I’m always talking about how good a pitch’s peripherals are, on our podcast, or on the radio, or on twitter, so I thought I’d help you get a sense of makes a good off-speed pitch, when it comes to whiff percentages. Since some of the listings in different places are whiff per swing (more here), and yet our site uses swinging strike rate (swSTR%), I thought I’d make the benchmarks in swinging strikes. You can see the whiff benchmarks in this oft-linked post here. You’ll also get ground-ball rates there, which is an important pitch peripheral that I won’t talk about much today.

So what makes a good pitch, swinging strike wise?
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Sleepers are the holy grail of fantasy analysis. Everybody has players they like more than others and sleepers are those special someones who offer tantalizing upside at a piddling price. Sometimes, they’re just overlooked, small market players who have been good all along while other times they are players predicted to have a break out season.

It’s good to have sleepers. It’s good to acquire them on draft day, assuming you have some skill at parsing the mountains of data available on the internet. It can even be good to throw an extra dollar at your favorite targets in the auction. Where owners run into trouble is when they convince themselves that they must acquire their sleepers.

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When drafting hitters for a traditional five category league, my standard strategy is to target players who contribute in many categories – preferably all five. Today, in deference to my jet lag, we’re mostly going to dispense with analysis and break out some lists of players who fall into different buckets of production. All of the values below come from Steamer’s 2014 projections. Steamer and projection systems in general aren’t the best at predicting runs and RBI, so keep that in mind.

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I read two articles the other day that helped clarify my thinking. For at least a year, I’ve been bothered by fantasy baseball’s obsession with rankings – especially preseason rankings. Imagine: here’s a list of the top 25 first baseman ranked in order of value. Except there isn’t much difference between the fourth best and the eighth best. After the 11th best it gets really ugly. Perhaps we should introduce some tiers, we’ll call them Great, Good, Average, Bad. But now there are tiers within my tiers and hidden tiers than span between my arbitrary tiers, etc. etc.

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From time to time, I’ll hear reference to BeerGraphs as if we’re trying to legislate which beers are actually the best with our numbers. I don’t really think that’s the aim — we research beer trends and report what the numbers say, and we try to offer different ways to slice available numbers so that you can make more informed decisions. There’s no way to analytically prove which beer is the best.

There’s no way to analytically prove which settings are the best for your fantasy league. It’s fantasy, it’s not real, and so whatever settings you decide are just the rules for the game you are about to play. Different settings do beget different styles of analysis, though, so it’s worth a little thinking to get it right, especially if you are about to start a league that you hope will be around a while.

I’ve got 15 leagues. I’ll just write about the pros and cons of each. Maybe that’ll help.

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UPDATE: You can view complete rosters here and Steamer projections for all teams here. I’m ranked 10th currently, but saves aren’t included yet (12 points projected). 

On Tuesday, Howard Bender organized the first draft of the 2014 season for his Mock Draft Army. You can learn more about the army here.

We kept things short and simple; a 23 round snake draft with standard deep league positions, no bench, and 5×5 scoring. The picks ranged from Mike Trout at pick 1-1 to Fernando Rodney at pick 23-12.

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As you might have noticed, we are a few days into our offseason analysis of relievers. We’ve mostly discussed the best of the best thus far, and we’ve been sure to warn everybody that waiver wire hawks may want to allocate the $20 it takes to win a Craig Kimbrel to another position. If you’re the kind of guy who finds a Koji Uehara or Mark Melancon for free year after year, why should you pay $20 for a closer? You’ll eventually get your saves – even if you’re at the bottom of the pile in April – and the extra $20 could go into hiring 20 more home runs and RBI in the outfield or a catcher that contributes in more than one category.

Like every other position, closers also get hurt. Unlike most other positions, the guy who steps in as the next closer is sometimes as good or better than the first guy. Again, see Uehara and Melancon. So that’s the common line of thinking on elite relievers, that an active owner can find underpriced saves without taking on the injury risk of a $20 relief asset. However, there are definitely circumstances where it makes all the sense in the world to pay for 40 saves, massive strikeout totals, and drool worthy ratios.

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There’s been some talk about the ideal auction budget mix on twitter recently. Perhaps, if you click this link, you can see some of the conversation between Chris Liss, Mike Gianella, Steve Gardner, Peter Kreutzer, and Jeff Erickson upon which I was snooping. It’s a fairly complicated conversation, and far-reaching. Let’s jump in.

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If you’ve been following me over on Twitter, then you’ll know that there’s nothing I love more during the offseason than a good ol’ mock draft. I love researching players and setting myself up with my own set of rankings and Draft Day depth charts, but one of the best tools for in-draft decisions is understanding public opinion.

It’s one of those rare instances in life where what everyone else thinks does, in fact, matter. Does no one seem to believe in this guy, so I can easily wait a few more rounds for him (i.e. my earlier Travis Wood dilemma)? Is he a recently outed sleeper whose public opinion has grown more mainstream thus forcing me to take him earlier than I had originally thought? These are always questions we ask ourselves during drafts and given that they usually hit us when we’re under the gun and have no more than a minute and a half (usually) to make that decision, knowing the answers ahead of time make it all the more easy to think and act on the fly.

And since we’re still talking starting pitchers over here this week and mock draft season is just getting underway — I’ve actually done six already, if you can believe that — I thought that looking at how pitching is already being viewed by many would be a good start. You’ll get a jump on things in the early goings and it also might help you make some of those tough keeper decisions you probably have sitting in front of you. Read the rest of this entry »

Fellow RotoGrapher Chad Young recently posted on the value of playing time as it pertains to weekly vs. daily leagues. The first commenter, Kris, asked a great (and difficult) question – “what is a roster spot worth?” Basically, how many dollars did an owner forgo to roster, say, Oscar Taveras last season?

The easy answer is, it depends. While I could sit here, reconstruct a standard league, make a handful of assumptions, and come away with a rough estimate as to the value of the last roster spot, such an analysis would miss too many factors. Instead, I will take the rest of this article to highlight some of the things you’ll want to consider when deciding how to deploy your final roster slot.

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