Archive for Roto

Eno Sarris said not to look at HR rate. He said it and I’m going to listen. However, FIP and xFIP are not HR rates, and I’m going to look at that. Too often we assume that others know, or we actually know, what a statistic represents. We hear it, we think it, we know it. But, take a moment with me to reinvigorate our understanding of these two very important statistics.

FIP gives us an idea of how a pitcher performs regardless of who is playing defense behind him. It accounts for strikeouts, walks, hit by pitches, and home runs allowed. FIP gives us a better understanding of how a pitcher is performing than ERA. xFIP tells us all the same but accounts for the volatility of the HR rate. Quoting from our very own FanGraphs glossary, xFIP is:

calculated in the same way as FIP, except it replaces a pitcher’s home run total with an estimate of how many home runs they should have allowed given the number of fly balls they surrendered while assuming a league average home run to fly ball percentage (between 9 and 10% depending on the year).

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Baseball is happening! I decided for the entire season to run a weekly article on pitchers who have been “heating up.” I will dive into what it could mean for the pitcher and what you should do with them. This should be a captivating concept because it will be pitchers of all levels, anywhere from aces to pitchers you would have never drafted. That’s what it’s all about, catching players as they improve and acting on it before anyone else can realize. Welcome to “Throwing Heat!”

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There have been some really exciting starts from young pitchers so far this season. On Sunday, Michael Kopech pitched five innings, faced 18 batters, and struck out 10 of them. When I saw that he was starting in place of Lucas Giolito on Sunday morning, I totally rolled the dice and got lucky. Adding a young pitcher who I’ve been rooting for over the past few years and it paying off was great. But, I’ll admit, it made me feel a little empty inside.

As I stared at the tv and excitedly encouraged whiff after whiff I slowly began to realize that a win wasn’t going to be possible. I knew Kopech would be on a pitch count and I knew he wasn’t going to suddenly become a rotation mainstay, but I went for it anyway, dropping a set-up reliever in order to gain some strikeouts. I felt oh-so-sad when Tony La Russa effectively looked into the camera and told me not to get used to it. Monday morning had me reflecting, was it worth it? Which is better to roster, low-pitch count starters like Kopech or middle/set-up relievers?

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It seems we spend most Aprils ballyhooing about what should and shouldn’t be believed, what can and cannot be discussed. Some valid, some not. What I believe can sometimes get lost in early season analysis – or missed completely – is what the data (whether in April or September) can tell us beyond the numbers and beyond the sample.

Intent.

Good or bad, change or no change, we can find intent within data, regardless of sample size. Because, simply speaking, professional baseball is played by humans who are trying to be good at baseball. And like most humans, they will attempt to do more of what gets them a reward (being good at baseball) and less of what gets them a punishment (being bad at baseball).

If you start from there and work backward, intent can help you with analysis when the sample size is lacking. This can be more telling in regards to pitchers, at least early in the season, as they are the first-mover in baseball’s 1-on-1 battles, chooser of their path on every pitch.

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Baseball is happening! I decided for the entire season to run a weekly article on pitchers who have been “heating up.” I will dive into what it could mean for the pitcher and what you should do with them. This should be a captivating concept because it will be pitchers of all levels, anywhere from aces to pitchers you would have never drafted. That’s what it’s all about, catching players as they improve and acting on it before anyone else can realize. Welcome to “Throwing Heat!”

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Let’s get a disclaimer out of the way; I’m not writing to recommend a punt and I don’t think you should just completely give up on a category. Ok? All I’m saying is if I were to punt, here’s how I’d do it. Punting in fantasy baseball is when you abandon a category. Saves are hard to come by and you might just be able to completely forego accumulating them. Many fantasy managers will draft with the punt in mind straight from the get-go. Some will wait and see how their team is shaping up and will punt a category that is lacking. Surely there has been work determining the value of the punt, Ron Shandler’s forecaster comes to mind. But let’s look at it from a 2021 perspective and whether or not it’s theoretically possible to punt a category and also win your league.

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With Statcast replacing their radar-based tracking systems with the new Hawkeye (optical-based) system in 2020, what we’re now able to see on the field has taken another giant leap forward. What was once inferred is now being observed and those observations have led to ground-breaking work by Barton Smith, Driveline Baseball, and others in fully parsing the forces in play when it comes to pitch movement.

I highly recommend the above readings (and a host of others) for a more in-depth explanation but here are some cliff notes for those new to the concept of seam-shifted wakes:

Every baseball spins in a certain direction, spinning around a certain axis, resulting in a certain movement. The old method of determining spin direction was to use the movement measured by Pitchf/x and work backward to infer what the spin axis should have been. Or, “the baseball moved this way, it must have spun in this direction”.

Hawkeye’s cameras, however, are able to observe what the spin axis actually is after leaving the pitcher’s hand. When comparing the two measurements (inferred and observed) the deviation between the two can tell whether more forces than the downward one of Magnus are at play.

The work of Smith and at Driveline has centered around how the seam orientation of the pitched baseball in flight is informing those “side forces” and how best pitchers can attempt to keep their seams in the place most conducive for their desired movement. Sounds difficult but it’s certainly possible and pitchers have been doing it unknowingly as long as baseball has been played, playing with and cycling through grips in search of the elusive nirvana that is “I just found one that works”.

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Now is that time in the season where you’re probably starting to get a little antsy. Why hasn’t Player A hit any home runs yet? When will Player B steal a base? Do I cut this player? Do I add that player? You may fall into the trap of cutting players on a whim because of a 3-for-31 performance thus far, but then regret that cut when he goes on a home run hitting bonanza in a few weeks. So, what indicators can you look for when trying to decide whether to buy or sell, cut or claim? 

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We can be dumb about pitching. Rather, we tend to be not as smart in April as we are later in the season. As the year goes on and we get more information about the skills that pitchers (and their opponents) have, we naturally get more choosy with who we’re willing to start.

In April, however, we’re still all high off of draft prep and are more willing to believe whatever narrative sold us on them in the first place. We put aside obvious questions like, “What if Chris Paddack still has a terrible fastball?” and  “But isn’t he still Andrew Heaney?”, instead going full bore with, “Good enough to draft, good enough to start!”. At least until the wheels come off.

The simple reason to raise your bar for starting early in the season is that this is when we know the least about the pitchers themselves, as well as their opponents’ general offensive prowess, strikeout rate, win likelihood, etc. Compared to what we’ll know later in the year, we’re often flying blind in April, at least in terms of the pitchers outside of the top tiers. And yet at the time when we’re the least informed, our bar for starting is often the lowest.

Obviously, you want to avoid bad starts all the time but I aim to be even more risk-averse early in the season because I want maximum flexibility later in the year. Acquiring good ratios (whether via FAAB, the wire, or trade) is expensive (or impossible) later in the season while scrounging for wins and strikeouts can be cheap. That is, at least they are if you don’t need to stress about ratios when doing said scrounging.

August and September may seem far away but focus on keeping your ratios shiny early and you’ll give yourself more avenues for doing business later.

Let’s go deeper on a few of the shakier options you may be tempted to roll with early, but just remember to choose wisely.

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You may remember, in the before times, a game called Beat the Streak. The game challenged baseball fans to hypothetically beat one of the greatest records of all time. The idea was to pick one player each day to get a hit and to do that 57 consecutive times, beating Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hit streak record. Way back in preseason 2020 I wrote about my ambitions of becoming a millionaire by using predictive, machine learning models to aid in winning the competition. The game’s 2020 cancellation gave me time to think, time to read, time to learn how noisy my upstairs neighbors are, and time to build a better model.

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