It’s the final month of the season and every pitching matchup holds extra weight. Maybe one of your regular arms is slated pitch in Coors and in Arlington or you’re in need of an extra few starts from now through September 14th. Over at my site Pitcher List, I helped tackle this question by outlining the Top 100 Starters for the rest of the season according to their ROS schedules, providing estimations for each starter’s schedule from now until the end of the year. Instead of focusing on the entire month of September, here we’re going to take a look at ten lesser owned arms that could help you later this week or find themselves in good matchups for the next round:

Note: Owned rates are according to ESPN Leagues.

Good Matchups

Kyle Gibson (@KCR, SDP) – 8.7% owned

You may be surprised to see Gibson here. I’m surprised to see Gibson here. His career 6.17 K/9, 3.20 BB/9, and 4.73 ERA have secured him a comfortable spot on the third page of your waiver wire for ages, but in his last three starts, Gibson has been a new man, sporting a 1.37 ERA, 9.15 K/9, and 0.92 BB/9. His whiff rates have jumped to 13.9% in those starts after a near 9.0% prior and given he’s facing the paltry lineups of the Royals and Padres next, he’s worth a look for your squad.

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8/22/17

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, 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 SLEEPER18!

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Leading Off: New Addition!

• Nick Pollack of PitcherList.com joins the RG team!

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This is an updated version of an article originally posted in 2013 and then reposted in 2015.

As we get closer to our league trade deadlines (if it hasn’t passed already!) and the final month of the season, and the effect any individual player will have on our place in the standings gradually diminishes, 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 available to you is a so-called $15 player for your $25 player, it’s still easily worth accepting if you expect that it gains you points.

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Publicly available Statcast data is just over two years old. Eric Logenhagen posted his first set of prospect grades before this season started. I have decided to say screw it to small samples and see how well Eric’s power grades match up with exit velocity number. Even with the limited sample, the results ended up fairly consistent.

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This past weekend I spent two days in Boston at the Saber Seminar. As always, it is a great event and here is some the fantasy relevant information I extracted from it (full list of presenters and abstracts).

Note: My notes got a jumbled so there may be a chance the information I attribute to a speaker is incorrect. I apologize to the speakers in advance if I made this mistake.

Rich Hahn: Q and A

He broke some big news at the conference which he stated that Reynaldo Lopez will be starting for the White Sox this weekend against the Royals.

Will Carroll: Saving the Pitcher, 2017: A Data Driven Approach

He was promoting the use of the Motus Sleeve to help measure short and long term elbow stress. He discussed that each pitch has different levels of elbow stress depending velocity and pitch type. As for predicting injuries, I wonder if some general injury guidelines can be created, especially incorporating Motus sleeve data. I’m going to investigate this idea further. If anyone else is interested, let me know and I may be able to share some ideas and/or acquired needed data.

Mike Reinold: An Update on the Effect of Weighted Ball Training on Arm Stress, Range of Motion, and Injury Rates Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a unique fantasy season in which I’ve never experienced. Pitchers should be dominating the landscape with strikeouts at an all-time high. They’re not because home runs are also at an all-time high. With this unique environment, the fantasy norms which owners have been familiar with no longer exist. No one has played fantasy baseball in this high strikeout and home run environment because it has never existed before.

Here are some new guidelines for navigating this season and thinking towards next season.

Home runs have pushed scoring is up, but not to any historical levels

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I have been “that guy”. If we are honest, we all have been. Typically, when we really dislike something or someone it can be traced to a trait we own or exhibit.

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A few weeks ago, I stole RotoGraphs contributor Joe Douglas’ idea (with his permission) as I pointed out that the “generic” Tommy Pham had provided surprisingly similar offensive production in his career to the “brand name” Michael Conforto. It was a fun exercise, and one that we’re going to do again today.

To set the stage, we’re going to talk about two rookies with outfield eligibility. One receives plenty of attention and hype; the other, not so much. Mr. Generic debuted in 2016 but is still considered a rookie this season, while Mr. Brand Name debuted in 2017. Here’s how they’ve fared so far this year:

The first thing that jumps out is the nearly 100-point difference in BABIP, and the fact that Mr. Generic’s BABIP is perhaps unsustainably high. More about that in a minute.

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There are 10 qualified starting pitchers with an xFIP under 2.80 in the last 30 days.

Among them are predictable names like Chris Archer (2.52), Clayton Kershaw (2.53), Chris Sale (2.64), Johnny Cueto (2.74), and Zack Greinke (2.76).

The other five aren’t as well known, and therefore, they are more intriguing.

Being in the top 10 xFIP leaderboard for a month is not necessarily a huge accomplishment. However, xFIP has one of the highest correlations with future ERA of all pitching metrics, so it’s among the most relevant numbers to examine when searching for potential breakouts or analyzing the legitimacy of poor or plus performance.

Below is a table sorted by the top 10 qualified starting pitchers in xFIP over the last 30 days*, with the best statistic in each category highlighted in yellow, and the worst statistic in each category highlighted in red: Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to a supersized edition of The Unwritten Rules! Throughout the season I have been and will continue to answer questions based on fantasy ethics and rules in this recurring piece. You may not always like the answers I give, but I hope that it is informative and makes you think about how you construct your leagues and play the games. Typically I do 4-5 questions per piece, but with the overwhelming amount questions I received, I felt I should knock out as many as I could. You can send me more questions via email, JustinMasonFantasy@gmail.com, my twitter account, or by posting in my facebook group. Read the rest of this entry »