Who’s Been (Un)lucky–The Relief Pitchers
Back to our search for players whose granular stats suggest that last season’s fantasy-relevant stats make it appear that they were having better (or worse) seasons than they actually had. In our search for unlucky pitchers, we look for guys who had high BABIPs and HR/FB percentages but low Hard-Hit percentages. To find lucky pitchers, we look for the opposite. The idea, as we explained last week, is that those stats are out of alignment with each other, that the misalignment is a consequence of luck, and that, luck good or bad tending as it does to disappear, the pitchers in question will do better (or worse) this season. Last week, we did starting pitchers; this week, relievers.
A word about luck and relievers generally before we get started: as usual, the list of luckies is far more interesting to us fantasy baseball owners than the list of unluckies. That’s because we’re unduly interested in saves, and it doesn’t do us that much good to know that, say, the 6th best pitcher in a team’s bullpen is in reality the 4th best. So, while the group of unlucky relievers always yields some astonishments, they’re not going to do you much good unless it looks like they’ve got a shot at saves, like Brooks Raley 레일리 last season, or they might wind up in somebody’s starting rotation, like Austin Voth last season. So we’ll just mention four relief pitchers who were certainly unlucky last season, and whom you can expect to do better this season, but who don’t look like candidates to close games for their respective teams. These are: Jake Diekman (although it’s not inconceivable he gets some saves), Tommy Nance, Joel Payamps, and Victor Arano. If your draft is deep enough, by all means go after one of them. Otherwise:
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