You may have heard that FanGraphs got a fantasy game. It’s hard to contain my excitement, but let’s start with some pithy slogans!

No People Herding!
This auction dynasty is open year-round, so commissioners don’t have to email everyone to remind them to get their keepers in, and what were their players’ prices again, and what did they want to do with those two hurt guys again and what happened to Charlie and did Jim change his email or is he just on his annual three-week trek to the Harry Baals Community Center for that Baccarat Tournament?

No, the game is there waiting. It’s always there.

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This year, I was given the opportunity to be in the presitigious Scoresheet BL (short for “Both Leagues”) Kings fantasy league. It’s a mixed league, but with a roster size of 35 players, and competition from 23 of the brightest analysts around, it’s going to get pretty intense.

Scoresheet is a bit of a different animal than your normal fantasy league. Rather than just adding up the stats for your players like most leagues do, Scoresheet allows you to manage your entire roster and plays simulated games based on your roster construction. You can do the obvious things like set your lineup and rotation, but you can also set when starters are pulled, when relievers enter and when to use pinch-hitters. It can be pretty addictive, and ever since I had given up a team a couple of years ago, I had been wanting to get back into a league. Mission accomplished.
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The upcoming season will be pretty exciting at RotoGraphs. We’re bringing on some new faces to mesh with the old and expanding our coverage. This post, however, is about what YOU want.

So, please use the comments section to tell us what you’d like to see more of at RotoGraphs. More in-depth pieces about single players? More rankings information? More mailbags? More work on leagues with different settings? More pro and con?

Less of any of this?

Let us know. We aim to please.

Chasing wins in fantasy baseball sometimes seem futile, but if pursued in a logical way, they can be gained. Playing sub-par pitchers may increase win and strikeout totals, but they puts a drain on WHIP and ERA. By looking at the pitcher’s talent level and knowing the offense of the pitcher’s team, the chances of getting a win can be determined. The following are formulas to help estimate a pitchers win total.

First, all the qualified starters that didn’t switch teams from 2010 were matched with their team’s average runs scored per game. Then a linear regression was run comparing the player’s ERA, his run support and his actual winning percentage. The following equation was created:

Projected Winning % = 0.112(Run Support)-0.105(ERA)+0.446
with an R-squared = 0.827

With this equation, the expected number of wins can be estimated with just a couple more pieces of data. First, the number of starts that lead to a decision (win or loss) for games in 2010 was 70% with the bullpen getting the rest. Second, the number of GS will have to guesstimated using playing time projections and injury history. With this information, a projected number of wins can be calculated:

Projected Wins = 0.7 * Games Started * Projected Winning %

Going back over the 2010 numbers, the average difference between the number of games won and the predicted number of games won was 1.89 with a standard deviation was 2.24 wins.

For example, here is how Felix Hernandez’s win total would compare if he pitched for different teams during 2010. He was able to get 13 wins with a 2.47 ERA in 34 games with a team that average scoring 3.13 runs a game. With those numbers, he was projected to win 13.3 games. Now if he played for the Yankees and got their run support (5.23), his wins would have been around 18.9. If he had only got just 4.0 runs of support, he would have been closer to 15.6 wins.

Normally, trying to accumulate wins is a tough proposition. With a little knowledge of the pitcher and his team’s offense, the amount of wins the pitcher gets can be somewhat predicted.

Pitchers can’t control every aspect of the game around them including the the defense behind them. A team’s defense can effect a pitcher’s WHIP and ERA by letting more batted balls turn into hits (increasing WHIP) therefore leading to more runs allowed (increasing ERA). The following is a look at how much a team’s defense could effect a pitcher’s ERA or WHIP.

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This summer I played in the deepest league I’ve ever played in, a 20-team mixed league with traditional 5×5 scoring plus OBP and Quality Starts*. It basically came down to who had the best injury luck and made the shrewdest waiver wire/free agency pick ups (i.e. whoever grabbed Jose Bautista first). My offense was fine, propped up by Robinson Cano, Jayson Werth, Hanley Ramirez, Carlos Gonzalez, and (eventually) David Ortiz. I can’t say the same about my pitching staff.

Cole Hamels and (especially) Wandy Rodriguez started slowly before having monster second halves, and the same was true for Brian Matusz. Dallas Braden was solid yet unspectacular (I had him on the bench for the perfect game figuring the Rays would hit him around), but Ben Sheets was pretty much a flop before getting hurt. My most consistent starter all year was C.J. Wilson. My weekly ERA and WHIP pretty much sucked, and the wins were scarce.

My team was still competitive thanks to the offense and luck, but the pitching staff needed work. I started to pursue trades rather aggressively in early-June but after a week or two I gave up. Quality pitching was hard to come by in this league and everyone knew it, so if you wanted a good starter you were going to have to overpay. Frustrated but in need of some kind of fix, I gave up on starters and instead turned to the free agent pool for middle relievers. Not closers and not necessarily setup men either, but guys that pitched a fair amount of innings with high strikeouts rates.

In the first week of Operation Middle Reliever I grabbed Hong-Chih Kuo (this was long before Jonathan Broxton fell apart), Arthur Rhodes, Darren Oliver, Mike Adams, and a rookie just breaking in by the name of Jonny Venters. All five had sky high strikeout rates at the time and were getting a boatload of work, so I figured it was worth a shot. Here’s what they gave me that first week…

15 IP, 11 H, 6 R, 5 ER, 7 BB, 19 K (3.00 ERA, 1.20 WHIP)

The numbers would have been better if it wasn’t for Rhodes’ first meltdown of the season, a 0 IP, 3 H, 3 ER effort that put the always scary “inf” in his ERA and WHIP columns for a few days. Aside from that, the overall production is pretty damn good, basically the same as adding two good starters to my staff. Our league carried 3 SP, 2 RP, and 3 P starting spots, so from that point on I had four or five middle relievers going every night. As the season progressed I got a better handle on things and leveraged my roster spots by keeping track of workloads (via Daily Baseball Data). The production was solid and best of all, there’s a seemingly limitless supply of these kind of relievers available. If someone got hurt or hit a rough patch, a capable replacement was just a few clicks away. Trust me, those were just the first five relievers I picked up, there was another dozen or so that came in and out as the season went on.

There’s a downside as well. Blow-ups like the one Rhodes had are inevitable and can screw up your week rather easily. If two relievers have performances like that, I basically done for the week. I was also close to punting QS, though things improved there once Hamels, Wandy, and Matusz hit their strides late. Roster efficiency was another issue; I needed four or five guys to give me the production I could be getting from two or three. I was pretty desperate for help, but the strategy worked. I finished the year with the best regular season record in the league but ultimately lost in the Championship Round.

While I recommend going heavy on quality middle relievers in deep leagues, my best advice to make sure you have good starters. I know it’s a helluva lot easier said than done, but I wouldn’t go into the season counting on bullpeners to carry my pitching staff. If you need help at midseason and aren’t willing to meet to asking price for starters in a trade, grab some high strikeout relief arms to tide you over. Don’t try to catch lightning in a bottle with sketchy starters.

* Not a fan of QS in fantasy, probably won’t use them again.

In an effort to limit his workload this season, the Blue Jays plan on shutting starter Brandon Morrow down after Friday’s outing against the Yankees. Morrow has established himself as a very good keeper candidate with his strong performances these last couple of months, but is he worth holding on to if he’s going to miss so much time? Here are some things to consider when it comes to keeping Morrow after this season.

1. September Shutdown
I briefly mentioned this above, but it’s a big deal. When a player is scheduled to ride the pine for the last month of the season, it can really complicate things for some owners. For owners who have teams who aren’t in contention, it’s no big deal, but competing owners? That’s a whole other story. For a team trying to win a league title, having all hands of deck is important and cannot be overstated. Some races get really close this time of year, and missing out on five starts could be the difference between first and second place.

2. Losing Eligibility
Thanks to the Mariners jerking him around for so long, Morrow had SP and RP eligibility this year. The Blue Jays have been kind enough to take away the valuable opportunity to slide Morrow into a relief role on your roster. While this isn’t a big deal in daily leagues, weekly owners willing to punt saves and rack up innings will have to make harder decisions next year. While it seems you can always find a starter who’s relief eligible, it’s rare to find one with Morrow’s skills.

3. Innings in 2011
The Blue Jays have said that they try to keep starters from increasing their workload by more than twenty innings. When all is said and done, Morrow will have pitched about 150 innings this year, meaning he’ll probably be around the 175-185 mark next year. Since he turns 26 next July, the Blue Jays may be willing to let him pitch freely next season, but I wouldn’t count on it.

In Conclusion…
Overall, Brandon Morrow and his owners should be asking for some relief appearances during September, but the Blue Jays aren’t going to oblige. A part of me hopes the Blue Jays decide to place him on the DL with a phantom injury, but with roster expansion they won’t be forced to. It’s hard to make a judgement one way or the other without knowing every owner’s situation, and I haven’t even made up my mind yet in one of my leagues. Weigh the facts, and make a decision. That’s all anyone can ever ask for.

Fantasy baseball players love stolen bases. Sometimes, that affinity leads to well-justified draft picks — who doesn’t want five-tool force Carl Crawford wreaking havoc on the base paths for their team? Other times, that need for speed results in owners employing a latter-day Omar Moreno, a guy who racks up big stolen base totals but couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat. There’s yet another type of player who garners a reputation as a “speed guy,” while perhaps not actually helping his team or fantasy owners when he scampers toward second or third base. He might have a shiny SB total, but he’s costing the club runs by getting caught too often.

Today, I’d like to focus on which players have been the most and least efficient when attempting a stolen base. To judge efficiency, I rounded up all players with at least 15 stolen base attempts in 2010 and ranked them in terms of their run value on SB tries. According to Tom Tango, a stolen base is worth about +0.19 runs. A caught stealing subtracts roughly 0.46 runs. So, by looking at a player’s SB and CS figures, we can get a feel for whether he’s helping or hurting when he tries to steal. This matters in fantasy, too — those CS’s cost owners runs scored and provide other batters with fewer chances to drive in runs.

Here are the players who have added value when testing the pitcher and catcher:

And here are the guys who haven’t provided any value or have actually cost their teams runs by getting nabbed too much:

Those looking to add speed to a fantasy roster should look at more than raw SB totals. When a player bolts and gets caught red-handed, there’s a price to be paid.

Last winter, we took a gander at the MLB hitters with the biggest difference between their respective batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and expected BABIP (xBABIP) totals. Today, let’s update those lists for 2010.

To get the full methodology, here’s a link back to last year’s article. xBABIP, developed by Peter Bendix and Chris Dutton, estimates a hitter’s BABIP based on components such as batted ball distribution, speed and power. For the purposes of calculating xBABIP, I’m again using a formula developed by Slash 12 of Beyond the Box score based on the work of Bendix and Dutton. The model uses the following to find a hitter’s xBABIP:

– Line Drive Percentage (LD%)
– Ground Ball Percentage (GB%)
– Fly Ball Percentage (FB%)
– Infield/Fly Ball Percentage (IFFB%)
– Home Run/Fly Ball Percentage (HR/FB%)
– Infield Hit Percentage (IFH%)

Hitters with high LD%, HR/FB% and INFH% totals tend to have higher BABIPs than those who don’t. Grounders have a higher BABIP than fly balls, and infield flies are BABIP killers.

From last year’s post, a disclaimer:

These lists of “lucky” and “unlucky” hitters are based on just one year of data. To get a better feel for how a hitter will perform in the future, it’s vital to take a good hard look at multiple seasons worth of performance. This is just a quick-and-dirty exercise.

In this case, the numbers are based on even less data — I used a 200 plate appearance cut-off. These lists basically tell you, “who has underperformed or over performed based on their batted ball inputs so far in 2010?” A player might have certain line drive, infield fly and HR/FB percentages to this point, but that does not mean those numbers will persist in the months to come. To provide more context, I have included the rest-of-season ZiPS BABIP for the players with the biggest BABIP/xBABIP splits.

Without further ado, here are the 25 hitters with the biggest negative BABIP/xBABIP splits. These guys have BABIP totals that are significantly lower than their xBABIPs:

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This is article seven in a seven-part series on fantasy trading. To read the introduction, click here.

If liked my preseason piece on the different types of owners, this is right up your alley.

The Sniper
The Sniper rarely makes an offer, but when he does, it’s dynamite. Reminds some of a cautious poker player, who must have a hand if he raises. He does his research, knows your team, and will always give you something to think about. If he offers a deal, he expects to get it done.

The Master of Propaganda
This trader also goes by his scientific name of “Das Goebbels”. Never offers a trade without writing at least a paragraph in the comments. Never includes any bad stats about the players he gives up, yet can always find the flaws in the players he is receiving.

The Gunner
Can’t go a day without studying an opponents roster looking for a trade opportunity. He’ll make an offer to every team when he wants to trade a player, and won’t stop until he gets a deal done. While he’ll annoy some, others will love him. Because of his willingness to deal, other owners may begin to give him first shot at players they are looking to deal.

The Con Artist
A deadly combination of The Gunner and The Master of Propaganda. Frequently tries to deal players if he finds out they’re injured before others do. His trades tend to get vetoed, and he always complains. His league mates hate him, but any new team won’t know any better. He’s been kicked out of countless keeper leagues, but dominates in newly formed public leagues.

The Mule
The most stubborn owner in the league. If he doesn’t like a deal, he will never make a counter-offer, instead forcing his counterpart to wonder where the deal went wrong. Playing the role of The Mule has shown to be a great negotiating technique when utilized properly.

The Counter-Attacker
Rarely initiates trade talks, electing to sit back and let others come to him. Once he receives an offer, he runs with it and tries to get a deal done. A combination of The Sniper and Counter-Attacker have been seen roaming the world at times, but are now only bred in captivity.