Few things excite fans more than mega pitching prospects. Sizzling fastball velocity, sinister breaking pitches, off-speed stuff that makes grown men look like dizzy, blindfolded kids slashing at a pinata. Every spring, there’s a short list of elite starting pitching prospects on the cusp of the major leagues who are considered must-haves. It’s hard not to get swept up in the quest to draft The Next Big Thing. Hit on one of these picks, and you’ll not only climb the standings, but you’ll also look cool, trendy and sage. Prophetic, even. I knew he’d be a star right away, you brag to your friends as your young ace crushes their dreams of victory and empties their pockets.

That’s if putting down a high pick on that top starting prospect works out, however. And, as anyone who once saw stardom for the likes of Nick Neugebauer, Carlos Hernandez or Adam Loewen can tell you, young arms are anything but predictable. For every Stephen Strasburg, there are dozens of Jesse Fopperts and John Van Benschotens.

To add some clarity to the top pitching prospect conundrum, I sought to answer the following question: Just how good are these young guns during their first extended run in the major leagues? Do they tend to dominate from Day One, or are they merely average? Answering that question goes a long way toward determining when to pop that elite pitching prospect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most fantasy leagues are either already in or are headed to hibernation, but ottoneu, as those of you who played this year have already learned, is a little different. With arbitration voting behind us, we are onto the ottoneu hot stove season, and there are a few things you should know as you prepare for a 4 month period that will be surprisingly important to determining your 2012 league champion.

Some of what happens in the off-season is going to be similar to your other leagues – reviewing projections, putting together rankings, valuing players, preparing for the auction – but some of it will be quite different, and that is what I want to focus on here.
Read the rest of this entry »

In lieu of a chat today, we’ll answer some questions over the course of the afternoon. This will allow us to answer more detailed questions, so make sure you give us the relevant information in your comment so we can help you. The RotoGraphs staff is here to help!

Oh, and ottoneu arbitration voting ends at midnight ET on 10/31 so remember that and ask us about those votes if you want.

While working on my 2B rankings, I kept seeing Dustin Ackley and Jason Kipnis ranked low. The rankings were a combination of 2011 stats and ZIP preseason projections. While they both hit good in 2011, the projections seemed low. I decided to look into players that had similar rookie seasons and how they performed the next year.

I took all rookies from 1991 to 2011 that had between 150 and 400 PA and an OPS between 0.750 and 0.850. I chose to use OPS, because it is an encompassing stat that is available in the options at Baseball-reference’s Pay Index. Twenty-eight players made the list. Besides Ackley and Kipnis, two other rookies from 2011 where on it, Paul Goldschmidt and Eric Thames. In the end, I had 24 players to use in the comparison.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in September, Bill Petti at Beyond the Boxscore took a look at the year-to-year correlations of a set of hitting metrics. Some of the stats you’d expect had no year-to-year staying power (AVG, BABIP); some you would think are skill based turned out to vary greatly (Line Drive Rate); while some metrics proved to be remarkably consistent (Contact Rate, Swinging Strike Rate).

What jumped out to me was that First-Strike Rate had only a .56 year-to-year correlation for batters, while all of the stats I’d expect to directly impact First-Strike Rate (Swing Rate, Contact Rate, etc.) were quite consistent. First-pitch strikes make a huge difference in any at-bat, and the high year-to-year variation in this stat suggests that, over the course of a season, some hitters may have very good or very bad luck in this area. After looking at Petti’s analysis, I looked deeper into the phenomenon of F-Strike% and have three posts coming – starting with this one looking at my methodology and the basic information I found.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey let’s talk about everything! Baseball, ugliness, burgers, beverages.

Pitchers tend to induce different types of batted balls. Some are fly ball pitchers. Others induce ground balls. While there are always pitchers at the extremes, a few pitchers go beyond the norms on a yearly basis. Today, I am looking at pitchers whose 2011 batted ball data was outside the normal range of values.

To get the extreme baselines, I took the the top and bottom values for a pitcher with over 400 IP total over the past 3 years. Here is a look at some pitchers that may be in store for some batted ball corrections in 2012

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball is a grind. It’s 162 games played nearly every day over a six-month period. By extension, then, the fantasy version of this unending onslaught of a sport can be — and often is — just as overwhelming.

Look, it happens: Late-summer hits and the portion of your brain that was tending to your fantasy baseball team on a regular basis instead shifts its focus to other things, like vacation, fantasy football or the hot chick named Tiffany who spent the summer as a lifeguard at the local beach and hung out all the time at your favorite bar.

That’s why, unless your team was good enough to be in contention all the way down to the stretch run, chances are, you missed out on a few things as the season wore on, particularly into August and September. That’s when the non-contenders tend to check out (if they haven’t done so weeks before), but it’s also about the time that even those chasing after that elusive championship start suffering from tunnel vision as their eyes become focused solely on the prize.

Now that we’re a couple weeks removed from the crush and rush of the final days of the fantasy season, allow me to point out a batch of American League outfielders who performed better than you might have realized, thanks to end-of-season surges or new opportunities. There just might be a nugget or two in here that you didn’t notice the first time around. You know, while you were too busy ogling Tiffany.

Read the rest of this entry »

In my first two parts of this series, I looked at the stats to be examined when evaluating hitters and projecting Runs and RBIs. Today, I am going to take a look at projecting plate appearanes (PAs) and stolen bases (SBs).

Plate Appearances

With projections, I find the most error and room for improvement is with playing time. An owner needs to have a hitter playing and accumulating as many PAs as possible. The more PAs, the more counting stats they can hope to generate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I tried to provide insight on strategies for arbitration voting in ottoneu, but with almost four weeks left until votes are due, I thought I would add some color to that lecture with a couple examples. I’ve identified a couple teams from the original ottoneu league that I think include some pretty interesting arbitration cases.

We’ll start with this year’s champion: Last Years Leftovers.

Read the rest of this entry »