This year, as always, we found the run-up to the MLB trading deadline absorbing and diverting. And this year, yet again, we were struck by the unexploited entertainment potential of the event. Everyone knows that there’s a market for the manufactured drama of big-league sports transactions. We inhabit a world in which 3 million Americans watch the NBA draft, and another 3 million—actually, it’s probably the same 3 million—are willing to sit in front their TV or computer screens on a Saturday afternoon and watch NFL teams make their 5th-round draft choices.

You couldn’t make the MLB draft similarly compelling, of course. NBA and NFL draftees go directly to the teams that select them. They’ll be playing, and often starting, for those teams a few months later. MLB draftees serve (usually years-long) minor-league apprenticeships. This absence of immediate consequences makes the baseball draft dicier as a viewing spectacle.

Not so the last week of July for MLB. Practically every deal that gets done has, and is intended to have, an immediate effect. The Cubs and Rangers double down. The Yankees and (it appears) the Royals muck their hands. As it stands, the process unfolds glacially, and we ourselves kind of like it that way. But we guarantee you that there are handsomely-compensated consultants brooding as we write about how that gradual unfolding can be turned into a one-day extravaganza. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a sucker like me, you constantly pin your hopes on the latest Rockies phenom hoping that he will finally be the one to tame the beast that is Coors Field. After all, there are only 29 other teams full of pitchers playing in exponentially more friendly ballparks, so why not intently focus on the toughest pitching environment we’ve ever seen in the game and hope to find the diamond in that rough?! (Cool life, Paul.)

The latest Great Coors Hope is Jon Gray.

Read the rest of this entry »

After missing the entirety of the 2015 season and nearly two-thirds of this season, former top prospect Tyler Skaggs finally made his triumphant return from Tommy John surgery on Tuesday. Though the surface results are meaningless, he did go seven innings, striking out five, while issuing just one walk. The now-25-year-old showed serious strikeout ability in the minors and his ground ball spike in 2014 was intriguing. And although his strikeout rate slipped in 2014, his fastball velocity jumped three miles per hour, which is almost unheard of when it’s not related to a move from the starting rotation to the bullpen. So we had the makings of a true sleeper here. Now that he’s back, is he worth rostering?

Read the rest of this entry »

We go way back with Jose Urena. We drafted him in January 2015 for the very first team we co-owned. Undaunted by his disappointing performance as a reliever at the start of that season, we rhapsodized about him in May 2015, just before the Marlins re-promoted him and plugged him into their rotation. Further undaunted by his disappointing performance in that role, we effused about him just this past March. And now, still undaunted by his disappointing performance as a reliever in the majors earlier this season, we again wax enthusiastic as he rejoins the Marlins’ starting rotation.

The book on Urena has been well-thumbed, but just in case you haven’t been to the library: 24-year-old Dominican, torrid fastball in both its two-seam and its four-seam variants, indifferent secondary arsenal, good control but misses too few bats for a guy who throws that hard and doesn’t do so great when he throws softer. He’s pitched well, if not always overwhelmingly so, in the minors, but hasn’t (until now—see below) approached seven strikeouts per nine innings since rookie ball in 2010. When he got demoted to triple-A the end of May this season, his career MLB record stood at 2 Wins, 6 Losses, a 5.82 ERA, and 4.39 K/9. Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, strikeouts minus walks was the best way to look ahead for a pitcher. It focused on the things that a pitcher could control and left the rest to league averages, and therefore it was a strong ‘one number’ to look at.

We are in the midst of turmoil, though. In the middle of the biggest year to year increase in home run rate, we’re suddenly looking at pitchers with home run problems and wondering which ones will continue to be ridiculously ‘unlucky’ and which ones will shortly conquer their gopher problem. Don’t worry, the pitchers themselves are doing the same thing.

The good news is that we have new tools to help us figure out which home run rates are more likely to regress. The home run is the result of the correct launch angle and the correct velocity. We know that 25-30 is the ideal home run launch angle, but for these purposes, I expanded it to 20-35 to get a broader range. We also know that 95+ mph in those zones leads to home runs, so I included a ranking of exit velocity in that band.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I discussed some of the starting pitchers whose xK% significantly exceeded their actual K% marks, suggesting strikeout rate upside over the rest of the season. Today, I’ll check in on the opposite end of the spectrum, looking at those fantasy relevant starting pitchers whose strikeout rates are far exceeding their xK% marks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s do one final rest of season xK% update. If you recall, my xK% equation uses Baseball-Reference.com metrics to calculate a pitcher expected strikeout rate. It’s missing a sequencing component, though who knows if that’s even a skill. But even without accounting for such, it has proven to be one of the best expected metrics we have developed, at least by R-squared. So let’s begin with the fantasy relevant starting pitchers whose expected strikeout rates are well above their actual marks, suggesting significant upside over the rest of the season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maximizing the upside of your lineups is crucial to having success in DFS tournaments. Oft-discussed strategies like stacking and targeting home run hitters are important for upside, but another strategy is to target bad bullpens.

Read the rest of this entry »

There was a time, many, many years ago, when I would never roster a rookie starting pitcher. This was when I first began playing fantasy baseball in the late 1990s. Whether it’s because rookie starters now seem to enjoy more immediate success than in the past or we just do a better job evaluating pitchers in general that enables us to separate the wheat from the chaff, I no longer avoid rookie starters, and have not for a while. I already discussed selling Michael Fulmer two weeks ago, so that leaves us with just only a couple of rookie American League starters we truly care about, one of which is Blake Snell.

Read the rest of this entry »

Redraft leagues that permit trading take you places you wouldn’t otherwise go, although the same can be said of kidnappers. In a no-trading league, wherever Clayton Kershaw or Paul Goldschmidt or any high- or mid-priced player is at the end of the draft, that’s where he’ll be at the end of the season. In a league that permits trading, though, if you’re the Kershaw owner, you will be fending off suitors like a romance-novel heroine. You might be offered, say, Danny Salazar and Carlos Rodon—to take two names that, as you’ll see, aren’t chosen at random–for Kershaw, and you’re going to have to do some spadework to figure out if the deal might be worth your while.

We ourselves, as we’ve mentioned, play in just one trading league. That would be the Bluefish Blitz league, in which trading is not just permitted but encouraged, and not just encouraged but virtually compelled. We have survived our own pluperfect stupidity in this league—we’ll tell you at the end of this installment about the dumbest thing we did—and, rising on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things, have assembled a roster that, when you squint hard at it, appears to be marginally competitive. And now, having spent more waking hours in the past month devising, contemplating, proposing, and receiving trade offers than we have on personal hygiene, we’ve reached the conclusion that we’re one good starting pitcher away from actual contention. Read the rest of this entry »