I spend an inordinate amount of time playing with splits. It’s hard to come up with two new topics to write about each week, so I export a lot of data to Excel and click and sort around until I find something interesting. During the relatively boring late slate of football games yesterday afternoon, I was looking at ball in play data.

It occurred to me that there should be a pretty strong correlation between ERA on balls in play and OPS allowed on balls in play (there is). It then occurred to me that guys who have a relative ERA that’s much lower than their relative OPS might be getting a little lucky. When I say relative, I just calculated each pitcher’s z-score for both statistics, which were adjusted for number of batters faced since they are rate stats. Here are those potentially lucky pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

I will assume that those who can take advantage of streamer opportunities are those in daily transaction leagues and after reading this article, it will not be too late to pick up a starting pitcher to stream for tonight’s game. If I am wrong, please let me know so I know to recommend pitchers for the following day instead! Below I have listed some of your options, which include those owned in fewer than 50% of CBS leagues. Let’s decide if they are worth a stream.

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Public disclaimer on this one as I’m an admitted Scott Kazmir fan. I own him on virtually every one of my fantasy teams, and the part of me that loves good baseball stories just can’t get enough of the path that Kazmir has taken over his career. That’s probably a fatal flaw of mine relative to fantasy baseball success — the tendency to own guys you actually like to root for in real life. And I still root for Scott Kazmir. But that doesn’t mean I’d still start him on my fantasy baseball teams.

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Trevor May

Why I watched: Highly touted prospect up in the majors.

Game(s) Watched: 9/14/14 vs White Sox

Game Thoughts

• Hawk was announcing. I hope I did not lose too many brain cells.

• May’s fastball was from 90-95 mph, straight with little downward movement. Looking at the values, it is at +10.1 vertical movement. Using some of my recent work, his GB% should be near 35% (actual 37.6%). He should get a good number of infield fly balls, but his home runs may be a problem at times.

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With just about a week left in the season, the ratios are pretty much solidified and there’s much less concern over one of those three inning, seven run debacles ruining your stats. It is likely, however, that an extra win and/or five strikeouts could gain you a point. So deep leaguers in need of some counting stats without as much regard for their ratios should consider these weekend probables.

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An innings limit and suspension are the events that resulted in opportunities for the two men discussed below. Hopefully, you’re in a position where a good start and a potential extra homer or two actually contribute to your money spot finish.

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This should go without saying, but fantasy owners have to be careful with starting pitchers who previously spent time in the bullpen. As we all know, good relievers aren’t all cut out for the starting rotation. The ability to go hard for short bursts allows relievers to cover up deficiencies that prevent them from being starters, with the lack of a third, or even second, pitch being a prime example. But sometimes it is easy to forget that a pitcher spent time in the bullpen when looking at his player page at the end of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

After evaluating Zack Wheeler and Jacob deGrom in my previous post on the 2015 Mets Commanding Rotation, I was hoping to follow-up by looking at pitch release point consistency for a number of pitchers that prevented contact in the zone but didn’t have elite swinging-strike/contact rates. Initially, I found good results using root-mean-square deviations.

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Last second I changed the title from “Having a Presence” to “Commanding Attention”. If I were to talk about the team as a whole, I would have had to go with “Having a Presence,” but I’m focusing on their rotation, and well…they command our attention…

It’s rough to be a Mets fan living in Minnesota. It’s rough being a Mets fan anywhere, but watching the Twins and their approach to 100 losses doesn’t help. Despite being only 6.5 games back from the 2nd Wild Card to date, I don’t think the Mets will have enough offense to sustain next year, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be fun to watch. There will be quite the trio that commands attention – or even a quartet with the assumption that Noah Syndergaard makes an impact. And with a quartet…who knows?!

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All good things must come to an end, and for the purposes of this space, that means this is my final deep league wire column of the 2014 season. It’s been a lot of fun plunging the depths of the fantasy dumpster with you, and I appreciate you joining me each week in our ongoing quest to find cheap value in deep leagues.

But the fantasy playoffs are still ongoing in many leagues, so now is not the time for us to rest on our laurels. Let’s take a look at two young hurlers who could provide help with strikeouts in AL-only leagues this week.
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