Cursing at the injury Gods already? Yeah you are. Let’s see what your free agent pool might offer in your deep league.

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I will continue to implement player grading on the scouting scales of 20-80. I will use Kiley McDaniels scale he discussed in this article.

I will give a value for where I think the pitcher could currently fit in on the average team (CV=current value) and where they could end up (FV=future value). I am sure I will disagree with some grades from others, but I am only looking at one game.

Note: If I say a pitch moves 11-5, it is from the pitcher’s perspective.

Chris Heston (CV: 55, FV: 60)

4/13 vs Rockies

Game Thoughts
• Man I expected less. The 27-year-old righty was not ranked here at FanGraphs, but in the 2015 Baseball America Handbook says he is “… without any pitch that grades out as even average.” The biggest key from the BA book is the mention of his 86-89 mph fastball in 2013 (45 grade) and 2015 (40 grade). Also it mentions his change and curve. Not much is the same now.
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Two starts does not a season make, but Chris Heston is quickly making a positive impression. He’s a pitcher who shouldn’t have been on the radar of gamers entering the year, however, it might be time to re-evaluate the 27-year old right-hander. The Giants prefer keep Yusmeiro Petit in a swingman role, and Heston has bypassed Ryan Vogelsong in the rotation pecking order. Matt Cain remains a little less than week away from playing catch, according to Alex Pavlovic of CSN Bay Area. In other words, Heston has at least a few more turns in the rotation before the Giants could have to make some decisions regarding who the five pitchers are in the Giants rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a tough time of the year for fantasy baseball analysts. We’re not even at the end of week two meaning that in most cases the sample sizes are still too small to really be useful. The downside of this is that the fantasy analysis can become lazy as we wait for more data. Too often you see the vague, unhelpful “sell high” tag attached to any mid-rounder who is off to a high start or “buy low” on the star who has two rotten starts on his ledger thus far. But what does that even really mean? It’s so easy to say and so hard to actually execute.

Nobody who spent a top 20 pick on Stephen Strasburg (6.75 ERA in 10.7 IP) is going to move him for Nick Martinez (0.00 ERA in 14 IP). In fact, they probably aren’t going to move him at all (nor should they). You know what’s easy? Me telling you to go sell high on Chris Heston. But it’s also generic and frankly, shitty advice because it offers no insight into what selling high might be, especially because I know full well that unless Teresa Heston (that Chris’ mom, I looked it up) is in your league, you can’t really cash him in for some great return. The rest of your league is just as skeptical about his dubious 0.69 ERA as you are right now.

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Yesterday, I issued my first challenge. Sparked by Brandon McCarthy’s bizarre outing on Monday, I asked you to prove that his HR/FB rate was not bad luck. The challenge led to some great discussion, which is exactly what I had hoped it would do.

Now it’s time to move on to the second, and likely final, challenge. It’s a topic that I am more interested in and has been debated ad nauseam. Of course, I’m talking about pitcher BABIP. We have been taught that pitchers will tend to regress toward the league average, which has sat around .295 in recent years, as hitters actually possess the majority of control over how often balls in play falls for hits. So early on, we eventually came to accept this.

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If you drafted Masahiro Tanaka and his elbow of broken parts, you knew there was risk. I was among the many that thought because of his “high floor” and expected ADP, he represented a nice little opportunity given the other available talent at that stage in the draft — a point well articulated by Paul Sporer in this piece. But while we knew he had a partially torn UCL, what wasn’t fully disclosed was that Tanaka had every intention of modifying his approach to hitters, saying, in effect, don’t expect much in the way of velocity this year. So it goes.

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Last week, I identified potential stolen base streamers for daily fantasy leagues and weekly leagues with daily transactions and lineup changes. I used a pitcher’s career caught-stealing and pick-off rates as criteria to determine if a particular matchup was primed for streaming a speedster with the hope of him stealing a base (or two or four).

I like how it turned out, but it felt hastily constructed. A pitcher’s career rate seemed too broad a scope, especially considering the possibility that a pitcher can get better (or, perhaps, worse) at limiting steals and picking off runners over time.

With a little more time and care, I fleshed out everything a bit more and added an additional criterion: catcher effectiveness, which can be most obviously measured by caught-stealing rate. But I think there also is merit to calculating the frequency at which runners attempt to steal on a catcher. In a sense, it measure runners’ perception of a catcher’s skill, especially for those at the tails of the distribution.

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Last week I shared my Hitting Portfolio, detailing the hitters I have across my 16 leagues by position. I was going to do the entire portfolio initially, but the hitters ran pretty deep so I decided to split the pitching off as a separate post. Let’s begin with starting pitchers. I have at least 73 starters on one club, 33 of which appear just once. The sheer quantity is inflated by being a part of two draft-and-hold 50 round NFBC leagues. We are digging deep by the end of those so there are some guys who wouldn’t be rostered in a lot of other league formats. But let’s start at the top with the guys I have the most.

I ended up with three pitchers on at least six rosters. All are from the American League which isn’t too surprising since ALers are eligible for 15 of my 16 rosters (while NLers could only hit 12 of the 16) and I’m sure the names won’t come as much of a surprise if you‘ve listened to the podcast or read the SP Guide. So here they are:

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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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Yesterday I analyzed the ultra small sample size of one outing when discussing four starting pitchers. But that’s kinda okay because fastball velocity stabilizes quickly and instantly provides useful information. Since I don’t know what else one writes about a week and a half into the season, let’s talk about a couple of more names with regards to fastball velocity.

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