Archive for Roto

Neftali Feliz and LaTroy Hawkins both picked up their first saves of the season last night. Per ESPN’s live draft results, Feliz was drafted as the 25th reliever off the board on average and just inside the top 200 overall. Hawkins was drafted 38th among relievers and went at pick 226 overall. These are a couple of the names you wound up with if you chose not to pay for saves.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I assume the plan if you own guys like Feliz and Hawkins is to ride them out as long as they hold on to the closer’s job and squeeze as many saves out of them as you can. I ascribe to the “don’t pay for saves” philosophy and scrounge around late in drafts and on the waiver wire to acquire my saves. Typically when I get a guy who has the ninth inning job, I ride it out until he loses the job. But it occurs to me, as it may have occurred to you, that maybe it’s better to cash in that asset after a string of un-blown saves. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you draft Dustin Pedroia, who is on pace for almost 300 home runs? Mookie Betts? In a fit of extreme homerism, the entire Red Sox lineup, which will surely score 1,296 runs? That must feel pretty good. Good for you, Pete. Give yourself a pat on the back.

Or, wait — you were the one who drafted Kyle Lohse, weren’t you? Threw a mid-round pick at Mat Latos? Wrote “stream Nate Karns” on your list of good Tuesday decisions? Do you regret it?

Man, there have been some truly brutal starts to kick off the season. It’s really easy to make a knee-jerk decision in reaction to such preposterous, ego-damaging, season-dooming starts, but you have to remember — and I think it goes without saying — that these guys will (probably) never be worse this year than they were today.

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball in 2015 has finally begun! Well, the version that actually counts has. So it’s time to dig deep and uncover those hidden gems that could lead you to victory. As usual, the deep league wire will include names owned in 10% and less of CBS leagues and usually be players whose value is confined to deep mixed or mono leagues, unless otherwise noted.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, it’s been a busy preseason and I had a list of all the articles I wanted to publish before the season officially began. Unfortunately, I failed. And as a result, Eno beat me to the punch. But I’m going to do it anyway. A whole three years ago, with help from math wizard Matt Swartz, we discovered that spring pitcher strikeout and walk rates actually do hold value and using them could improve projections, even if just marginally. This was validated recently by another math wizard, Dan Rosenheck. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at which pitchers enjoyed a strikeout rate surge during spring training.

Read the rest of this entry »

Opening day is finally upon us! I conclude this year’s (condensed) Pod’s Picks series with starting pitchers. If you missed them, here are the infielders and outfielders. The bullish group will only include those I ranked within my top 75 and the bearish only players the consensus ranked within their top 75.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 213

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Jason Collette discuss the massive trade between San Diego and Atlanta as well as roster decisions on Kevin Gausman, Micah Johnson, and Eddie Butler.

Read the rest of this entry »

Playing time is the currency of today’s fantasy game. The more at-bats you can find, the better you’re going to do which is pretty obvious with four of the five categories in a standard being counting categories. The difference these days is that guys just don’t play as much as they used to due in large part to injuries, but also because teams are more willing to platoon guys perhaps in response to sharply declining offense.

Since 2000, an average of 87 players have logged at least 600 PA, but the league hasn’t reached or exceeded that average since 2010 (89). The following season saw just 68 players reach that mark, a 15-year low. From 2000-2009, the average was 92, but in the last five years it has tumbled to 78. This places an even bigger premium on the handful of stars who have shown stability year-to-year with their playing time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 212

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

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris have news about Curtis Granderson, Coco Crisp, Justin Verlander, and Rusney Castillo. Then they play a little game that essentially tries to identify some sleeper-types who could bust out in a big way.

Read the rest of this entry »

• No velocity reports again today. Instead, I will go over the past two weeks of available Pitchf/x data and report them in my Quick Takes slot tomorrow afternoon.

• Early this offseason, I notice the Orioles have seen a huge drop in elbow and shoulder related injuries since 2009. Brittany Ghirolli at MLB.com just wrote a nice article on the subject. One key for the Orioles is more rest between starts.

The Orioles, who haven’t had a player on the 25-man roster undergo Tommy John ligament-replacement surgery since manager Buck Showalter took the helm in late 2010, aren’t on to anything new. But perhaps what sets them apart from other organizations is that they are unrelenting in keeping their guys out of harm’s way. The biggest complaint Showalter heard while serving as an ESPN analyst was about the way bullpen guys were managed. To that end, every pitch an O’s reliever throws — be it in warmups or in the game — is tracked by the team, their workouts and exercises adjusted by the trainers based off of that.

• I am a guest on today’s Effectively Wild podcast by Baseball-Prospectus doing an anti-Tommy John surgery draft. Good stuff all around except maybe Sam’s picks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Rozenheck recently published some interesting research via the Economist regarding the significance of spring training statistics. For the TL;DR crowd, there is some legitimacy to spring training breakouts and disappointments, although they correlate with only marginal improvements to in-season performance in terms of on-base plus slugging (OPS) and earned run average (ERA).

Our own Mike Podhorzer also conducted similar research of his own a couple of years ago. He found that a pitcher’s spring training strikeout and walk rates carry some significance in regard to in-season performance.
Read the rest of this entry »