Archive for Roto

Episode 167

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

Eno Sarris and Nicholas Minnix on, among other topics:

Derek Holland; the New York Mets’ 2015 rotation; Alex Colome; sources of saves for the rest of the season, including with the Detroit Tigers and Philadelphia Phillies; Nick Franklin; the Toronto Blue Jays’ 2015 if they sign Melky Cabrera to a qualifying offer; and, by request, Starling Marte’s 2015 outlook and value.

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This should go without saying, but fantasy owners have to be careful with starting pitchers who previously spent time in the bullpen. As we all know, good relievers aren’t all cut out for the starting rotation. The ability to go hard for short bursts allows relievers to cover up deficiencies that prevent them from being starters, with the lack of a third, or even second, pitch being a prime example. But sometimes it is easy to forget that a pitcher spent time in the bullpen when looking at his player page at the end of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

One very good streamer on the pitching side.

One potentially good streamer on the hitting side.

Good luck to fantasy baseball players who are trying to bring it home for Jerome … Williams. And to those who aren’t doing it for him. It’s fine. I guess.

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After evaluating Zack Wheeler and Jacob deGrom in my previous post on the 2015 Mets Commanding Rotation, I was hoping to follow-up by looking at pitch release point consistency for a number of pitchers that prevented contact in the zone but didn’t have elite swinging-strike/contact rates. Initially, I found good results using root-mean-square deviations.

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Power turns outs into hits, hits into RBIs, and fly balls into home runs. You have to draft for power, or you’ll find yourself behind in way too many categories. So hopefully you have some power on your squad and don’t necessarily need to stream for it now.

But lets say you find yourself up against a team with lots of speed. If you wanted to punt stolen bases, you might be able to drop a speedster or a bench piece for power in the late going. Let’s look at the end of the week and see if we can identify a few flawed (available) sluggers in nice parks with the platoon advantage.

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Last second I changed the title from “Having a Presence” to “Commanding Attention”. If I were to talk about the team as a whole, I would have had to go with “Having a Presence,” but I’m focusing on their rotation, and well…they command our attention…

It’s rough to be a Mets fan living in Minnesota. It’s rough being a Mets fan anywhere, but watching the Twins and their approach to 100 losses doesn’t help. Despite being only 6.5 games back from the 2nd Wild Card to date, I don’t think the Mets will have enough offense to sustain next year, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be fun to watch. There will be quite the trio that commands attention – or even a quartet with the assumption that Noah Syndergaard makes an impact. And with a quartet…who knows?!

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Fantasy baseball players, coming into this season, probably knew that Mike Zunino has shortcomings. Most of them have to do with his hitting. But some drafters were happy to target him as a dirt-cheap second catcher in two-C mixed leagues, for example. I wasn’t one of them.

I thought that those folks were excessively ambitious. There existed significant power in his Louisville Sluggers, but I didn’t believe that he’d go deep often enough to satisfy my hopes for one of my choices at the position. And I value power production most from my catchers. I’m more than willing to swallow a crap batting average for 20 bombs. I figured that his major contact problem and thorough lack of experience against even pro competition, period, would prevent him from threatening, perhaps even sniffing, that level.

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I was searching through depth charts the other day, trying to find an interesting tidbit or interesting name. I stumbled upon Kennys Vargas. He was covered here by Scott Strandberg upon his arrival. Of note in that piece: he’s a large human with large power; also there’s a Big Papi reference, which was purported by others. And then he was covered by Mike Podhorzer in a searching for power piece.

It’s been a little over a month since those pieces. Vargas has accumulated nearly 200 plate appearances; not a huge amount, but a substantial one upon which to at least look at what’s taken place. He’s still huge. And his power, evidenced by his ISO, is also pretty damn large-and-in charge, too. Also of note, though: a huge swing rate; a pretty large strikeout rate, and a miniscule, nearly unidentifiable, walk rate.

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All good things must come to an end, and for the purposes of this space, that means this is my final deep league wire column of the 2014 season. It’s been a lot of fun plunging the depths of the fantasy dumpster with you, and I appreciate you joining me each week in our ongoing quest to find cheap value in deep leagues.

But the fantasy playoffs are still ongoing in many leagues, so now is not the time for us to rest on our laurels. Let’s take a look at two young hurlers who could provide help with strikeouts in AL-only leagues this week.
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Yesterday, I shared and discussed the 10 starting pitchers with at least 100 innings pitched who have outperformed their SIERA marks by the greatest degree. Today is a look at the opposite end of the spectrum — those starters whose ERA has most underperformed their SIERA marks. This could be an early list of pitchers who will be undervalued next season.

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