As part of my preseason prep, I watched a Kris Bubic start from last season. During it, Rex Hudler, who is never short on opinions, brought up an interesting point. The more pitches each batter sees, the quicker the batter becomes with the pitcher repertoire, and the more likely the batter gets a hit. At first, I thought someone else was speaking, but no, the concept warranted further investigation. It’s the same theory behind the times-through-the-order penalty but the new effect could be felt depending on how many pitches a pitcher throws per hitter and depth of arsenal for the pitcher. That idea started me down a wormhole that led to many questions and one subpar answer, but there seems to be at least one nugget of wisdom in Rex Hudler’s head.

First off, with less than a month before the season starts, it’s not an ideal time to start a study that could take weeks to iron out. I barely have enough time to report news, velocity readings, and draft my own teams. The following “answers” are not set in stone and there are so many more questions to investigate. I could either shelve the ideas for months or just make a snippet available and let others run with the ideas while I grind through the fantasy season. I’m giving others the chance to refine the ideas before I come back to them.
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The Pod Projection process sharing continues! The 2021 forecasts are now available and include nearly 600 player lines. As usual, I’ll dive into my projection methodology (detailed in Projecting X 2.0) by sharing my process on several hitters and pitchers.

2021 Pod Projection Index
Ha-seong Kim
Trent Grisham

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With drafts beginning to ramp up, it is important to monitor where players are being draft on a regular basis. Throughout draft season, I will be doing that work for you with regular updates on the Average Draft Position on NFBC up until Opening Day. You can find all the pieces in this series here. Read the rest of this entry »

In order to follow the same preview path as the Ottobot Podcast, we’re gonna pivot off of offensive ranks and jump to SP. I find this to be the most challenging list to create – there are so many relevant players, so many ways to evaluate them, and so little confidence in projections, at least compared to hitters. So in addition to my list, I am going to share a few notes on how to adjust rankings from your favorite pitching analyst.
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In 2019, Brad Johnson and I published a weekly series in which we, each on a semiweekly basis, identified three or four or five players in the Minor Leagues who (1) had not appeared on previous top-prospect lists and (2) appeared to us to be capable of producing admirably, perhaps significantly, at the big-league level at some point for fantasy purposes.

Because of an actual force majeure (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic), Peripheral Prospects was rendered temporarily null as the Minor League Baseball season was cancelled. Alas, we published nothing about peripheral prospects. But that does not mean peripheral prospects did not thrive! Peripheral prospects indeed thrived.

I figured it would behoove me to not only review my favorite peripheral prospects from the end of 2019 but also highlight my favorite (existing) peripheral prospects heading into 2021, before a whole new batch of peripheral prospects is anointed. Yesterday, I revisited my 10 favorites from 2019; today, I’ll highlight another 10 eight whose progress I’m eager to monitor in 2021.

Presented in chronological order (and not by favoritism):

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As the saying goes, boring is better. A lot of fantasy baseball players look for the next best thing. This is mainly due to the fear of missing out on a breakout or new exciting young player. Sure, it’s extremely valuable to find those pitchers but it’s also really hard to find them. What most don’t realize is that taking those “old” boring players can be just as valuable. With a long track record and decent numbers, these pitchers could give you stable innings and ratios with a predictable floor.

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In 2019, Brad Johnson and I published a weekly series in which we, each on a semiweekly basis, identified three or four or five players in the Minor Leagues who (1) had not appeared on previous top-prospect lists and (2) appeared to us to be capable of producing admirably, perhaps significantly, at the big-league level at some point for fantasy purposes.

Because of an actual force majeure (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic), Peripheral Prospects was rendered temporarily null as the Minor League Baseball season was cancelled. Alas, we published nothing about peripheral prospects. But that does not mean peripheral prospects did not thrive! Peripheral prospects indeed thrived.

I figured it would behoove me to not only review my favorite peripheral prospects from the end of 2019 but also highlight my favorite (existing) peripheral prospects heading into 2021, before a whole new batch of peripheral prospects is anointed. Here, I’ll revisit my 10 favorites from 2019; next time, I’ll highlight another 10 whose progress I’m eager to monitor in 2021.

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For this article, we will be going through a couple of pitchers that you might want to avoid on draft day. This doesn’t mean they are in a sense bad, it just means based on their ADP they don’t seem to have any perceived value. This could be for a variety of reasons such as playing time, stuff, or injury history.

Walker Buehler ADP 19

We all know that innings will be at a premium coming into the 2021 season. We have heard of teams already saying tack on 100 innings to their innings pitched from last season. We have also heard of teams already setting a hard cap like the Mariners. This is the only reason you might want to avoid Walker Buehler.

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Spring training can be helpful in determining a pitcher’s future performance. While most of it should be taken with a grain of salt, sometimes it can be a calling card for things to come. Some major components to look out for involve velocity, command, and pitch mix.

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The Starting Pitcher Episode (Part II) of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Nick Pollack

Strategy Section

• Simple analytics vs. advanced analytics.
• Offseason information – what is noise, what is real?
• Blind spots of projections for pitchers.
• 2021 Season
  • 6-man roations
  • Starting pitcher inning limits
  • The Tampa Bay Rays
  • What if the season is delayed?
  • Ramp-up from 2020 short season

Starting Pitcher Strategy

• General strategy
• Pitchers that we would more likely roster in auctions vs. snake drafts (& vice versa).

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