I’m continuing Jeff’s series of looking at widely available starters who might be worth a stream in the final days of the season. I think Jeff was using a 10% or lower threshold, but I bumped it to 20% for one guy because I think he’ll still be out there in a ton of leagues and worth a scoop. These are ranked in order of how much I like them, but I’ll have a concise ranking at the bottom that shows the drop offs in confidence:

Tyler Chatwood, COL (18%) at SF (Moore)

Chatwood on the road has been one of the more bankable streamers for the last two seasons. Last year, he posted a nice 1.69 ERA in 80 IP away from Coors, in spite of a meager 1.7 K/BB ratio. He’s up to 3.41 in 71.3 IP this year while actually lowering his K/BB down to 1.5. He has a career 1.67 ERA, 0.91 WHIP, and 3.0 K/BB ratio at AT&T Park over 43 IP, including just 1 ER in 22 IP there since the start of last year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ottoneu, like most fantasy leagues, uses a soft innings cap. This is pretty standard. You have an innings limit of 1,500 IP, and the day that you go over that innings limit, you are able to exceed it by as many innings as possible. How can we use this rule in our pursuit of a league championship?

Looking at Ottoneu specifically, though easily adjustable to any league format, you would want to get as close as possible to your innings limit, then on the last day, fill out your pitching lineup with players who are pitching that day. For example, start the day you plan to go over with 1,499 IP and throw 5 starters that day, with 5 RP in your lineup as well. Practically, this could get you another ~25-40 innings. Even if these innings fell below replacement level, they are still valuable as they would not be points you would otherwise accrue. Even if your pitchers were terrible across the board you would be looking at a lower bound of around 50 points, with an upper limit in the 250 point range. That’s a big gain on competitors who may not deploy the same tactic.

This is the main reason I recommend pacing your innings at 1,550 to 1,600 all year. It allows the flexibility to wait a week or two to pick your last day to blow up your pitching totals. Read the rest of this entry »

Predicting bat speed using the publicly available Statcast data is easier said than done. For much of the past few years there was a section on Baseball Savant which displayed a bat speed number of each player, but without much explanation for how it may be calculated. I haven’t inquired for an explanation, but I feel rather comfortable saying it was probably a derived stat using a formula published by Alan Nathan.

This formula takes the pitch speed and batted ball speed, and manipulates them using laboratory tested values for the various relevant coefficients–basically the bounciness of the ball and the bounciness of the bat. If you assume values for those coefficients, you can get a rough estimate for bat speed by plugging in the pitch speed and batted ball speed.

I don’t have proof that this is how bat speed was being estimated by Baseball Savant, but I feel it is the most likely explanation for the numbers.

Two weeks ago I proposed a formula for estimating future exit velocity using past exit velocity and launch angles. This method is far from perfect, and there is a whole lot more research that can be conducted into this area.

Over the past week I have been thinking about what performance changes may or may not be predictable from one season to another. Part of the variance that we see from season to season are large dips or climbs in offensive production, which often in retrospect we might be able to explain. Maybe there were signs that pointed towards decline, but we overlooked them for one reason or another. Maybe we didn’t know what the signs meant until further research had been conducted.

No doubt, these mistakes are often due to a lack of information. In some cases it may be bat speed. We don’t really know how much of a role bat speed plays between seasons or during the course of a career. We don’t know how injury plays a role with bat speed, nor do we understand the aging curve. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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!

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer
• @enosarris
• @jasoncollette

Leading Off: New Addition!

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »