It’s getting time for some teams to start making a single category move to improve in the standings. Today, I am going to examine speedsters owned in less than 5% of ESPN leagues for owners looking for a few extra steals.

Alcides Escobar (4.7%): Escobar has nothing going for him (.230/.254/.316) except the chance he could get back to stealing bases like he previously. Since he’s a complete statistical black hole otherwise, he should probably only be used in the last week or so of the season to not kill the other categories.

Adam Frazier (4.6%): Frazier is one of the more balanced choices to help with steals going forward. Steamer has him with only five more over the rest of the season.

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It is Bold Prediction season here at Fangraphs and I am ready to improve on my 2.5 correct out of 10 from last year.

This year I decided to do mine a bit different. I have been vacation and busy preparing for my trip to New York for Tout Wars, where I will be crashing/helping out with the festivities and harassing/getting to meet fellow industry colleagues. So, I decided to focus on players and themes that I felt I have not been able to touch on as much on my podcast or here at Rotographs. Read the rest of this entry »

As Paul Sporer noted last week, stolen bases are getting expensive in this year’s drafts. With players like Jose Peraza and Jarrod Dyson shooting up draft boards, it’s clear that fantasy owners are more than willing to pay for steals in 2017.

Personally, there is nothing I love more than a good bargain. I spent a good two minutes doing price comparisons on hot dog buns at the grocery store yesterday, before finding some off-brand buns for just 89 cents on the bottom shelf. I don’t care who you are, you don’t need to be spending big on hot dog buns.

This is the same approach I take to speed-only players in fantasy baseball (great transition, Scott). I don’t like to spend on speedsters in my leagues, partially because I know steals are probably going to be available on the waiver wire. There’s usually a handful of undrafted bench players or minor leaguers who end up swiping a significant number of bags.

Last year, Travis Jankowski stole 30 bases in 383 plate appearances. Keon Broxton swiped 23 in 244 PA. Dyson was another example, stealing 30 bases in his 337 PA. The aforementioned Peraza picked up 21 steals in 256 trips to the plate. It’s no coincidence that Dyson, Peraza and Broxton were the top three players Sporer mentioned last week when discussing rising ADPs.

I got to thinking about who those guys will be next year; the players who go undrafted in fantasy leagues this year, but end up in high demand in 2018 due to gaudy smallish-sample steal totals. I identified three players to keep an eye on for steals as the season progresses, or perhaps slot into a reserve or minor-league spot, if your league has those.

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After a short break to tend to family matters, let’s return to the comparison of my Pod Projections to the Steamer forecasts. A week ago, I identified six hitters I was more bullish on for stolen bases, so today, I’ll discuss the hitters I’m more bearish on. To ensure we’re comparing apples to apples, I extrapolated Steamer’s stolen base projections to the same number of plate appearances I’m forecasting for each player.

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Today, I continue the comparison of my Pod Projections to Steamer in various fantasy categories, this time identifying players I believe have stolen base upside. My stolen base projections are calculated using a proprietary metric I developed that is revealed in Projecting X 2.0. Essentially, it’s a stolen base attempts per opportunities ratio and I use historical rates to guide my projected rate.

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We’re preempting the promised report on the first half of our NFBC slow draft to offer some information that, for a change, you might find useful. Stats, Inc. keeps track of Average Draft Position in NFBC drafts, starting with the earliest drafts in late 2016 and updating as the preseason heats up. We’ve been tracking the tracker—following the movement in ADPs– and have seen some interesting things.

When we studied this recently, there had been 46 NFBC drafts (there have now been 57; the trends we report below have mostly continued, and none of them, with one exception noted below, has reversed itself). The NFBC ADP at that time of course reflected the average of all those drafts. We knew what the ADP after 34 drafts had been, and we calculated the separate ADP of the next 12. We figured—accurately, it appears—that the all-drafts ADP would mask some interesting developments. Read the rest of this entry »

Though we grew up, and still reside, in the Northeast, we’re not winter sports guys. How much are we not? Well, there’s this Olympic event called the biathlon that combines Nordic skiing and rifle shooting. One of us—we’re not saying which one—was in his twenties before he realized that cross-country skiing, which he’d seen though not tried, and “Nordic skiing,” which he’d never seen, were the same thing. And that very brother was thirty before he learned, aggrievedly, that the two activities of the biathlon don’t occur simultaneously.

So each winter, all our sentient lives, we’ve yearned for the first sign of spring. And for us, even when up to our navels in snow, the traditional first sign has been the commencement of baseball spring training in February. Except, for the past three years, since the start of our mutual immersion in Fantasy baseball, that welcome harbinger has come even earlier—in January, in the form of our first Fantasy draft of the season.

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This far out from the start of the season, most of the average draft position data we have available is largely speculative, and understandably so. Still, I find value in analyzing the returns from this uncertain period, as it helps us develop some early trends going into our own draft/auction preparation. Second base is my usual beat here at RotoGraphs, so the other day I found myself examining the NFBC ADP for the position.

There’s other surprises in that data to save for another day, but today I’d like to discuss Jose Peraza’s position as the 12th 2B drafted. Peraza is currently going ahead of Dustin Pedroia, Ben Zobrist, Jonathan Schoop, Devon Travis, Jedd Gyorko, Starlin Castro, Logan Forsythe and Neil Walker. I’m sure we all have our own arguments about which of those eight names should slot in above Peraza, but I’m also fairly confident most of us prefer at least one or two of them to Peraza. Right?

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Over the course of the last few weeks of the regular season last year, I had explored different ethical and strategic questions posed to me via email and social media. It was a fun series to write and while some definitely did not like me or my advice, others loved it. So, I am hoping to make this a reoccurring series that will pop up periodically throughout 2017. Feel free to send me more questions at JustinMasonFantasy@gmail.com or on twitter @JustinMasonFWFB and when I have enough, I will do another installment. Thanks for playing along! Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I wrote about why Wil Myers will probably continue to steal bases in 2017. The theory was pretty simple – mostly because it didn’t need to be complicated – Myers was an efficient thief and bad teams usually let their players run. Myers is still young, and the Padres are still bad.

The other side of the coin – players on good teams usually run less often. It’s a trend, not a hard and fast rule. Rickey Henderson (or Billy Hamilton) would steal bases on any team. However, guys with iffier success rates like Cesar Hernandez (17-for-30) typically stop running when they join a quality roster. Today we’ll discuss four top stolen base sources from 2016 who may decline due to their team situation.

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