Yes, the best in-season ERA estimator is strikeouts minus walks. You can use that tidbit to find a few sleepers in season, for sure.

But when you look at Matt Shoemaker and Phil Hughes right now, you realize there are perils when it comes to using the stat in the offseason. And really, you may start to see some of the limits of the stat even when it comes to in-season work.

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Over the last couple weeks, a 24-year-old former top-ten overall pick has been on fire. He has started 13 consecutive games, batting leadoff or second in 12 of those games. He slots in as the No. 6 fantasy second baseman in that stretch. Furthermore, he’s already third-base eligible in Yahoo leagues, making his sixth appearance (fifth start) of the season at third on Sunday.

On the year, this player is now hitting .262/.338/.431, with two homers and four steals. Sounds like a guy we should be jumping all over, right? Would you ever in a million years expect his ownership rates to look like this?

• 6% Yahoo, 3.4% ESPN, 11% CBS

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Ever since Orioles second baseman Jonathan Schoop went down with a sprained right knee, manager Buck Showalter has been covering the keystone in some wonderfully weird ways. Without backup Ryan Flaherty — who hit the disabled list himself with a groin injury — Showalter turned to a couple of highly unorthodox options.

As Jeff Sullivan outlined last week, the Orioles called up natural second baseman Reynaldo Navarro, but used him sparingly before ultimately optioning him back to Triple-A on Friday. Instead, Showalter has relied on Jimmy Paredes — who had made just eight starts at second in his five partial major-league seasons — and first baseman/corner outfielder Steve Pearce, who had never logged an inning at the position in his 11-year professional career.

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Every year, pitchers add wrinkles in the spring. Most years, they forget them once they have to get batters out and the results count. In the case of today’s pitchers, though, we have three guys that found a new thing and stuck with it when the calendar switched to April. The results weren’t uniformly amazing for each of them, but a third pitch might mean wonders for misters Jimmy Nelson, Nathan Eovaldi, and Brad Boxberger.

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You can tell a lot about a person from their team names. Well, with mine at least, you can probably tell I’m a writer. Because they’re all stupid puns. Seems like a must in the writer community, but I almost feel forced to take something about myself or my players on my team and turn it into a silly phrase. That’s how this collection of team names happens.

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So, it’s been a busy preseason and I had a list of all the articles I wanted to publish before the season officially began. Unfortunately, I failed. And as a result, Eno beat me to the punch. But I’m going to do it anyway. A whole three years ago, with help from math wizard Matt Swartz, we discovered that spring pitcher strikeout and walk rates actually do hold value and using them could improve projections, even if just marginally. This was validated recently by another math wizard, Dan Rosenheck. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at which pitchers enjoyed a strikeout rate surge during spring training.

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Yesterday, I opened 2015 Pod’s Picks season with my infield bullish and bearish selections. Today I’ll finish my look at hitters by moving into the outfield. The bullish group will only include those I ranked within my top 60 and the bearish only players the consensus ranked within their top 60.

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If you’re like us—we sincerely hope you aren’t, but if you’re reading this blog, you probably are—your soul is suffused with the sickness unto death as you contemplate how microscopic the attention you pay to baseball events must be if you hope to succeed in any moderately sophisticated Fantasy Baseball league. First, of course, you have to know how the players everyone knows and cares about are doing. Thus, it will matter to you when you see a headline like “Sean Doolittle plays catch.” We know that this fact has a measure of real-world significance that, say, “Khloe Kardashian plays catch” or “Mitch McConnell plays catch” doesn’t. Still, we keep expecting to see follow-ups: “Sean Doolittle walks the dog.” “Sean Doolittle takes his kids to P.F. Chang’s.” Nonetheless, we care. And just to set the record straight: Doolittle doesn’t have kids, or a spouse, though he does have a famously hot girlfriend.

And then, of course, you need to be completely familiar with the resumes and futures of guys that normal people haven’t heard of. We won’t insult you by telling you who Bruce Rondon is, because you already know. But believe us, there are plenty of hard-core baseball fans (as opposed to Fantasy addicts) who don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Due to the busy preseason schedule of posts I had to publish, the 2015 version of Pod’s Picks is being unveiled later than ever before. But I refuse to skip a year because it’s always fun comparing my rankings to the rest of the rankers and discovering who was closer at season’s end. Rather than drag things out by posting just one position a day like I have in the past, I’m grouping them into infield, outfield and starting pitchers to bring us into the start of the season (finally!).

I calculated the average rank of the three rankers in the Rotographs Rankings Update and then compared to my ranking within each position. As usual, I will limit my Bullish picks to those I have ranked as startable players in a standard 12-team league and Bearish picks to those the consensus has ranked as startable.

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“Don’t read into Spring Training stats” is a good surface level mantra to hold on to. The competition is uneven, the results don’t matter, and the players are all working on things in preparation for the regular season. To some extent, it’s like looking at September numbers on a non-contending team: those are very different from May numbers.

Even the benefits of a huge surge in results is only slightly predictive. There’s the study from John Dewan about a huge slugging percentage breakout in the spring, but recently work by Ben Lindbergh and Jon Shepherd poked some holes in the theory.

If you look at when stats stabilize, however, there are a few stats worth checking out. We know from Jeff Zimmerman that fastball velocity stabilizes very quickly, and so it’s worth reading his MASH articles to find the most recent gun readings on pitchers.

And we know that strikeouts stabilize quickly — 100 plate appearances for batters, 126 batters faced for pitchers. A spring is something like a half of a September, so it doesn’t get to those thresholds, but the evidence is there that strikeouts become meaningful quicker than most stats, and so therefore spring strikeouts may be worth keeping an eye on.

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