Archive for Roto

Episode 229

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer talks to himself for a little while! He covers the injury news involving Jean Segura, Wil Myers, Jake McGee, Kenley Jansen, Kelly Johnson, Jon Jay, and Justin Masterson. He talks about guys playing well who he believes in like Shin-Soo Choo, Prince Fielder, and Edwin Encarnacion. He spends what feels like an hour talking himself into Todd Frazier as the best candidate for the 2016 Election a top 10 fantasy player the rest of the way before moving onto pitchers Corey Kluber, Jose Quintana, and finally Sonny Gray.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I noted that Carlos Gonzalez’s isolated power, as determined by my expected isolated power (xISO) equation, mirrored his current production. This would be great news if we were talking about CarGo circa 2013.

Unfortunately, we’re talking about the 2015 incarnation of CarGo, he of the .109 ISO, .188 batting average and .233 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). The latter-most statistic might be the first talking point a proponent of his brings up in his defense: CarGo’s BABIP is atrocious right now — it’s just a matter of time until his bad luck turns around. Indeed, there may be some truth to this sentiment.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have essentially stripped the terms “buy low” and “sell high” from my vocabulary, so I now prefer to call the former buy low guys acquisition targets. One would think that offering for a player off to a slow start would have to come at some sort of discount, even if a minor one. And since slow starts are usually just that and have little predictive value for the rest of the season, getting anyone at a discount to his pre-season value should yield a nice profit.

As usual, the easiest way to identify your targets is to calculate the difference between a pitcher’s ERA and SIERA and then sort. Those pitchers with SIERA marks most below their ERAs are typically your targets, though that’s not automatically the case. Often times a pitcher could be carrying an ERA over 7.00, but still sporting a 4.50 SIERA. Sure, he’s been unlucky, but he also hasn’t been very good either! So you still don’t want him on your team.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I introduced xISO, a metric that calculates a player’s expected isolated power based on his batted ball profile (per FanGraphs’ recently added batted ball data courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions). Having looked at a handful of underachieving National League outfielders for its induction, I’ll expand the analysis of xISO here today.

I’ll reiterate some key points. I used all 12 years’ worth of batted ball data for all player-seasons in which a hitter qualified for the batting title. The OLS regression specified pull rate (Pull%), hard-hit rate (Hard%) and fly ball rate (FB%) as explanatory variables and produced the following equation, which I deliberately omitted last week:

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s deep league wire features a pair of fresh outfielder call-ups. Both were one-time promising prospects, but have struggled at the big league level. Are these two post-hype sleepers?

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 228

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

Eno is on a train during this one and there is some spottiness, but it’s not too much and I don’t think it obscures any main points, but if you miss something that needs clarifying, let us know!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris discuss the injury updates with Justin Verlander, Ivan Nova, Devin Mesoraco, and Zack Cozart. They talk about their current valuations of Yunel Escobar, Kris Bryant, Mark Teixeira, Jordan Pacheco, Shelby Miller, Ubaldo Jimenez, Alex Colome, and Colby Lewis. They finish with a discussion about the Steve Cishek situation in Miami.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I took our first look at the batted ball distance leaderboard to identify hitters who could enjoy a surge in HR/FB rate. Today I’ll check in on the potential decliners. This could perhaps be your sell candidates. I’m going to ignore the obvious ones that have still posted strong distance marks, like Bryce Harper at at 35.5% HR/FB rate, backed by a 323 foot distance. Obviously, he’s going to regress, but that big distance suggests a career year in the power department.

Read the rest of this entry »

Each weekend I take the ZiPS rest-of-season projections and run them through the Zach Sanders z-score method and then see how players I have rostered compare to players available on the waiver wire. Being that I’m tasked with discussing shortstops here on Mondays, I thought I’d analyze two decisions I had to make this week involving shortstops. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re not a month into the season, so it’s finally time to start putting the hitter batted ball distance leaderboard to work. Back in late January, I unveiled my xHR/FB rate equation, which included three components, batted ball distance being one of them. Unfortunately, I don’t have the data for angle and standard deviation, so I cannot calculate xHR/FB rate marks yet and share the biggest discrepancies. However, simply looking at batted ball distance could do a reasonably decent job at identifying those who might be in for a HR/FB rate surge or decline. We’ll start with the potential surgers. These are the hitters whose distance is top notch, but for whatever reason, have posted mediocre or poor HR/FB rates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 226

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris discuss the injury news surrounding Coco Crisp, Jayson Werth, J.J. Hardy, and Nick Swisher. They dive into the performances of Corey Kluber, Chris Sale, Drew Pomeranz, Mike Fiers, James Shields, Joc Pederson, Yasmani Grandal, and Andrelton Simmons before closing with a couple of Arizona transactions.

Read the rest of this entry »