Any keeper league that allows offseason trading will have its share of rebuilding teams. The guy who drafted Chris Davis, Joey Votto, and Cliff Lee will need time to recover from those dreadful picks. If the standard of excellence is high enough in your league, a perfectly adequate roster might still qualify for a touch of rebuilding.
During the season, my Daily Grind column relied heavily upon what I called the Factor Grid. It’s a simple spreadsheet with a few of the most important park factors. With those in mind, fantasy owners and daily fantasy players can wisely select the hitters in the best offensive venues and vice versa. It’s a simple but effective strategy.
We’ll talk about two separate tactical topics today, because neither is really sufficient to carry a post by itself.
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We often talk about fantasy strategy here. I often talk about strategy. When we do so, we lump tactics and strategy together in a way that obscures the relationship between two similar concepts. Tactics and strategy must be executed hand-in-hand to find success, and it can be helpful to recognize when you’re employing a tactic and a strategy. It’s not a mind-blowing topic, but the offseason is a great time to make subtle adjustments to how you think about fantasy sports. I’ve identified this as a potentially valuable adjustment for myself, and I’m sharing it with you.
I’m here to introduce or perhaps reinforce an idea today. People always, always, ALWAYS oversimplify things. Why didn’t such-and-such team win? It’s because so-and-so made a bad pitch. We readily gobble up that answer even though it’s probably one of a thousand ways to explain why a team lost a contest. Fantasy baseball has its share of oversimplification too.
You probably know the drill by now, but if you play in Yahoo leagues, there’s a Hail Mary option at the end of the season to chase wins, strikeouts, or if you’re in a miserable league like I am, points. You can whittle your innings down to precious few, even one third of an inning left on your allocation for the season — and then run five starters and two relievers out there to try and blow the roof off. It doesn’t matter if all seven guys through complete games, you’ll get credit for their stats, for better or for worse.
After evaluating Zack Wheeler and Jacob deGrom in my previous post on the 2015 Mets Commanding Rotation, I was hoping to follow-up by looking at pitch release point consistency for a number of pitchers that prevented contact in the zone but didn’t have elite swinging-strike/contact rates. Initially, I found good results using root-mean-square deviations.
Power turns outs into hits, hits into RBIs, and fly balls into home runs. You have to draft for power, or you’ll find yourself behind in way too many categories. So hopefully you have some power on your squad and don’t necessarily need to stream for it now.
But lets say you find yourself up against a team with lots of speed. If you wanted to punt stolen bases, you might be able to drop a speedster or a bench piece for power in the late going. Let’s look at the end of the week and see if we can identify a few flawed (available) sluggers in nice parks with the platoon advantage.
Earlier this week, Jeff Zimmerman presented Early 2015 Hitter Projections using Steamer and/or ZIPS averaged ROS projections. The main contingency at this time: all values are set to 600 plate appearances. If I had all the time in the world, I would go through the list and manually adjust the PA based on lineup position, career PA/G, etc, but I’m not that much of a Mensch.
The next day, Mike Podhorzer highlighted some of the surprises ranked in the top 30. Again the 600 PA contingency is clear as Rajai Davis, Jarrod Dyson and Corey Dickerson make the list although if Dickerson doesn’t get platooned, I (and Mike) think he’ll surpass expectations. His splits page tells us there is no good reason to platoon him.
In Mike’s intro, he also referenced that there is no adjustment for position in Jeff’s SGP rankings. That’s where this post comes in.
Many of you are preparing for the head to head playoffs, which often involves looking at the worst couple of pitchers on your roster and thinking about what you want those spots to look like in two weeks. Even those of you in roto leagues are getting down to it and wondering how best to use the remaining innings you have available. In either case, a look at the schedule can be huge.
My method is to look at the free agents in my shallowest league, sort them by ownership, and move through the pitchers. It’s not the most rigorous method. I fail the people around me often.
