We’re going position by position this week and next with our initial roll out of rankings. We will update these in March based on Spring Training activity and injuries. We took yesterday off because of the uncertainty around Alex Reyes. Now that he’s officially out with Tommy John surgery (:sadface:), he has been removed from the rankings.

We’re using Yahoo! eligibility requirements which is 5 starts or 10 appearances. These rankings assume the standard 5×5 categories and a re-draft league. If we forgot someone, please let us know in the comments and we’ll make sure he’s added for the updates. If you have questions for a specific ranker on something he did, let us know in the comments. We can also be reached via Twitter:

• Paul Sporer
• Jeff Zimmerman
• Mike Podhorzer
• Brad Johnson
• Justin Mason
• Al Melchior

Eno did his standalone SP Rankings which you can find here.

There will be differences, sharp differences, within the rankings. The rankers have different philosophies when it comes to ranking, some of which you’re no doubt familiar with through previous iterations. Of course the idea that we’d all think the same would be silly because then what would be the point of including multiple rankers?! Think someone should be higher or lower? Make a case. Let us know why you think that. The chart is sortable. If a ranker didn’t rank someone that the others did, he was given that ranker’s last rank +1.

Key:

• AVG– just the average of the seven ranking sets
• AVG– the average minus the high and low rankings
• SPLIT– the difference between the high and low rankings

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My Tout Wars prep continues. I have already examined the league’s historical aspects which I have used to create initial auction values and a draft outline. With the initial projections out of the way, I am refining them. One step in this process is to find the replacement level player and adjust players who will miss time accordingly.

The concept behind the replacement level player is fairly simple. If a good player is expected to miss significant time, his fantasy value is based on just the games he is expected to play. For the games he misses, some lesser player (replacement level player) will fill. The better player’s total value will be both his and the replacement player’s contribution.

For example, I don’t expect Yoan Moncada to get called any earlier than the Super Two deadline around June 1st. For the months he’s in the minors, a less talent replacement level player will be subbing in for him. The same idea works with pitchers. Tyson Ross is expected to miss at least a couple of months so a replacement is needed until he gets healthy.

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When you watch football, it’s very clear by body type, what position a player likely plays. Are you 6’5 and 320lbs? That’s more than likely a lineman. 5’9 and 210 lbs? Chances are, you’re a running back. Baseball is a lot different – Marcus Stroman (5’8, 180lbs) and Chris Young (6’10, 255lbs) play the exact same position. Chris Sale (6’6, 180lbs) and Bartolo Colon (5’11, 285 lbs (sure… I believe you)) also play the same position. There aren’t too many times on the gridiron where a 100lb weight difference will line up against each other!

The point I’m trying to make, is with such huge variances in body shapes and sizes, there are many different ways to skin a cat. Marco Estrada (of 89 mph fastball fame) was massively more successful than Joe Kelly (punching a fastball in the high 90s, and over 100 mph). Pitchers of all shapes and sizes (of body and fastball) find ways to succeed. The question is – when you don’t have the clearly obvious advantage of that big fastball, how do you get major league hitters out?

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So far in my Tout Wars preparation series, I’ve documented the league’s draft tendencies and the stats needed to win. Today, I’ll create the framework for player pricing. Along the way, I will show how there is no position scarcity except with catcher. At least for this league

Completing this step brings the preparation is laborious, but necessary. Once it’s done, I can spend most of my time evaluating players and their projected playing time.

For evaluating players, I utilize the Standings Gain Points (SGP) method. I previously outlined the procedure and it‘s the same method Larry Schechter recommends in his book, Winning Fantasy Baseball. Normally, this procedure is fairly straight forward since I’ve historically used three-year average values. Last year’s offensive explosion complicates the math. With more offense available, home runs, Runs, and RBIs become less important. Predicting 2017’s run scoring environment is impossible so I won’t for now. I feel I need to use a weighted average system with 2016 getting the most weight but I am just not sure how much to weight them. To get the process started, I will use the average standings from 2014 to 2016 for this work.

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Today’s ADP piece is looking at the SPs beyond the top 50. This is where you can win leagues. Let me emphasize “can” because leagues are rarely won or lost at the draft table alone. After all, there’s a reason we play out the six months of the season and don’t just go off a projection set. Usually a good 40-50% of many rosters turn over every year, at least in mixed leagues in the 10-15 team range.

Even if there are only 6-7 player slots turned over out of a 23-man roster (which is 25-30% turnover), there will still be many players moving in and out those slots. The point is that you shouldn’t get too precious about your draft picks in the mid-to-late rounds because a lot of them aren’t going to be on your roster very long anyway. Pitchers in particular have huge variance year-to-year so take your guys in this part of the draft.

Previous Editions:

• C/1B
• 2B/SS
• 3B
• OF Pt. 1
• OF Pt. 2
• SP Pt. 1

STARTING PITCHER (click here for ADP list)

• Jeff Samardzija (pick 196) might not have bounced back as well as some of us expected, but he shaved over a run off his ERA and further showed himself as one of the few workhorses left in the market.

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The volatility of pitching makes SP average draft figures sketchy after the top 25 or so. Opinions can only differ so much on hitters, especially those with anything close to a track record (starting around ~1000+ MLB PA), but opinions will vary widely on pitchers regardless of track record. Some won’t believe in a pitcher until he has 500-600 IP under his belt regardless of how good his first 200-300 are while on the other end you have fantasy players afraid to be holding the hot potato when the music stops on someone with a lengthy track record in their mid-30s.

Most of the guys in that sweet spot are the established aces and frontliners (lower level #1s, elite #2s) that we generally agree on for those early round picks. This year is vastly different than last year which is likely to create even wider chasms perhaps as early as the mid-teens among starters. The uncertainty should create some fantastic buying opportunities, though, and it’ll open up draft strategies, too.

Last year, most teams didn’t want to exit the third round without their ace. Early on this year, teams are OK waiting until the sixth, maybe even seventh round to get their ace while they stock up on hitting and perhaps open their  pitching staff with an elite closer instead. As with outfield, I’ll do two parts with starters going through the top 50 today and then 51 and beyond next time.

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Yesterday, I share an updated version of Alex Chamberlain’s pitcher xBB% equation and used it to identify the fantasy relevant pitchers whose walk rates should improve this season. Today, I’ll check in on the other side of the coin, those starting pitchers whose xBB% was well above their actual BB% in 2016. This group will find it challenging to fend off the regression monster this year without throwing more strikes.

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Introduction

Before I came to Rotographs – I wrote a lot on my own site, and in the FanGraphs community section. My first foray into baseball analysis was developing a metric to try and quantify “Stuff”. A New York Times article by John Branch in October 2015 discussed the elusive definition of the pitching term “stuff”. Talk of “plus stuff” and feelings of “all the stuff being there” was scattered throughout the article.

Despite interesting commentary discussing the ability for pitchers to over-power hitters, there was no true definition of the nastiness of a pitcher’s stuff. My favourite quote from the article is that stuff is “both meaningful and meaningless. There are no synonyms. Like pornography, stuff is defined mostly by example. An only pitchers have stuff. Hitters do not have stuff (Branch, 2015)”.

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About three and a half years ago, I shared the bestest starting pitcher xBB% formula yet. Since I mentioned to you recently that I have been on an xEquation binge, I updated that bestest xBB% one too, of course. But as I was working on it with an additional variable, I realized that Alex Chamberlain had literally done the exact same thing about two years ago. That same thing was adding the 3-0% metric from Baseball-Reference.com, which is the percentage of plate appearances in which a 3-0 count is seen. So rather than take credit for developing a better version of my original xBB% metric, I’m now simply updating the coefficients of Alex’s equation.

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Robbie Ray is already shaping up to be one of 2017’s most contentious starting pitchers headed into draft day. (This isn’t even my first time writing about him in the last half-year.) His 28-percent strikeout rate (K%) and 3.45 xFIP scream of an elite starter, but his 4.90 ERA and 1.47 WHIP, sustained during more than 170 innings pitched, seem to say otherwise.

Analysts and laymen who have expressed optimism about Ray have done so in regard to his alleged hittability. That 1.47 WHIP didn’t come from nowhere: his .352 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) got him there. You’ll hear a variety of arguments: he struggles on his third time through the zone; he lacks a quality third, or maybe even second, pitch; and so on. I’m not here to argue the validity of those sentiments.

I want to talk exclusively about Ray’s BABIP. Well, his sinker, too. And maybe even his strand rate (LOB%)… But mostly his BABIP. Please, have a seat. I don’t want to fluster you.

Ray’s .352 BABIP in 2016 was the second-worst of the last 15 years. That’s out of 1,281 individual player-seasons posted by qualified starting pitchers. His BABIP was historically bad — strange, you’d think, for a pitcher who has quickly demonstrated a lot of promise. So, I want to approach this whole BABIP thing in a vacuum. Let’s just look at the facts — not even alternative facts, but real facts!

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