Archive for Uncategorized

• With little news, here is a nice write-up on what Alex Cobb’s minor league rehab days are like.

Four hours before Monday’s first pitch Alex Cobb ordered a Slim #4 Turkey Breast sandwich at a Jimmy John’s, located a few blocks from the stadium.

He removed the top piece of the French bread and quickly devoured the first of his two pregame meals. The second was the peanut butter and jelly sandwich he always eats before leaving the locker room to begin his pregame warmup.

“I try to eat as light as possible before I pitch,” he said. “I’ve been on the mound (after eating too much) and feel like I have a brick in my stomach.”

• Tyler Flowers is out at least six weeks and could miss the rest of the season.

A Braves source confirmed Flowers received this diagnosis via the results of a MRI exam that was performed in Atlanta on Monday. The 30-year-old catcher will miss at least six weeks, but it seems quite possible that he could be out through a portion of the final month of the regular season.

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I thought I would spend this month reviewing some of my preseason work. Unfortunately, because I was working on a piece for The Hardball Times last week, I didn’t get to post anything. However this week, I will review my Bold Predictions article and next week I will give an update on my BARF league team. Read the rest of this entry »

Parsing data too small can create unreasonable expectations. As an astute reader, I don’t need to remind you to take any small samples with a grain of salt. However, if you wait for a player’s stats to normalize, the ship has likely sailed for acquiring him for free. With that in mind, I’m intrigued by Kyle Gibson’s numbers of late. Even his full-season totals offer some optimism for him being a useful pitcher in deep leagues. He’s widely available (CBS: 14%, ESPN: 3.0%, Yahoo!: 10%) and probably worth a look if you’re pitching starved. Read the rest of this entry »

Agenda

1. The Mid-Stack Fade
2. The Daily Grind Invitational and Leaderboard
3. Daily DFS
4. SaberSim Observations
5. Tomorrow’s Targets
6. Factor Grid

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We’re in the midst of a new frontier in pitching analysis. With Statcast giving us the exit velocity on batted balls, we can now test our theories about balls in play for pitchers. It’s long been thought that pitchers have little control over the ball in play, but recent research has begun to show that maybe pitchers have a little more to say about the ball once it leaves the bat than we thought before.

It’s a little scary, because we don’t have years and years of data to make sure that what we’re looking at is sticky, year-to-year. But we do have some idea of the meaningfulness of exit velocity for pitchers. It looks like something that can change rapidly, but is still meaningful in small samples. That’s probably because it speaks well to true talent, but true talent can change quickly for pitchers, because they can make an adjustment that changes their effectiveness completely. That makes the stat cool but also hard to use.

Also, it’s possible that the things that pitchers do to suppress exit velo are perhaps more subject to slight changes in your mechanics than the things they do to strike players out. For example, Rob Arthur outlined the factors as being “getting ahead in the count, low pitch velocity, low vertical pitch location, and precise horizontal pitch location.” Sounds like exit velo is a proxy for command, and we’ve seen what a little tweak to mechanics can do to command when we looked recently at Aaron Nola.

Still, we can look at the leaders for the year in exit velocity. Those pitchers may have better numbers than their strikeouts and walks suggest, and might be more believable than we thought. And we can also look at the guys that have improved the most over the last month and a half. Maybe they’ve made an adjustment!

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Small sample sizes be damned! OK, not really. But today we take a look at two players who, in very limited playing time, have made us (or should make us) look twice and dig just a little deeper.  Read the rest of this entry »

It didn’t take long for a team to acquire Oswaldo Arcia after the Twins opted to designate him for assignment. He’ll get a fresh start for the injury-depleted Rays. With the non-waiver trade deadline on August 1st, Joey Gallo could finally get another crack at the majors soon. I’ve also got my eyes on a lefty throwing premium cheddar. James Paxton is lighting up the radar gun and received some love from Paul a few weeks ago. Read the rest of this entry »

At this point in the season many people are looking at grabbing the next potential impact prospect to come up. While it is always fun to speculate, it is a kind of a crap shoot. We would all love to believe that the Pirates are going to be calling up Tyler Glasnow and Josh Bell or that the Astros are going to be calling up AJ Reed, but no one really knows their timetables. If you are fighting to stay in the hunt, it may be more apt to grab some guys that are more likely to make an impact now. So, here are some guys that are making (or will be) an impact right now that are widely available on fantasy waiver wires. Read the rest of this entry »

Fantasy gamers who drafted Matt Harvey and Sonny Gray haven’t gotten the return on their investment they’ve hoped for. Harvey’s strung together three straight strong starts, but Gray turned in a rough start Wednesday night after a pair of solid starts following his disabled list stint. I loved Harvey coming into the year, but I was down on Gray. For the rest of the year, though, I’m buying into both pitching well. Read the rest of this entry »

This week I am doing Part 2 of my ground-breaking, innovative, revolutionary, completely original piece from two weeks ago that no one has ever thought of before, but before I do I want to mention that it was pointed out to me that our very own Alex Chamberlain did some fantastic articles covering the exact same premise for DFS last season: Read the rest of this entry »