As your fantasy team marches into the playoffs, weekly matchups and playing time considerations become more important. Players fighting for playing time or battling nagging injuries can hurt you chances of taking home a title if they are giving you nothing or only playing three times per week. Especially leagues with weekly lineup locks.

While some players are easy to let go, the pedigree and past performance of others can make fantasy owners hesitant to cut or bench players of a certain caliber, but given the time of year, here are some top-150 players that you might consider cutting or benching to give you the best shot at winning in 2018.

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Last September, Jeff and I spent last September highlighting daily starters you could consider picking up for your playoffs and roto stretch run. We’ll be doing the same again this year starting with tomorrow’s super-lite 4-game slate.

(I’ll be citing the FantasyPros roster rates)

Luis Castillo – CIN v. SD (49%)

Castillo entered July with a 5.85 ERA, but has since put together a 10-start run of 3.23 ERA and 1.06 WHIP in 55.7 IP with a 26% K rate and 4% BB rate. Two 5 ER duds during the run push the ERA a bit, but he bounced back strong from each one. The Arizona one was kinda weird, too, because he bookended four perfect innings with the five runs in an inning and two-thirds.

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In my last article, I contemplated if fantasy owners care too much about who to add and not enough on who to drop. I’m going run an experiment over last few weeks of this season to see what can be extracted from league drop trends.

For reference, I’m going to analyze the 34 leagues in the NFBC Main Event. These are 15-team mixed leagues using batting average and no trading. With each team putting $3K on the line, more of these owners haven’t thrown in the towel than in most leagues.

This first week, I went through the 30 most dropped players. The reasons behind the most dropped players were obvious, mainly they were hurt, lost a role, or demoted. Next week, I may concentrate on the players dropped between 5 and ten leagues. These players aren’t the most obvious drops and analyzing them may be the most helpful.

Name: Number of teams who dropped him (of 31)

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Since I’ve started this tracking the NFBC Main Event FAAB bids, I’ve gained some insight on how the owners spend their money. A few nuggets I’ve found is the high prices paid by owners chasing Saves and the money hoarding that happens right before the trade deadline. This week, it’s time to see the money spent on impact rookies with the promotion of Michael Kopech.

I expected a fairly bland week with prospect call-ups starting next week. After September 1st, any player on the 40-man roster can be called up and the time in the majors doesn’t count for their service clock. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Eloy Jimenez are the two big names who owners have been waiting on.

Without getting too far ahead, here is a look at how last week’s newly adjusted projections performed.

The results from my FAAB estimates this week.

I was way off on Taylor Ward but his value heavily depends on him being catcher eligible.

Owners stepped up to pay for closers this week. https://t.co/kimu1c0IiY pic.twitter.com/OI8DFDffut

— Jeff Zimmerman (@jeffwzimmerman) August 21, 2018

While the results (and spelling) were not perfect, they were better than the previous few weeks. Owners do continue to spend their limited resources on potential closers (Hildenberger and Glover).
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It’s crunch time, folks! After the remainder of this week, we have just five left so I put together a quick chart of how many games each team has left. There aren’t massive edges to be gained in the aggregate as it’s just a four game split between the most (Cubs) and fewest (Padres) left, not to mention that the team with the fewest isn’t even that fantasy relevant, but whether H2H or Roto, every little advantage can be useful at this point in the season.

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The term “consistency” is thrown around a lot in fantasy sports, though it lacks a set definition and is often just a nebulous idea rife with recency bias. A few memorable meltdowns? Horribly inconsistent and can’t be trusted! Can’t recall any truly awful starts? So consistent! My impetus for diving into this was a self-check on someone I’ve deemed rather inconsistent this year, Nick Pivetta. Was I just remembering the week-ruining disasters he dropped on my H2H team or is he truly a volatile arm?

I’m looking at starts with a Game Score of 40 or lower as the threshold for inconsistency. The baseline is 50 and there is no way to truly salvage a 40 GS outing. Jon Gray had one with 10 Ks, which is the closest thing to a salvaged 40, but the 6 earned runs and 11 base runners in five and a third all but canceled out the whiffs.

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I put out the NL Schedule Planner a couple days ago and today we have the American League. I ran some numbers to identify the best and worst offenses by handedness and perhaps this can offer some guidance for you down the stretch when selecting starters. I looked at wOBA for the year, last 30 days, and last 14 days, then weighted the three, and ranked the teams.

The recent samples are smaller and thus more volatile, but they also can reflect the changing dynamics of a team via injuries or trades. That said, I still weighted the season mark the most. This is just focused on handedness so be mindful of potential park factors that could also play a role. It’s sorted by division and record and then the scheduled teams are listed in order starting with Friday, August 10th.

The best use for these planners would be to focus on the arms in the spot start tiers or lower who are getting favorable or unfavorable schedules and leverage that in pick ups or drops… or trades if your league hasn’t hit the deadline yet. For example, the Blue Jays are going to face one Top 10 offense against righties in the next eight series so perhaps Marcus Stroman and Marco Estrada can get on track and Ryan Borucki could definitely stay hot, but then they get Cleveland (4), Boston (2), and New York (10) in a row starting September 6th so those same righties could be tough to trust in the playoffs for H2H leagues.

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With just under two months left in the season, playing to the schedule is a big factor in fantasy baseball so I ran some numbers to identify the best and worst offenses by handedness and perhaps this can offer some guidance for you down the stretch when selecting starters. I looked at wOBA for the year, last 30 days, and last 14 days, then weighted the three, and ranked the teams.

The recent samples are smaller and thus more volatile, but they also can reflect the changing dynamics of a team via injuries or trades. That said, I still weighted the season mark the most. This is just focused on handedness so be mindful of potential park factors that could also play a role. It’s sorted by division and record and then the scheduled teams are listed in order starting with Wednesday, August 8th. Today we’ve got the Senior Circuit:

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This past weekend, I attended the always incredible SaberSeminar in Boston. It was great time catching up with friends (Dave Cameron sighting) but also to take in some innovative ideas. I decided to share some fantasy applicable topics which were discussed.

Pitch Tunneling

Experimentally determining the “Commit Point” – Evaluating the time it takes a hitter to check his swing by William Clark and Joe Petrich

Pitch Tunneling, Pitch Calling and Expected Outcome: A Former Pitcher’s Perspective by Dan Blewett

Pitching tunneling was brought up several times by several speakers but these two came to the same conclusion. The reaction time for a batter to determine the pitch type may be less than previously calculated. It was thought that a hitter had around 225 ms to 275 ms to decide to swing. It’s possible that the time may be under 200 ms and the batter may be keying off the release point.

Also, if a pitcher is struggling, it might be worth looking over at his release point charts (example with Jon Gray). Make sure all the pitches are clustered together and haven’t been recent moving around.
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This is an updated version of an article originally posted in 2013 and then reposted in 2015 and 2017. It’s a vitally important exercise to perform, so I think it’s worthwhile to continue to resurface it each season around this time.

Heading into the final two months of the season, the effect any individual player will have on our place in the standings has continued to diminish, which means that this time of year represents one of the final chances to improve our teams. It probably doesn’t need to be stated, but it’s important to reiterate for those still clinging to preseason values (I usually cling to them far longer than most, but even I know to give them up at this point!) — you need to essentially throw player values out the window and trade for needs based on your position in the various statistical categories. Don’t worry about overpaying if you still expect the trade to net you positive points. Obviously, you want to make a trade that brings back the greatest value in return and gain you the most standings points, but if the best return offered to you is a player whose owner paid $15 for him during the auction for your $25 player, it’s still absolutely worth accepting if you determine that it should gain you points.

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