Archive for Roto

On 7/18, Madison Bumgarner changed his positioning on the mound. Eno noted it and Madison Bumgarner confirmed it. Bumgarner has worked to make his pitches (and I presume his release point) very similar through video and in front of a mirror “making sure he sets up in in the right places.”

Eno summed it up: “Bumgarner is ready to make the most of his old playbook. Throw lots of fastballs, cutters, and curves, all from the same release point, all with similar spin, and all exploding out of a slow, deliberate delivery.”

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Adrian Gonzalez was pretty fantasy baseball valuable this year. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ first baseman wasn’t, in the preseason, expected to be quite so fantasy baseball valuable. That made him a good deal. He was 11^th on the RotoGraphs consensus rankings list at first base coming into the 2014 campaign and finished as a top-five commodity after it.

A-Gon is kind of boring, to many fantasy baseball players. I recall conversations prior to the season in which folks basically said as much. He had the look of a reasonable consolation prize if you missed out on the sexier first basemen. A big reason was that he’d seemed to have lost the ability to contribute significant power production, which made the evaluation understandable, but which also seemed a little premature. Mike Podhorzer acknowledged that he had no notable explanations for his “bullish” ranking of Gonzalez but that folks just seemed to be undervaluing him, and Pod was right.

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• Jon Roegele at The Hardball Times examined the recovery success rates for Tommy John surgeries. Here are a couple of the major points.

To summarize, this examination of Tommy John surgery has shown that while the overall success rate has not seemingly improved over time, in recent years players have been able to get back on the field in the same league faster than they did when the surgery was less common.

And

As far as attrition goes, there is naturally a downward trend for return rates as players age. Comparing Tommy John survivors to all major league pitchers (injured and non-injured, in the last column) shows that recovering from the surgery tends to occur at around the same rate as typical pitchers manage to stay in the league for a given age range. Some age bands are better, some worse, but with sample sizes this small for Tommy John patients it is hard to make a definitive statement in this regard.

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It’s quite possible Albert Pujols’s obituary was written a little too soon. I wrote him off; not entirely, but basically. Projection systems liked him fairly well early on; I didn’t, mainly due to injury concerns. Perhaps, that’s indicative of the leagues I play in, and their setup – OBP leagues mostly, where he hasn’t been quite as valuable lately. Either way, I didn’t want much to do with King Albert this season. I owned him in one league – an Ottoneu points league, purchased for $23 ($400 budget). I wish I had owned him in more. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple months ago, Landon Jones wrote this column about Anthony Rizzo’s impressive adjustments in 2014. In that piece, Landon focused on Rizzo’s improvement against fastballs, as well as his altered approach. Obviously, not much has changed since Landon wrote that article, so I’m not going to bother retreading any territory he already covered (especially since I agree with his analysis).

However, there is one area of Rizzo’s game that I feel we could certainly talk a bit more about, and that’s his newfound ability to hit southpaws. This has always been my big reservation with Rizzo, stretching back to his days as a prospect, and it wasn’t so much a bat-speed issue for me, as it was concern regarding his swing plane.

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*Updated 10/23/2014 with Position Tiers ($5.00 USD).

The 2015 Steamer projections are up on FanGraphs! “Steamer” uses playing time projections from our depth charts, but right now there are important players (Dustin Pedroia and Jon Lester for examples) missing actual projected playing time. I therefore went into mensch-mode and manually updated Plate Appearance and Innings Pitched projections – very manually, but at least somewhat rational. What I did for these players was go into their “Steamer 600” projections and took their HR, R, RBI and SB per Plate Appearance projected rates (W, SV, SO per Inning Pitched for pitchers) and outputted associated counting stats connected to the quantity of Plate Appearances/Innings Pitched.

*To see which players I manipulated, go into the “P” and “H” tabs in the below embedded file: click on the “…” tab to the left of the current depicted tab. I highlighted all names and counting stats per plate appearance or innings pitched that I edited in Yellow so that I can associate some accountability with the end-rankings. I edited a few catchers’ PA totals even though Steamer already had totals for them (Lucroy, Mesoraco, etc.). I also edited Troy Tulowitzki‘s and Carlos Gonzalez’s PA totals, because…well, you know. I could spend all month editing the PA totals, but I’m not that much of a mensch.

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Just in case you didn’t know, Chris Carter finished the season tied for second in home runs with Giancarlo Stanton. Also in the top five were Nelson Cruz, Mike Trout and Jose Abreu. One of these is obviously not like the others, although Cruz is a cut below Stanton, Trout and Abreu yet still a cut above Carter. We all know that Carter is a one-trick pony (or a three-true outcome pony), but it’s amusing how different he is from the rest of this group when you look at something other than home runs. For example, the three studs in the top five all had a wOBA over .400 for the year while Carter’s was .346. And those three studs all contributed at least 40 offensive runs more than average while Carter contributed just shy of 13 more than average.

For the purposes of this column, it’s more important to note that the production of all four other guys in the top five of home runs was essentially worth $30 or more. Carter’s production was worth about $15. To be fair, Carter vastly out-earned the $1 at which I had him valued in the preseason, but this just illustrates how truly limiting the batting average is even when the power production is as good as you can expect it to be. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll freely admit that this column is highly speculative in nature, and based on plenty of assumptions. However, that’s kind of what this time of year is for as a fantasy writer. It’s the time of year when you start going through your “What ifs” for the next season, and I think I have a pretty intriguing “What if” scenario for John Jaso.

For the second consecutive year, Jaso had his season cut short due to continued concussion symptoms. For very good reason, this has led to some speculation regarding Jaso’s future behind the plate, or possible lack thereof. The A’s already took steps in 2014 to get his bat in the lineup at designated hitter, but even with his 32 starts at DH, the 47 starts he made behind the dish proved to be too many, and Jaso’s 2014 season ended just like 2013 did.

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• OK, I got the data finally cleaned up. I have quite a few players added who look to be back for 2015, but I will keep them on until some resolution is complete. For example, John Hamilton is messed up. I will keep him on there to track him until he is playing 100%. Basically, I would rather have a potentially healthy player on the list than miss someone who may be hurt.

• Quite a few players state they will be ready for spring training which is vague. For any player giving spring training as a return time, I set their date to February in the spreadsheet.

• Adam Wainwright’s elbow is acting up as gets near the point when pitchers have their second Tommy John surgery. He came back pitching in 2012. Since then he has thrown three full seasons (582 IP) and nine post season games (54 IP). He is at the sweet spot for when pitchers need their 2nd TJS as I state in this Hardball Times article:

I ran a brief study using the up-to-date TJS database and found those pitchers who had their first TJS from before 2011 averaged 4.5 years until they needed to go under the knife again, with a median time of 4.0 years. These numbers are in the ballpark of the 650 innings value we originally found.

The seasons are bit on the low side, but he is at 636 innings. No matter how the post season goes for him, I will not be paying top dollar for him next season

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Episode 173

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

RotoGraphs writer Zach Sanders and Nicholas Minnix discuss:

Alex Rios; Adam Wainwright; Yasiel Puig; Bryce Harper; Shelby Miller; and, right in Zach’s wheelhouse, the end-of-season catcher rankings, which went up at the beginning of this week.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us or comment with fantasy questions so that we may answer them in our next episode.

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