Some might have you believe we just finished the most wonderful time of the year, but it’s actually coming up. Sleeper season is about to kick off for the 2016 fantasy baseball season and it promises to be another fun year of debating what actually constitutes a sleeper, who’s asleep and who’s just going at-cost, and whether or not you should include injury comebacks on your list. Another fascinating feature of Sleeper season is the group of guys who appear on virtually every list thereby negating their sleeper status by the time Draft season actually gets here: the wide-awake sleepers.

Examples from last year include Carlos Carrasco, Marcus Stroman before his injury, Michael Wacha, and Matt Harvey (especially by mid-Spring Training). They were all in 40s or later among starters in the winter magazines (which are written in the fall), but all were early-30s or higher by March. Stroman obviously fell off once he suffered the torn ACL, but Harvey surged all the way through draft season, winding up 14th among starters and top-50 overall. Being a part of this list isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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There isn’t a top 75 pitcher that is as overrated by his ADP against his projections as Sonny Gray, it turns out. There’s almost 120 spots between where he’s being taken and where he “should” go, at least for now. You can see how that sort of thing happens.

He was 40th in strikeouts minus walks last season. 40th in strikeout rate. 26th in FIP. And ninth in ERA. And the ‘answer’ to that disparity is the worst in the business: he’s fifth in batting average on balls in play since he came into the league. 491 innings isn’t enough to believe that sort of things, so we all just whimper into our hats and wonder what to do about him.

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At last, we have reached our final 2015 Pod Projection review! All pitcher projections were based on the methodology laid out in my just released eBook, Projecting X 2.0. Yes, it’s the follow up to the original Projecting X, and is chock full of new research, new metrics, new ideas, and new methods for projecting baseball player performance.

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RotoGraphs writers get invited to be in some way-too-early drafts for various industry sources. I have been lucky enough to be included in a 12-team mock drafts for both Lindy’s and RotoWorld. While I have agreed to not release my full results until the sources are available to the public, I can talk about smaller aspects of the drafts. In this case, I ended up with Masahiro Tanaka in each draft. The doubling up on a risky pick has me wondering if I am overvaluing him. For the formats I was drafting in, I don’t think so. As the league depth increases, I could see his value drop.

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Let’s continue where I left off before Christmas when I reviewed the hitters that baffled the rankers in the top 100 and switch things up to the starting pitcher side of the ledger. Since we had five rankers for our preseason consensus, it was only natural that there would be some players we disagreed on. Sure, we didn’t rank everyone exactly the same, but most were in the general vicinity. For these players that were part of our preseason top 100, our opinions were all over the map. Let’s find out who got it right. The original writeup is here and here is the top 300 the “Actual” ranking is pulled from.

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Happy holidays and especially a New Year! I just wanted to swing by quickly and drop some thoughts on a back-end arm I’ve been keeping an eye on for fantasy drafts next season.

I did write this player up for numberFire recently, though circumstances around him have changed a little bit. That is, his rotation spot has become a bit murkier. That pitcher is Diamondbacks left-hander Robbie Ray. On the surface, Ray’s numbers aren’t overwhelmingly impressive for 2015: 5-12, 3.52 ERA, 8.4 K/9 and a 1.33 WHIP. There are a couple stats individually that provide a bit of hope, but still maybe nothing more than a possible pop-up guy with little evidence he’ll actually get that chance. Read the rest of this entry »

Felix Hernandez’s days as an elite starting pitcher are over. That’s not a knock on him, nor does that make him any less of the ace that he is for his ballclub. It’s just that King Felix posted a season that pretty much replicated his production in 2010 and 2011 — production that, in between those two seasons, earned him the #2 spot on Razzball’s 2011 preseason top-20 starting pitchers — and he finished 16th.

The King dominated in 2015 the same way he has dominated for the better part of the last decade. But everything is relative, and his performance was relatively underwhelming given the glut of young talent that has emerged at the Major League level. To attest:

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I wrote last week about Max Scherzer, who, in 2015, reached new heights. It was, is, painfully cliché, but it’s true. The same could be said for Chris Sale, who also (1) reached new heights and (2) suffered the misfortune of languishing in the rotation of a ballclub that ultimately would not contend.

Except Sale didn’t throw two no-hitters, nor did he almost throw three no-hitters, nor did he almost throw back-to-back no-hitters. Because those are all things Scherzer did. What Sale did do, yes, is give up 13 runs in fewer than nine innings across two starts in late April and early May.

People kind of freaked, and understandably so — the sabermetrically inclined readership at FanGraphs is not necessarily representative of the greater population of baseball fans. And the greater population of baseball fans saw a 5.93 ERA through 27.1 innings — the epitome of a small sample size, but nonetheless a sample to which a fan is entitled to react.

If you stayed tuned, you know the narrative: in the 26 starts after his two-game disaster, Sale struck out more than a third of the batters he faced. More than a third. In four of those games, he struck out more than half of them. That’s insane. Even in an era of baseball when we yawn at a strikeout rate lower than 8.0 per nine innings, that’s still insane.

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Hey AL-only players, you didn’t think Santa Paul forgot about you, did you? I offered two NL arms on the rise on Tuesday, one for all-formats and another geared toward to deeper leagues (at least until he proves himself some more), and I’ve got the same for the American League today.

Carlos Rodon, CWS – pick 238 in early November, pick 158 in a draft last week

I think you can ignore that early November price because you won’t get him that late in other drafts. He jumped 80 picks in less than a month based on nothing and then I did a 12-teamer just this week (the roster setup is different than these other two drafts so I didn’t include the ADPs on purpose) and he was up at pick 140. He’s likely to live in the 130-175 range.

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It’s easier to identify pitchers you’re excited about, pitchers that you like better than the rankings say you should, than it is to do the opposite. At least for me. It’s easier to believe in a pitcher than to hate on them. At least for me. Lists of sleepers seemingly go on forever, while lists of busts are shorter. At least for me.

The fact remains that only half of the top 20 from 2014’s end-of-season rankings repeated on this year’s end-of-season rankings. We should have reason to hate on at least half of this year’s best pitchers. So, despite the season, let’s hand out some coal to last year’s aces. All of them.

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