Archive for Roto

Last week, I identified potential stolen base streamers for daily fantasy leagues and weekly leagues with daily transactions and lineup changes. I used a pitcher’s career caught-stealing and pick-off rates as criteria to determine if a particular matchup was primed for streaming a speedster with the hope of him stealing a base (or two or four).

I like how it turned out, but it felt hastily constructed. A pitcher’s career rate seemed too broad a scope, especially considering the possibility that a pitcher can get better (or, perhaps, worse) at limiting steals and picking off runners over time.

With a little more time and care, I fleshed out everything a bit more and added an additional criterion: catcher effectiveness, which can be most obviously measured by caught-stealing rate. But I think there also is merit to calculating the frequency at which runners attempt to steal on a catcher. In a sense, it measure runners’ perception of a catcher’s skill, especially for those at the tails of the distribution.

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Episode 217

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris discuss the injury news surrounding Alex Rios, Rusney Castillo, Ivan Nova, and Drew Smyly. They finish the news discussing the Colorado pen before jumping to their main topic: notable starters. The guys discuss five pitchers of note, including three featured in Eno’s recent piece on Rotographs. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I analyzed the ultra small sample size of one outing when discussing four starting pitchers. But that’s kinda okay because fastball velocity stabilizes quickly and instantly provides useful information. Since I don’t know what else one writes about a week and a half into the season, let’s talk about a couple of more names with regards to fastball velocity.

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Fastball velocity has seemingly received increasingly greater attention over the past couple of years. Perhaps it’s because it just keeps rising. A quick Google search yielded this interesting article detailing recent trends and confirming that average fastball velocity has risen every year since 2008. For us fantasy owners, velocity is important because a spike is often the precursor to a breakout. So let’s talk about a couple of pitchers and what we have seen from their velocity in the early going. These guys have all started just one game, which is as small a sample size as ever. But, velocity stabilizes very quickly, so it’s still worthwhile to discuss.

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Episode 216

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Jason Collette discuss the rash of injuries on Sunday and then talk about some of their Week 1 observations and decide if there is enough to change their tune on some guys.

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I play in a lot of fantasy baseball leagues. Like, a lot. I absolutely love the game, can’t resist a challenge, and have a tough time saying no when invited. All of that adds up to a 16-league portfolio when the dust settles. I’m sure some of you are thinking, “well doesn’t every result help and hurt you at this point?” Not quite. Part of that is because I’m a bulk drafter when it comes to “my guys”. There are certain players on both sides of the ball that I really focus on year-to-year and I end up trying to roster them as often as possible provided the format and pricetag are in line to do so.

I obviously can’t just copy the first team across the remaining 15, though, so I do have a shit-ton of different players. In fact, I have 244 different players at least once. A major part of this is because I’m in two NFBC 50-round draft-and-holds and I’ve got a lot of players on both of those teams that don’t show up anywhere else because of how deep we go in that league. As my league count ballooned, I began keeping track of who I have year-to-year to see how my investments shook out against what I believed coming into the season. We’re going to take a look at my portfolio today from the hitter side of things to see how it all turned out.

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Episode 215

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris discuss the news, talk about some of the afternoon’s games, and then play a little game called Stash or Trash recording some largely available players off to solid starts.

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I’m really not privy to the whole daily fantasy baseball thing, as proctored by FanDuel or DraftKings. It’s probably good that I’m not because I’m 98 percent certain I would immediately fall in love with it.

Still, I’m intrigued, mostly because it takes streaming to the extreme. And I love streaming. It’s a tedious, somewhat painstaking process, what with combing through splits, looking for the juiciest matchups that are also cost-effective.
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The title of the article is an allusion to Schott’s Miscellany, which you should definitely check out if you never have and feel compelled to know that a group of larks is called an exaltation or that a member of the 32nd degree of Freemasonry is known as a Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret.

–Quality of Pitchers Faced–

Hunter Pence will start the 2015 season on the DL because of a fractured forearm, but there is a silver lining. Each week he misses is a week he doesn’t have to face Clayton Kershaw. Pence faced Kershaw 15 times in 2014, more than any other batter, and managed just one hit.

Pence’s misfortune from last season made me curious how much imbalance there is for hitters in a season in terms of the quality of the pitchers they face, and whether that imbalance might be consistent from season to season.

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Last week, I posted the first iteration of the American League starting pitcher tiers. Naturally, I couldn’t possibly include every starting pitcher, even if they conceivably have the upside to push their way into the rankings at some point. So let’s discuss a couple of names that could quickly make a debut appearance.

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