Welcome to the Ottoneu keeper deadline, 2018 edition.  Today (11:59 PM EDT) is the final day to make that difficult decision about your on-the-bubble players before rosters lock and you set your sights on your upcoming league auction.  Per the rules:

Between the end of the Major League Baseball regular season and the end of arbitration, players may be cut. Between the end of arbitration and the keeper deadline, players may be cut or traded. After the keeper deadline and before the auction draft, teams may not cut or trade any players.

Since the keeper deadline also serves as a de-factor trade deadline, I’ve lined up a few final resources for you below and I’ve asked a handful of Ottoneu experts (Justin, Chad, Brad) to check your questions and comments periodically throughout the day to offer their input on your toughest decisions.  You don’t play this game? You should, but even if your non-Ottoneu keeper deadline is still a few weeks away, feel free to fire your questions below and we’ll do our best to give you feedback (for context, don’t forget to let us know details about your league format).

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As somewhat of an ode to the will-be-missed Mr. Swydan, I want take a page out of Paul’s book to highlight a number of players I’m excited to watch in 2018 (this is part one).

Freddie Freeman

Having fun with some random comparisons, Justin Smoak finished a terrific 2017 with a career-high .371 wOBA (.270/.355/.529).  Freddie Freeman also finished the summer with a .371 wOBA (.291/.378/.513)…after spending six weeks on the DL with a broken wrist.  Before that DL stint, Freeman was arguably the best hitter in baseball, slashing .341/.461/.748 (.485 wOBA) over the first six weeks of the season.  He was essentially unstoppable during that stretch, and at the age of 28, armed with one of the most consistent batted ball profiles in the game and a full season of health (plus 3B eligibility in some leagues), Freeman has all the ingredients for a truly special season in 2018.

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The Hot Stove is operating a  simmer right now after the busy weekend with Shohei Ohtani and Giancarlo Stanton. We’re getting a couple moves per day, but they are far from blockbusters. In fact, it’s been a bunch of middle relievers of late with a pair of TJ recovering SPs mixed in. It’s never ending! As I was typing up this paragraph, the Mets agreed to terms with yet another middle reliever.

• Luke Gregerson to STL (2 yr/$11 mil deal)

This is the first piece in a pen rebuild for the Cardinals. Trevor Rosenthal is out with Tommy John recovery so they non-tendered him while Seung Hwan Oh, Juan Nicasio, and Zack Duke are all free agents. Gregerson joins Tyler Lyons and Brett Cecil at the backend of the pen. Alex Reyes will also start the season in the bullpen, but probably as a multi-inning option earlier in games. Gregerson logged 47 saves in three years with Houston, including a 31-save season back in 2015. The Cards could tab the 34-year old as their closer, but I wouldn’t draft him as such right now.

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Spin rate is becoming ever more important to baseball analysis now that we have access to more reliable measurement devices. Namely, Trackman. But there are other technologies as well which are being used by high school, college, and minor league teams. Trackman is the big name, though, since it has been adopted by MLB, NPB and KBO along with many colleges and even a few high schools.

Trackman uses Doppler radar to measure the movement of the ball. I want to paint a picture in your mind of what this may look like, in the eyes of the radar. Remember, we’re trying to track the ball here. Read the rest of this entry »

I have never been supportive of pitch clocks. In fact, the first ever thing I wrote about baseball (formally), was an article in the Journal of Sports Sciences, illustrating how pitch clocks could elevate muscle fatigue in pitchers, possible contributing to increased injury risk. I also came up with a workload metric which factors in the time between pitches when calculating the number of Fatigue Units a pitcher can accumulate. I was pleased to read Travis Sawchik’s article on pace of play solutions, focusing on how it may be more on the batters than the pitchers when it comes to speeding up the games. Well, I was pleased until the last paragraph, where he proposed the ol’ 15 second pitch clock – but we’ll get there.

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Pitching blisters were an afterthought just two years ago but the reported instances have jumped the past two seasons. Detailed accounts were written by Eno Sarris here at FanGraphs and Ben Lindbergh at the Ringer.

Throwing a curveball may be to blame according to Sarris:

But we can’t dismiss that chart completely. The players who have gone down with blister problems have thrown curves 14.9% of the time, far above the 10-11% baseball as a whole averaged over that timeframe. The players who ended up on the list more than once averaged 18.9% curveballs. Enough to say there’s some smoke here.

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It’s probably been awhile since you’ve read a traditional “buy low, sell high” article.  In today’s golden age of baseball analytics where complex physics and statistics can be boiled down to a few simple indicators accessed instantly using one hand, it’s not very often that we (readers, fans, fantasy players) find ourselves in possession of knowledge before the masses.  For example, try “selling” Avisail Garcia and his recent .375 wOBA around your league without getting some type of response that includes “yeah, but he had a .392 BABIP”.

Thankfully, despite all the data available at our fingertips, the one ingredient that will always play a critical role in the mixture of value is the human element of perception, which can swing wildly in different directions depending who you’re dealing with.  Today I’d like to isolate a few players who’s perception may be suppressing their actual value a little more than it should be, which may represent a buying opportunity for savvy fantasy owners prepping for 2018.  The good news is you don’t have to stand in line to land these deals, but you will still need to get them early.

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I’ve finally compiled the 2017 Disabled List (DL) information. The main change from the last few seasons is the transition from the 15-day DL to 10-day DL and the subsequent increase in DL trips. With the total trips up, the number of days lost is down which makes it tough to draw any major conclusions. It’s time to dive into the numbers.

First off, I collected the information from MLB.com’s transaction list. I like to use this list because it is easy to go back and check. I waded through it and it wasn’t pretty. It took me twice as long to compile the data compared to previous seasons. I would just like to give a big thank you to ProSportsTransactions.com for having most of the missing data.

With my venting out of the way, here is how the days missed for pitchers and hitters compare over the previous 4 seasons.

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The offseason begins with a decent bit of uncertainty in the closer’s role for many teams. The free agent and trade markets could shuffle a lot of 9th inning plans across the league for contenders and pretenders alike. Looking at the free agent market, I’ve identified four middle relievers who I think have a real shot at landing a closer gig this winter.

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Last offseason, I created an individual pitch metric, pERA, which gives each pitch an ERA and prospect grade based on its ground ball nature and swing-and-miss capability. With the 2017 season over, I’ve compiled the final 2017 values. This year, I’ve added in exit velocity (EV) grades for each pitch.

The process I used for creating pERA is in the article linked above but here is a quick rundown.

• The key change is to give each pitch an ERA value (pERA) based on the pitch’s swinging strike and groundball rate. All the values are based on the average values for starting pitchers. Closers will have higher grades because their stuff plays better coming out of the bullpen.
• The pitcher’s control is determined from their walk rate which is separate from the pitch grades.
• I’ve put each pitch on the 20-80 scale with 50 being average, 80 great, and 20 horrible. For starters, target pitchers with three average or better pitches. For relievers, they just need two pitches.

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