So as you all no doubt know by now, Josh Johnson was part of the trade of fantasy baseball proportions that is expected to be finalized at some point today. It’s time for JJ to start trading in his dollars for loonies and toonies and switch sides when debating whether to blame Canada. Let’s figure out how the move to the American League and now calling the Rogers Centre home will affect Johnson’s performance.
Yesterday, the Royals acquired Ervin Santana and cash from the Angels for minor-leaguer Brandon Sisk. Our own Dave Cameron extensively covered the deal from the real world perspective. The change in scenery does look to change Santana’s value for the worse, but regressing back to the his previous production level will be the main key for his fantasy value going forward.
If you hit 26 homers and lead your league in basically every offensive stat from your position, but no one notices, does it still make a sound? That twist on the classic thought problem seems to apply to Arizona’s Aaron Hill, who bounced back from two consecutive disappointing seasons to become the second-best second baseman in baseball in 2012, both by WAR and Zach Sanders’ end-of-season fantasy rankings. The hype, however, including an All-Star snub, never seemed to follow.
Learning fantasy lessons in the postseason is a tricky affair. By its nature, a postseason series is a small sample. Also by its nature, a postseason series receives greater emphasis, fair (the games are high leverage when compared to a mid-season tilt) or not (they’re still just seven games). Even though the statistics are kept separately and are often out of mind, though, the fact that this is still baseball means that there is something that can be gleaned from it.
On Monday, I took a look back at the hitters who I boldly predicted would lead the league in each of the 5×5 fantasy categories. Well, I made those same predictions for pitchers as well in the pre-season. So, let’s see if I did just as poorly or had some better luck.
On Wednesday, I took a look back at who I calculated to be the most overvalued pitchers versus their pre-season average draft position (ADP). Today, I will review the pitchers I identified as the most undervalued. I had excluded the reliever turned starter group, but since I was very bullish on Chris Sale, I would guess he would have appeared had I not excluded them.
Looking back at the 2012 season, we’re out to attempt to identify players that represent the very best return on the dollar in the respective “award” categories. Recall that this is a best value kind of series, not necessarily the best player.
To that end, we need to award the American League Cy Young to the pitcher who provided you the most production for the least possible cost. And among the staff votes, we have a tie between Chris Sale and Jake Peavy, thus the regrettable title of this piece. And it’s not hard to see why we’re divided.
I continue my quest at taking a look back at my pre-season predictions and claims by checking in on who I believed to be the most overvalued starting pitchers. Pitcher valuations are easier and there should be less controversy (well, none at all!) over position eligibility. I’ll use Yahoo again, but any obvious relief pitchers who happen to have SP eligibility on the site will not be included in the rankings.
Freedom from shame at least. They were supposed to be bold. So let’s revisit those predictions.
[Sorry no chat today, gotta get my stuff done before heading to the city for the Bay Area meetup. And sorry for abrupt ending last week, got an important call.]
A week ago I identified several American League starting pitchers whose SwStk% suggests an imminent strikeout rate surge. I then took a detour to look at both sides of the coin for National League starters, and now I’m back for the potential K/9 decliners in the AL. As a reminder, the league average for American League starting pitchers with a minimum of 120 innings pitched this year is a 7.0 K/9 and 8.5 SwStk%.