Archive for Roto

September is an exciting time in baseball. It affords us the opportunity to see many of the stars of the future, who are often promoted once rosters expand. Those prospects with enough offense to be viable in fantasy this season are likely long gone from the waiver wire, but offense is not the only way September call-ups can make a difference in fantasy. The defensive upgrades some call-ups provide can make a major difference for their starting pitchers, even over only a handful of starts. Four pitchers should benefit, in particular.

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Collin McWho? That was the question I asked in early May when Collin McHugh had made just three starts. But at the time, he had allowed just six runs over those starts, while posting a sparkling 23/4 K/BB ratio in 19.1 innings. It was a small sample size to be sure, but it’s hard to fluke your way into a 30.7% strikeout rate. So we all took notice and wondered where this performance came from.

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It’s official. 100% of my value is bothering @jeffwzimmerman to run data and then use that data for said content. I did just that this morning for updated shift data. I believe the last time he posted related content on RotoGraphs was here back in May looking at: Early Hitter Shift Data.

It was because of this post and his balls in play (groundball and pop-up rates) that led me to believe Albert Pujols was going to drop off/continue his downward trend. I guess I pushed out the fact that he was the best hitter of his generation. While the .375 BABIP (from the above link) against shifts did not last, he’s at a very respectable .284. Between this and additional discipline (best contact rate since 2008 and hacking less at stuff outside of the zone), he is able to hover around a .280 BA, which remains elite in conjunction with 30HR, 90R and 100+RBI.

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On Monday I wrote about Chris Tillman’s success the third time through the lineup this season and how that seemed at odds with his established ability to limit hard contact. It turns out there isn’t much of a relationship between those things, so it’s likely that Tillman is due for some regression when facing batters for a third time in a game going forward. It’s likely because excellent research done by Michael Lichtman shows that a pitcher’s past deviations from the typical decline in performance each time through the lineup is not predictive of future performance. He estimates a pitcher would need about eight full seasons of significantly deviating from the average decline each time through the order before that data would become reliable in a predictive sense.

With that said, let’s look at the starters who have been the best the third time through the lineup this year. Most are regression candidates, but there are a few exceptions. Read the rest of this entry »

At a time when call-ups – those who arrived prior to September as well as the gaggle of them that joined major league rosters this month – pique the interest of many fantasy baseball owners, a player who reclaims playing time can be overlooked.

Not all call-ups will be exciting options just because they’re new to roto or head-to-head managers anyway. Some are players whom folks have seen fail a time or three. Those players are unlikely to capture imaginations, although an automatic dismissal is often hasty.

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At this time of year, it’s easy to find a number of September call ups to write about. The trick is to find those who might actually garner enough playing time to earn some actual fantasy value. Here are two of those fine gentlemen.

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Episode 165

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

Eno Sarris and Nicholas Minnix on, among other topics: Brad Miller; Sonny Gray; Matt Barnes; Drew Storen and Washington Nationals saves; Joe Nathan and Detroit Tigers saves; LaTroy Hawkins and Adam Ottavino; and, by request, Danny Duffy.

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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If you use large samples and go looking for pitchers with many different plus pitches by whiff type that aren’t yet fully appreciated by the masses, you’ll get guys that we’ve been talking about all year here: Carlos Carrasco, Garrett Richards, Homer Bailey, Jake Arrieta, and Marcus Stroman, to name a few.

But if you relax the samples a bit — in this case down to thirty pitches thrown per category — you get some names that might be interesting to dynasty leaguers looking to the future, or deep leaguers looking for a sneaky late-season play. Or even mixed leaguers looking for names to stash for next year.

So here are a few interesting pitchers that have at three non-fastball pitches that qualify as ‘good’ by the benchmarks set by Jeff Zimmerman and I.

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Congratulations to fantasy baseball players who drafted Yan Gomes in 2014. He’s batted .285/.321/.472, with 17 home runs, in 452 plate appearances. He’s been a top-five catcher-eligible commodity in standard mixed leagues. That’s not bad for the 12^th one of those drafted, on average, across the most well-known places to play, according to FantasyPros. The owners who landed him at Yahoo! or ESPN, where he was several spots lower on that list, if he was even drafted, feel a little extra special. Unless they play in 1-C leagues.

I’m not one of those people. I didn’t avoid him, but I didn’t target him, either, and aiming for Gomes appears to have been a smart move. Because of that, I kind of want to know what I was missing, and why.

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Not too long ago Paul Goldschmidt’s season ended. The event that caused it resulted in a little retaliation, that may or may not have taken Andrew McCutchen out for a little while. In the aftermath of the McCutchen injury – and the Diamondbacks’ overall bad year – Goldschmidt’s season sort of became lost, carried away in the tide of Tony La Russa’s press conference, and the Pirates’ anger and sadness over losing their best player in the midst of a push for October. We aren’t here to debate unwritten rules and the policing of the game, though. It’s become a cumbersome topic that I don’t really care enough about to debate, but we needed some background, and my lede writing is below replacement level.

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