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We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

Fresh off 98 wins and a third consecutive post-season appearance, the Pirates enter 2016 with an elite outfield and one of baseball’s preeminent pitch framers behind the dish. But the infield, like the Allegheny that flows just beyond PNC’s walls, is both murky and shallow.

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Before I try to do this in a (slightly) more scientific way, let me say that you can easily create tiers via the sniff test. Take a look at the pitching pool and try to assign groups labels, like ‘ace’ and ‘front of the rotation’ and ‘mid-rotation’. It’s what we do when we are trying to talk about prospect pitchers and where they might slot in later, it should come fairly naturally, and it will help you make sense of your specific player pool. It’s a worthy exercise no matter how rigorous the background work was.

Now let’s try to apply a more reasoned approach to the matter.

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The popularity of amateur drafts in sports has been rising for at least the last decade or so. Just take the NFL draft that used to be a Saturday and Sunday event that now begins primetime Thursday, where people have draft parties and events based around the NFL draft. Think about that for a moment. No sport is being played and no athletes are competing live. People are spending countless hours preparing for an event where players are just being selected. During this time, everybody is a college football and draft expert and lead on to knowing more than the so-called “experts.”

The MLB amateur draft is not quite at that level yet, but the fact that it is now televised is interesting in terms of how quickly the popularity of the MLB draft is, or at least how popular major league baseball wants to make it. I’m fascinated how much stock people take in the draft considering most people have never really watched these players in high school or college, so the general public really has no clue who these guys are, unlike college football where a lot of these players were watched by a large audience every Saturday, whether it was active or passive watching.

This brought up some curiosity on my part. Thanks to Jeff Zimmerman, he did a tremendous job of providing me all the data I needed to start exploring my curiosity into the MLB draft using a great data visualization tool, Tableau Public. I didn’t have an exact idea about what I wanted to learn. I just wanted to explore the MLB draft from the beginnings to now. I had no preconceived notions, I just wanted to see if there were any trends I could find/or not find based on the data. So I plugged the data in and began looking around. I found some things that make sense, some things that don’t, some trends that are obvious, and some that really don’t exist.

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One of the position groups with sneaky potential this season is the rotation of the White Sox. Not only is the unit anchored by a pair of stalwart lefties in Chris Sale and Jose Quintana, but the mid- to back-end of the rotation is filled with potential high-ceiling options — even if they do have some question marks.

As a team the White Sox ranked firmly in the middle of the pack in starter ERA last year at 4.12. That mark was seventh among 15 AL teams, though the six ahead of the Sox were in a different class, one could argue. The next ERA up the list was the Angels at 3.98, while the Twins and Mariners each trailed the Sox by five points or less. Essentially, in terms of raw production they were far closer to the bottom one-third than the top.

But in terms of secondary stats, the White Sox were pretty dang good. They ranked fourth in FIP (3.82), fifth in xFIP (3.87) and threw more innings than any other team. As a result, they accrued an AL-best total of 17.4 WAR — more than a full win better than runner up Houston (16.0). The Pale Hose rotation was among the best at striking opposing hitters out (8.3 K/9, third), didn’t walk anyone and for the most part kept the ball in the ballpark.

Most of the key cogs from a season ago are back, with one notable omission: Jeff Samardzija, who jumped ship for the NL with the Giants. Replacing Samardzija’s nearly 5.00 ERA could seem easy on the surface, but he threw a team-high 214 innings. That’s less easy to replace.

As of this writing, the depth chart would seem to look like this in the rotation:

Sale
Quintana
Carlos Rodon
John Danks Read the rest of this entry »

This is the classic tale of good versus evil. Is the man in question truly the good natured doctor or the dreaded monster? There are clues along the way that must be examined but, no matter what the evidence suggests, it will be up to the man himself to prove who he really is. It is rare that the audience is rooting for the monster, but that in fact is the case. Read the rest of this entry »

Chad Bettis is on the Rockies. You might be inclined to move on after the very first sentence of this post, but let me convince you otherwise.

Chad Bettis finished 2015 with a 4.23 ERA and 1.41 WHIP. However, on July 7th, he was shellacked in Colorado by the Angels. Excluding this 2.1 IP start, he would have ended the year with a 3.50 ERA and 1.33 WHIP. That has utility in most, especially deep leagues. I personally just drafted him in the 47th round of my only NFBC Draft Champions League thanks to his Arsenal Score, which is sandwiched between Dallas Keuchel and Max Scherzer.

Don’t get worked up. Bettis should not be in the same sentence – or matrix – as Keuchel and Scherzer. The matrix should be updated next week with pitch usage weights (increasing the Fastball value due to usage approximately three-fold to approximate MLB rates). This will drop Bettis in the rankings significantly. If we look at his 2015 sabermetric outcomes on his Brooks Baseball Player card, we can see that his Fastball whiff-per-swing rate is -0.74 standard deviations worse than the average fastball.

Still, the rest of his repertoire is great from a whiff/swing perspective:

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Below is the First Base installment of our 2016 Ottoneu FGpt rankings.

In the context of Ottoneu, perhaps rankings are a misnomer, because you really want to know the dollar value each player is worth. We’ve included this information for our benefit. In all, these rankings should help to give you a spread of four dollar values for each player, as well as a comparison to average prices (post-arbitration, pre-cut deadline) within the Ottoneu FGpts universe. Each player’s Ottoneu eligibility (5GS, 10 appearances) is included as well, though players are ranked at their most valuable position. If you have questions on a specific ranking, or a question for a specific ranker, feel free to let us know in the comments.

Consider this your very early, subject to change, Ottoneu pricing cheat sheet.
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The theory first. By looking at the results on a per-pitch level, we can spot pitchers that have somehow been worse than the sum of their parts to date. Those pitchers, with better sequencing and selection of their existing pitches, or just luck, could be better in the future.

In order to avoid the problems inherent in balls in play data, we’re going to focus on two classes of information that help us the most — ground balls and strikeouts. We’ll z-score every pitch thrown over 100 times last year and sum up the scores. Let’s focus on starters — depth of arsenal matters more for them. And let’s report summed up z-scores as well as average ones per pitch. One tells us how good their collective pitches are, the other how even their arsenal is.

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The 2016 fantasy baseball season has unofficially begun. Yahoo opened its doors over the weekend. I’ve already renewed two keeper leagues, and undoubtedly more will follow. In fact, I’m planning to unveil some quirky reader leagues in the near future. What follows is an ode to the Roto 5×5 and common twists on the original.

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The Giants’ biennial odd-year failures are well documented. By now, Giants fans know that if it’s an odd-year, they can safely leave town on Columbus Day weekend, volunteer at their NPR affiliate’s fall pledge drive, or spend a weekend up in Santa Rosa picking delightfully fragrant organic Braeburn apples in-season. But odd-year apple seasons bring Brian Sabean neither respite nor rich phytonutrients. For it’s a time when baseball’s longest-tenured GM must roll up his sleeves and construct yet another World Series winner.

This past October, Sabean set his sights on filling a gaping hole in center field and rebuilding a rotation that ranked 25th in WAR. So he signed Denard Span, Johnny Cueto, and Jeff Samardzija to multi-year contracts, undoubtedly improving the team in 2016. And that’s more or less it. Needs addressed.

From a fantasy perspective, there isn’t so much a battle for the final rotation spot as the inevitability that injuries to Matt Cain or others will open the door for Chris Heston and conceivably a few promising young pitchers. With that in mind, we take a look at those pitchers vying for the final spot in the Giants’ rebuilt rotation.

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