Archive for Roto

There are a few players who are showing off this spring. First, the Orioles need to make room for Colton Cowser. This dude is slashing .478/.586/1.000 with four home runs and a spring training leading (qualified hitters) wRC+ of 307. How about Miguel Andujar? He has also hit four home runs and has 13 hits in 32 at-bats, good for a .406 batting average. Unlike most of the hitters who have high batting averages this spring, Oneil Cruz has a very low BABIP, .182. That, compared to Cowser’s .583 BABIP is night and day different. Yet, Cruz is still hitting for a very impressive slash line of .300/.440/.900.

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This article looks at the predictive power of spring training statistics last year for hitters. It applies learnings from last year to highlight a few movers and shakers so far this spring (based on spring games through 3/13).

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Diversity is good in all places. In the natural world, in the workplace, in your neighborhood, a collection of diverse parts makes the sum stronger. In fantasy baseball, that means your team has power hitters, base stealers, contact hitters, ironmen, rotation horses, flame throwers, and AI robo-mutant zombies that eat pine tar for breakfast and rosin for dinner. Ok, that last one may have taken things too far. The point is, if you’re only drafting for overall value (easy to do), you could end up with a lopsided team. Sure, you’ll win the home run category, but that’s only 12 points. You need to diversify and here’s one way you can do that during your next draft.

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Thanks to reader and LOTR enthusiast “Gandalfsstaff” for the comment they made on my article last week:

What if you hopped in the DeLorean and used the new formula pretending it was last year? Would it have predicted better picks in hindsight?

In that article, I wrote about the recipe I concocted, on the shoulders of giants, to target pitchers. I used the skills components in Ron Shandler’s LIMA plan and metrics from Eno Sarris’ pitching models to try and identify great pitchers in the upcoming 2024 season. The recipe included 2023 end-of-season stats and 2024 projected stats:

ATC 2024 Projections

• LIMA: K%>=25%, BB<10%, HR/9<1.3

2023 End-of-Season Actuals

• Stuff+ Fastball (FA, SI, FC) >=100
• Stuff+ Secondary (SL, CH, KC, CU, FS) >=100
• A called strike rate (CStr%, SIS) >12%
• Pitched at least 50 innings in 2023

Names like Zac Gallen, Gerrit Cole, and Corbin Burnes (new Oriole, no big deal) floated to the top of the bubbling, steaming pot. Ok, enough with the cooking metaphor. There’s a problem, though, with back-testing this recipe on last year’s data as Gandalfsstaff suggested. The K%, BB%, and HR/9 used in the recipe were projected by ATC. I don’t have data on last season’s projections. Next season’s Stuff+ metrics, also, aren’t specifically projected. Stuff+ is used to make projections, but we don’t see a fastball Stuff+ projection for Gerrit Cole in 2024. However, as you will see, Cole’s fastball will likely be very similar in 2024 to how it was in 2023. As complicated as that all sounds, back-testing to see which pitchers met all the requirements of the recipe by year’s end is not. Let’s go back in time. Here are the pitchers who accomplished all the bullet points above by the end of the 2022 season:

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Now that looks pretty darn good. Anyone of those seven starters could have anchored a fantasy rotation. The true secret ingredient here is a dominant fastball. My attempt at creating a recipe pre-season 2023 did not turn out well because I wasn’t using the best metrics. pVals are not predictive and they didn’t belong in my preseason analysis. Stuff+, however, is predictive:

You can read all about the predictive power of Stuff+ and other pitching models, but the chart above explains a lot. Fastball Stuff+ is generally repeatable year-to-year. This is nothing new. Once a pitcher has a dominant fastball, they can work their secondaries with more success. Hitters, bless their hearts, have enough to deal with when a fastball’s Stuff+ rating gets above 100. Furthermore, the ability of a pitcher to earn called strikes is important because he needs something that brings the bat off the hitter’s shoulder when the hitter has the advantage. Sure a pitcher has a good fastball and secondaries, but if those pitches rarely get a “Strike!” from the umpire, hitters can just become observers. Finally, the LIMA plan skill components from days of old were just as good in 2021 and 2022. You can’t fake striking someone out. Let’s take a look at who followed this recipe to the flour-stained, bottom of the pages in 2021:

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Once again, the recipe yields positive results. Don’t get too hopeful about this recipe, it’s difficult to predict which pitchers will end 2024 having met all of the very challenging criteria above. It’s even more difficult for even the top-most gifted pitchers in the world to go out and do it! If I were stuck with only one statistic to predict with confidence for the upcoming season, I would choose innings pitched every single time. Nestor Cortes was awesome in 2022 but dealt with injury all 2023 long, limiting his innings pitched and therefore, a repeat great season. If only I were Biff Howard Tannen. Unfortunately, we can’t predict anything with that much confidence, so relying on repeatable skills and moving forward with fingers crossed seems to be the best way to go.

This is Jordan Rosenblum’s debut at Rotographs. 

I’ve spent the last couple of seasons building out a fully-fledged projection system. You may have seen the StuffPlus-fueled version of them, ppERA, published by Eno Sarris over at The Athletic, or else variations of them elsewhere. Like most projection systems, mine includes aging curves, major league equivalencies, park factors, league run environment adjustments, historical performance, and regression to the mean.

My pitching projections performed well in terms of predictive accuracy in 2023, generally holding their own against other more established projection systems, with my rookie projections performing especially well. I must, however, concede that Steamer dominated the field overall—all hail! This article unveils my top 10 projected pitching prospects for 2024 and beyond, highlighting names worth breaking the TINSTAAP pledge for.

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Last season around this time I wrote an article showcasing a recipe that would help select starting pitching in drafts. I queried the heck out of a dataset containing 2022 end-of-season pitcher data and 2023 projected data, slicing and splicing the list down to an interesting group of pitchers, each having done or expected to do the following:

• A SwStr% in 2022 of at least 11%. (2022 MLB SP average – 10.7%)
• A K/9 projection (steamer) of eight or better. (2022 MLB SP average – 8.18)
• Positive pVals (Pitch Info) on at least two pitches in 2022.
• An ADP greater than 100.

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Are you the “keep it quick bud, I gotta two o’clock Zoom meeting and I still need to comb my hair” type of fantasy reader? If so, this post is for you. A real quick hitter that explains how the draft value is spread across draft rounds. Read the rest of this entry »

When something becomes sexy, I’m all in. Crocs and socks? Sexy. Minivans with a built-in vacuum cleaner to suck up all the floor Cheerios? Sexy. Throwing a four-seam fastball with a very shallow vertical approach angle due to some serious induced vertical break at the top of the zone? Sexy. Some things some people just can’t pull off. But when a trend becomes a trend, you’re either in or you’re out.

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Just 15 pitchers threw 10 or more 101+ MPH four-seam fastballs in 2024.

There are a lot of pitchers who throw fast and only 15 find themselves qualifying here as repeatable flame throwers. Jhoan Duran did it 368 times! Behind him was Félix Bautista who anyone would guess can throw the ball fast after one glance at La Montaña. But, Shintaro Fujinami? He’s on the list? He’s a free agent? Surely some team could use a guy like that. So, why hasn’t any team ventured a bid on a reliever whose fastball velocity ranks in the 97th percentile?

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The RotoGraphs writers’ positional rankings hit the World Wide Web last week and now such writers, perhaps only myself, are questioning every little keyboard stroke and mouse click involved. You can view my third-base rankings here and follow along all season. I didn’t look at the average draft position (ADP) as calculated by the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) while sorting these men who spent at least five games with their feet close to third base last season.

I mostly used the auction calculator with Steamer’s projections and moved things around from there, but only slightly. Take Elly De La Cruz for example. By the auction calculator, he’s ranked 14th (check the link above for settings). I brought him up a few (11th), first knowing the market would be higher and second considering his ceiling. But, as it turns out, the market is even higher on the Cincinnati wonder kid! In this post, I’ll dive into the players who diverge the most from my rankings and where the market (ADP) is so far this draft season.

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