come in three varieties: Closers, Guys Who Aren’t But Might Become Closers, and Everbody Else. Fantasy fortunes are made and broken on the basis of these distinctions. If, say, you were sharp enough to acquire Hector Neris, Felipe Rivero, and Brad Hand on draft day, you won a category and spent essentially nothing to do it. If, conversely, you started the season with Seung Hwan Oh and Francisco Rodriguez as your closers, then you were probably waiting till next year by the All-Star break.

We like unanticipated delight as much as anyone, but for Fantasy players, avoidance of hearbreak seems to us even more essential. And to that end, we reintroduce to you our Who Got Lucky report. The back story: In the middle of the 2015 season, we stumbled upon a simple approach that enabled us to avoid trading for Danny Salazar—an excellent move, although it didn’t help us much. We wondered: which pitchers who’d given up a lot of hard-hit balls had emerged unscarred by virtue of having low BABIPs and HR/FB percentages? We figured those guys had gotten lucky, and that their luck would change. It worked so well in identifying Salazar, and—in the other direction, as a guy who’d been unlucky—Carlos Rodon, that before last season we ran the numbers for both starters and relievers, and even for hitters, on the theory that anomalies in the same categories would once again right themselves.

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