Archive for Roto

Pitching coaches can make a big impact on starting pitchers in real life as well as in fantasy. Just take a look at Carlos Rodon and Dylan Cease last season with Ethan Katz. Katz stepped in and both of those pitchers took a step forward. About a month ago the Arizona Diamondbacks hired a new pitching coach in Brent Strom. Following this introduction, we are going to look at a few of the pitchers on the Arizona Diamondbacks and see who has the potential to take a step forward.

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As baseball history keeps telling us, a pitcher’s ultimate success often starts with the heater, providing a base of core strength for their pitch-mix body on which the glamor muscles of the breaking stuff can better be supported.

With that in mind, let’s look at the best fastballs from starters in 2022 according to Run-Value (per 100 pitches) before looking at three possible draft-day bargains. While Run Value is by no means the end-all measurement of overall quality, (nor necessarily predictive), it does give us a solid snapshot of the overall results that a pitch returned while sending up flares for where further investigation might be warranted.

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For this exercise, we will be looking at starting pitchers and their NFBC ADP as of 11/29/21. It’s always interesting to see how the crowd thinks, who they seem to value, and how fantasy managers are shaping their drafts. For instance, how many pitchers are going in the first round? How many fantasy managers are grabbing two starting pitchers in the first three rounds? A lot to unpack and a lot of different aspects to analyze. We will go by round and after each round, we will discuss briefly what we are seeing! To note: this is based on Draft Champions which is a 15 team format with about 14 completed drafts.

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Drafting early into the “Draft Season” can definitely be a double-edged sword, you could be taking advantage of the early market but you also are risking potential injuries to your players. If you do prefer to draft early I decided to dig into the current ADP and check out some starting pitchers who are going so late that they might be hard to find.

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Let’s do some experimenting. Let’s imagine you drafted a team using only one statistic. What style of baseball are you? Do you love the hitters with speed, bat control, and an eye for tactics? Or, are you more of the home run or strikeout kind of fan? Why can’t you be both, you ask? Well because it’s an experiment and you have to choose one or the other. So…go ahead. Which do you choose? The K% Kings or the Barrel Brothers?

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Last time on “Steamer Says”, we turned the first Steamer projections of 2022 into values using the FanGraphs auction calculator to see how they compared to the ranks available in the current NFBC draft room. Using those differences as a guide, I took a look at four hitters that Steamer had valued higher and dug deeper to see if we should agree.

We also talked about my belief that failing to pay attention to those ranks is to throw away a valuable tool. While site ranks shouldn’t necessarily inform your valuations of players, they will often inform the decisions of some of your opponents. Whether conscious or unconscious, bias can be a powerful force and I’ll take any and all advantages I can find when drafting.

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If you haven’t studied the managers who won your league by now, you should. If you won your league, and your competition is smart, you’re being studied. People are trying to find out why the Robbie Ray‘s and the Marcus Semien’s of 2021 caught the eye of those who drafted them and are looking to find next season’s doppelgangers. The Dodgers didn’t take long at all to take their pick. We can make all the models, algorithms, spreadsheets, and crystal ball readings we like, but the most tried and true technique is regression. Players that were unbelievably good…will regress to their true-talent level. Players that were unexpectedly bad…will regress to their true-talent level. This is something you can take to the bank. Rather than choose from 15 of the best players we should take in the first round, let’s think of players that we expect to go in the 5th and 6th rounds. Here’s a look at three players that seem likely to do just that, and could fly under the radar in your 2022 draft.

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With NFBC unofficially ushering in the start of the 2022 draft season last week, I think now is a good time to check in on a key piece of information your chosen fantasy platform provides. Site ranks, baby.

Uh-oh…Noob alert, am I right? I mean, how could a serious fantasy player pay attention to something so trite as site ranks? What am I going to do next; say something insane like ADP is important? Well, yes. But not today because we don’t yet have a significant sample. So, we’ll start by focusing on the ranks that sites include in their draft rooms and why paying attention to them should help inform your decisions. Read the rest of this entry »

Machine learning allows human eyes to take a break from the mundane scrolling and sorting through spreadsheets while still gathering useful insights. What made a top-five pitcher (from a fantasy perspective) so great in 2021? You could answer that easily by sorting through our leaderboards. Robbie Ray? Well, he had an excellent K-BB% (25.2%, league-average 14.6%) Corbin Burnes? His K/9 was a huge 12.61 while the league was only at 8.9. These underlying metrics are important to take note of but can be difficult to analyze all at once. Don’t get me wrong, it can be done. Just look at Michael Simione’s latest piece where he compares pitchers’ underlying metrics. In fact, that’s a lot of fun to do! But, as you come out of your fantasy hibernation and are ready to begin making your draft rankings, you’ll want a quicker way to analyze large data sets all at once. Enter the decision tree. 

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What’s better than sleepers? That’s right. More sleepers!!

Last time out we briefly laid out how loose I am with my definition of sleeper before taking a deeper look at two players I think will actualize my said nebulous designation. Tl;dr: I see sleepers as players who have some combination of high-ROI and low-hype. Also, designating sleepers before actionable ADP is available is basically a guessing game. See? Loose.

After choosing a player from Detroit and Kansas City the last time out, we might as well keep this AL Central tour of sadness going. Let’s get things started by taking some big deep breaths, in and out, listening to nothing but the sound of my voice. In and out. Now relax your breath and relax your inner self as we all get very, very sleepy. In-nnn…and out.

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