A few days ago, Travis Sawchik ask me to help find some comps for the Shohei Ohtani using a 2016 Davenport translation. The list of potential hitters with similar 2018 Steamer projections was impressive (Charlie Blackmon, George Springer, Mookie Betts, Carlos Correa, Yasiel Puig, and Aaron Judge). Additionally, I found pitchers who had similar 2018 projections to his 2016 translation but the list wasn’t as impressive (Jimmy Nelson, James Paxton, Jon Gray, Luis Castillo, Luke Weaver). Thanks to Dan “The Man” Szymborski, a 2018 projection now exists and results will be a little disappointing.

First, from what I heard from most fantasy websites, Ohtani’s will be two separate draftable players. Ohtani the pitcher and Ohtani the hitter. No site, that I know of, has yet to combine the two. If they did, they will likely have to count all the hitting stats accumulated by all pitchers. I hope this doesn’t ever happen.

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I’ve finally compiled the 2017 Disabled List (DL) information. The main change from the last few seasons is the transition from the 15-day DL to 10-day DL and the subsequent increase in DL trips. With the total trips up, the number of days lost is down which makes it tough to draw any major conclusions. It’s time to dive into the numbers.

First off, I collected the information from MLB.com’s transaction list. I like to use this list because it is easy to go back and check. I waded through it and it wasn’t pretty. It took me twice as long to compile the data compared to previous seasons. I would just like to give a big thank you to ProSportsTransactions.com for having most of the missing data.

With my venting out of the way, here is how the days missed for pitchers and hitters compare over the previous 4 seasons.

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Unless league rules require it or an owner plays in an NL West-only league, owners don’t use their starters in Colorado. This stance may be a little extreme but the league’s aces should be the only started used in Colorado. Pitching in Colorado adds one run to pitcher’s ERA. Owners know this but visiting team must send out a starter to get sacrificed. I’m going to go over some of the pitchers affected the most by being the sacrificial lamb.

This past season, I owned Jeff Samardzija in a couple of leagues. His 4.42 ERA was just above league average (4.36 ERA). The effect on my team wasn’t that much though. There is no way I was going to start him in Coors and I missed out on his 1.94 WHIP and 11.91 ERA over 11.1 IP. With the starts removed, his ERA dropped to 3.98. While not a great ERA, it represented the true effect it had on my team.

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The Auction Calculator is now loaded with the 2017 end-of-season data along with some 2018 projections. I’m sure the preceding comment will be sufficient to keep many readers busy for a while. I’m glad some came back. While its output can lead down several different discussion paths, I’m going to analyze what I consider to be the third starting pitcher tier. I feel many 2018 leagues will be won or lost by navigating this minefield.

So far this offseason, fantasy owners have placed four starters (Kluber, Kershaw, Sale, and Scherzer) in the top tier, After those four, I believe there are a dozen or so pitchers who would make acceptable aces, especially if they can be doubled up with another pitcher from this tier.

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This was supposed to be a quick paragraph on Max Fried but it turned into a borderline Quick Look. I was doing an article on pitchers who saw their ERA balloon because of starts at Coors. His non-Colorado ERA dropped stood at 3.09 vs 3.81 which made him seem like a borderline ace. I kept digging and found additional encouraging information. Here are some of my thoughts on my first 2018 deeper sleeper.

First, here’s how industry sources graded him including his pERA grades from his short MLB stint.

Some definite disparities exist. I will examine each pitch with a video from his September 9th start against the Marlins.

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This past weekend, I was in Phoenix for Baseball HQ’s First Pitch forum. It’s an intensive few days of catching up with old friends and focusing on the upcoming fantasy baseball season. There was an underlying theme of the weekend, the fantasy baseball game is being forced to change. Some game facets have experienced some massive adjustments. The following are some of the meta-trends which have quickly popped up over the past few seasons.

Home runs are way up

A few days ago I wrote the following incorrect statement about Carlos Martinez for a 2018 player preview.

His 1.19 HR/9 will likely drop back below the league average.

It was pointed out to me, his home run rate was below league average. I was for sure it was not near 1.20 but I was wrong. Here are the recent league-wide HR/9 values.

2014: 0.86
2015: 1.02
2016: 1.17
2017: 1.27

I remember when the HR/9 hovered around 1.0. Not anymore. Some other pitching stats are feeling the effects of the jump like ERA, but the root cause is more home runs.

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Happy Game 7 Day!

About a year ago I released my (2017) Top 50 Fantasy Prospect rankings using the Prospect Scorecard to weight a variety of important variables in the context of fantasy baseball.  Today I’m publishing an (early) expanded list of the Top 100 Fantasy Prospects for 2018 for both Ottoneu’s FanGraphs Points leagues (where wOBA is a key measure on offense) and Roto leagues (5 x 5).

A few quick notes before we begin:

• Since “Cost” is league-dependent (auction salary, keeper round, etc.), I’ve ignored it here for simplicity by keeping it constant for every prospect listed. Feel free to use the Scorecard to make changes that reflect true player costs for your league, which will impact these rankings.
• These rankings below are intended to represent the 100 most valuable prospects for fantasy leagues (depending on scoring format).
• It’s quite possible I’m missing an obvious player that should be ranked, so let me know in the comments.  We can discuss the specific rationale for player rankings in the comments, too.  Player ages are current ages.
• For a lot more prospect resources, check out the Ottoneu community.

Here are the (early) 2018 Top 100 prospects for the linear-weights-based FanGraphs Points scoring format (a good proxy for those in OBP leagues):

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Chase Anderson had shown glimpses of upside over his first three seasons as a major leaguer, during which he netted a 4.26 ERA, 1.35 WHIP, and 12% K-BB in 418.7 IP. He even caught the eye of our very own Eno Sarris, who heralded him as a solid deep league option for those first two seasons.  Unfortunately, he (Anderson, not Sarris… though Sarris has given up some bombs) had a home run issue as well (1.3 HR/9) only exacerbated by playing first in Arizona then Milwaukee.

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Yesterday, I reviewed the 2017 starting pitcher walk rate improvers using my updated xBB% equation. Today, I’ll recap my walk rate regressers, which includes those starting pitchers whose actual walk rates were significantly better than their xBB% marks.

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In late January, I updated my pitcher xBB% was include and additional variable, 3-0%, which is the percentage of a pitcher’s plate appearances in which a 3-0 count is seen. Since Alex Chamberlain had already published such a formula, which built upon my original equation, I simply updated the variables of his. I then used the new formula to highlight a group of starting pitchers with an xBB% significantly lower their actual 2016 marks. This group was then discussed as potential walk rate improvers in 2017. Let’s see how they did.

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