Yesterday, I discussed the seven players whose ownership rate jumped the most in CBS leagues. Today, I’m going to check in on the dropped players. I often find opportunity here a pitchers coming off one bad start get jettisoned or a hitter in a cold spell are kicked to the curb. The dropped list is a bit tougher to analyze, though, as many of them were bitten by the injury bug and placed on the DL, or demoted to the minors. So I’m only going to include those that are healthy and remain in the Majors.

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I’m going to blame Mark Melancon. I started out yesterday with the hope of writing about him. The article was selfish because I took a chance on Hunter Strickland before he was named the closer and my gamble paid off. With Melancon back, I wanted to see if his reduced velocity cutter would still be useful. And that was as far as I got with the article.

I was sick of thinking about fantasy baseball.  The problem is that when your livelihood requires continuous fantasy baseball content, this sickness can’t last. I tried to move onto another topic with no luck. After a few unproductive hours, mainly wasted on Twitter discussing valuing player risk, I just gave up. The dog days of summer hit me head on and I lost.

This event usually occurs me a couple times during the summer with content and demands coming at me constantly. I approach them two ways. Either I just power on and produce 20-grade material or beg my bosses for a break. As this article demonstrates, I am going with the first approach.

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There are, like, a dozen articles of this nature written daily — that is, “buy-low” candidates using some kind of xMetric, likely derived from Statcast. That’s fine. I’m not hating on it. This was my modus operandi when I first started writing at RotoGraphs, and it’s how I really started to understand the cyclicality of player performance and the differences between descriptive and predictive metrics.

Speaking of which, I have no desire to rehash the “what xwOBA should really represent” discussion that consumed the sabermetric sphere a week or two ago. (Although, for reference, I’ll link you to Baseball Prospectus, MLBAM’s Tom Tango, and FanGraphs’ Craig Edwards.) Primarily, I want to provide some facts about xwOBA followed by some non-facts about how I use xwOBA to keep my biases in check.

There are two important tenets to xwOBAism. At the player level, wOBA does not always converge on xwOBA…

1. in a given season.
2. over the course of a career.

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The phrase “Buying Low” gets thrown around in the baseball community. I’m not sure if owners can actually buy low on many of these frustrating but talented players. Owners need to be willing to sell. I going to try to redefine the concept of buying low concentrating on drop rates and go over a few potential targets.

When I hear or read about buying low on a player, the touts are focusing on buying a good player during a cold streak. Paul Goldschmidt fits this label with his .208/.324/.380 slash line. Owners paid first round prices for replacement level production. But are Goldschmidt’s owners selling low? Probably not.

Going over some recent trades at the Yahoo trade tracker, Goldschmidt is being traded straight up for players such as Clayton Kershaw, Joey Votto, Patrick Corbin, and Shohei Ohtani.

His value is down some (and should be with the K% spike) but not horribly. He’s still owned in 99%+ of leagues at ESPN, Yahoo, Fantrax, and CBS. Even the most frustrated owners in shallow leagues aren’t moving on. So why should owners focus their time and energy on players who even the most frustrated owners aren’t moving on with?

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Rarely is OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) a fantasy stat. It’s off many people’s radar but it’s widely available and closely mimics a position player’s overall hitting talent. While other stats (e.g. wOBA and wRC+) also give a hitter an overall value, these stats aren’t available at every website. Most sites have their own unique blend but OPS is commonly available. Because of this availability, I’ve been using it as a baseline in recent articles on adjusting projections based on prospect pedigree and when hitters get platooned ($$). Now, it’s time to use OPS to help predict the individual categories.

The process I used for this study was to simply see how much various stats changed when OPS changed a certain amount. For rate stats (e.g. batting average) the conversion is straightforward. For counting categories, I put the stats on a per 600 plate appearance scale. Additionally, I only compared data from 2015 to 2017 during the current “juiced” ball era. I know the process is not close to being 100% precise and that is fine. I’m just trying to create general adjustments and can look to hone the process later. I’m putting in 20% effort to get 80% of the answer.

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My current aim in fantasy baseball is to find instances where player evaluations can be improved. With several prospects recently getting called up, I am trying to answer the simple question: is there any projection information to be gained from being a highly touted prospect. The short answer is yes, but it took me a while to get good results.

I wanted to keep the analysis simple so I used all available Steamer projections which to back to 2010. Additionally, I used Baseball America’s top 100 ranked prospects for that time frame. From these two data sets, I compared the hitter’s projected results to the actual results for their first few seasons.

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Ottoneu has historically offered four different formats (two total points linear weights based, one traditional 5×5, and one saber-oriented 4×4), but this year head to head was added as an option for points leagues (think of your typical fantasy football league). You can read more about the format here, but today I wanted to highlight some of the rules that differ between ottoneu head to head and the standard points formats, and some strategy ideas driven by those differences.

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One of the great things about Ottoneu is the high level of engagement by the growing community of owners.  Few topics get the masses talking more than crowd-sourcing feedback on recent league trades, so today I want to highlight a few of the more interesting trades I’ve seen recently to get a pulse on how some player values are already shifting early this season.

As a quick reminder, Ottoneu is a keeper system by design that shifts the balance just short of traditional dynasty leagues, and offers a variety of scoring systems (including H2H this year).

Few players have seen their value shift as wildly as Shohei Ohtani over the past few weeks.  What he’s managed to do to start the season with both the bat (1.286 OPS) and off the mound (97.8 mph fastball) has at least verified that he’s as talented as the world thought he was, but the fact that he now looks less raw than he did just a few weeks ago in spring training tells you everything you need to know about the upward trajectory of his value in fantasy baseball leagues.  If you don’t happen to own Ohtani already, he’s going to be one of the hardest players in the game to acquire over the next 30 days.  He’s young, exciting, and just for the cool factor of clicking between batting and pitching stats on his FanGraphs page makes him the hottest commodity in the game right now, especially if you have the flexibility of slotting him into your daily lineup or your rotation like Ottoneu provides.

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Last week I wrote about a few lesser known opportunities within Ottoneu to maximize salary cap space, which is important to understand before your fantasy season begins.  However, by the time you read this post the fantasy season will have already begun, so I want to focus your attention today on strategies that will help you in-season as you attempt to squeeze every bit of value out of your team during what is sure to be a long but very fun Ottoneu season.

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3/29/18

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 19, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER19!

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Notable Transactions/Rumors/Articles/Game Play

• Salvador Perez out 4-6 wks
• Nathan Eovaldi done probably
• A.J. Puk done

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