Archive for Uncategorized

You know it’s late in the season when a Fantasy Baseball blogger can’t think of anything more constructive to do than recommend a Rockies pitcher. But stay with us for a moment, because we think we’re on to something.

More precisely, we think Mike Petriello, late of Fangraphs and dweller in stat Valhalla, was on to something six months ago. In early March of this year, a Denver Post article about Rockies’ starting pitcher Jorge de la Rosa caught his eye. As you no doubt know, Coors Field is a real tough place to pitch. And so it was for De La Rosa from 2008, when he joined the Rockies, through 2012. His home/road splits were big, though not really different from anyone else’s. Then, in 2013 and 2014, a very strange thing happened: De La Rosa was lights-out in Coors, but sub-mediocre everywhere else. Merge his 2013-2014 Coors stats and you have a Cy Young candidate: 29 starts, 20 Wins, 3 Losses, 2.92 ERA, 1.24 WHIP. Merge his two-year stats on the road and you’re in Jeremy Guthrieland: 33 starts, 10 Wins, 14 Losses, 4.66 ERA, 1.38 WHIP. Read the rest of this entry »

As the founder and commissioner of my local league since its inception in 2003, I face a difficult task every year. Invariably, as the calendar flips to September, at least one owner who has little chance at finishing in a money spot, essentially abandons his team. This is not a free league for simple bragging rights. It’s certainly nowhere near the high stakes played for in the NFBC, but it’s enough to incentivize owners to remain active all season long. And yet, it’s clear that the entry fee alone is not enough.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve reached the Naked Lunch point of the Fantasy Baseball season—that moment when everyone sees what’s on the end of every fork. That of course doesn’t mean that we all know where we’re going to finish in our leagues. But it does mean that we know pretty much whom we’re going to finish with or be finished by. Sure, there will be unforeseen September call-ups galore, and also some waiver deals that send role players to contenders. But except for the prime prospects—Hector Olivera isn’t in the majors to sit on the bench, and Javier Baez probably isn’t either—no one knows which of the newly-summoned hitters might play regularly, or which pitchers might get plugged into a starting rotation and have some chance of success there.

Anyway, we certainly don’t. And this created a quandary for us, in our capacity of would-be timely bloggers. Thirty blog installments in, we’ve already told you about the guys we like and don’t like who’ve been around during the season. We don’t know any more than you do about who among the newbies is going to (a) play and (b) be good. And if you’re reading this, need stolen bases and nothing else, and thus can afford to have an otherwise-uninhabited spot in your starting lineup, you’ve probably already acquired the amazing Quintin Berry and his spotless SB record; you don’t need our input.

So we had nothing to blog about, until we heard that one of our heroes had died. That would be the writer/neurologist Oliver Sacks, the Mickey Mantle of his hybrid profession. Casey Stengel, marveling at Mantle, said that he “has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster.” Similarly, Sacks wrote better than any doctor—we mean English prose, so don’t tell us about Chekhov or William Carlos Williams—and doctored better than any writer. His specialty was describing the strange things a brain can do when its owner isn’t looking or hasn’t been nice to it. And this, needless to say, made us think of Justin Morneau. Read the rest of this entry »

We know, not only because of Taylor Jungmann, but also from the Brewers’ starter, that not all pitches thrown seldomly with good results will remain as successful when thrown more often. Sometimes pitches are successful because they are rare and unexpected. Any batter can hit an eephus if you tell them it’s coming, but your average eephus gets 7% swinging strikes, mostly because they are surprising.

That said, we have some research on what makes curves and changeups good in terms of movement. So if we combine a pitch with elite results in a small sample with an appraisal of how good the movement and velocity on the pitch, we should be able to say with some confidence that the pitch is good.

In order to find our subjects, I merely set the filter low for pitch types (40 pitches) and looked for starters with elite results on changeups, curves, and sliders. It takes 150 plate appearances for strikeout rate to be stable, so this is probably a small sample even for pitch type ‘strikeout rate’, but we’re scouting here, trying to find the elite before they are actually elite.

Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Cashner has been one of those pitchers that has confounded fantasy owners and experts alike. You look at his fastball velocity and you see a pitcher that ranks in the top 10 in baseball. Cashner is pitching at Petco Park which is one of the most accommodating ballparks for hurlers. He definitely has the pedigree since he was a first round selection by the Cubs in the 2008 June Amateur Draft. Cashner induces ground balls at a career rate of 50%. On the surface, these factors alone are very promising and would suggest that Cashner should be a premier young pitcher on the rise.

In 2014 he produced the following line for Fantasy owners…

Clearly the win totals were very disappointing but we know how team dependent wins are so with a poor hitting Padres squad with meager run support we could give him a pass. He did miss games with injury so that capped his numbers. The 2.55 ERA and 1.13 WHIP were very good even if his 6.79 K/9 was not. All in all, a promising showing for a 27 year old pitcher who has dealt with an assortment of injuries and is entering his prime years. With the overhaul to the San Diego offense in the off-season, there were reasons to suggest that Cashner could possibly be a top 40 pitcher or better in 2015 especially if he avoided injury. However, not everyone was on board as Brett Talley took a more cautious position on Cashner in his 1/22/15 article in RotoGraphs, Starting Pitcher Bust Candidates According to Streamer.
Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout hurt his wrist in late July. Since then, in the 101 plate appearances headed into his game last night, the Angels outfielder has hit .224/.347/.388 with two home runs and a caught stealing. He’s been 11% better than league average, but that’s like 50% below average on the Trout scale. Is he still hurt?

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, we began our quixotic attempt to design the Universal Baseball Association—the ideal full-season Roto-style Fantasy league. This quest was interrupted by a vacation, or, more accurately, “vacation.” The chief benefit of doing something you don’t especially want to do in someplace you don’t especially want to do it in is that circumstances induce you to imagine you’re doing something you’d prefer to be doing in a place in which you’d prefer to be doing it. So there we were, being nibbled upon by sea lice in the saltiest water this side of the Dead Sea. Suddenly and magically, the similarly-immersed children who’d foolishly been placed in our care seemed to vanish—don’t worry; they reappeared all too soon–and we were transported, in the kingdom of our minds, to our desks and computers, free to brood further about the categories and rules of the UBA.

Herewith the results. First, though, a quick summary of the criteria by which we judge our success; if you want more of the same, check last week’s post. The categories in an ideal league should, we think, be as few as possible; be susceptible of appreciation by both the average baseball fan and the stat geek; be “primary,” in that they reflect the building blocks of baseball performance, rather than being “derivative” stats that massage these primary categories to and beyond the vanishing point; focus on a player’s individual achievement rather than the team-based context in which that achievement occurs and can be distorted; yet produce stats that, in the aggregate, look roughly like the stats that a Reality Baseball team would produce over a full season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the saddest thing about velocity changes in pitchers: it looks like you’re screwed either way. Velocity is mostly good for results, but Tommy John pitchers both a) threw harder across pitch types when they were healthy and b) showed velocity loss the year they had surgery. So, either way according to Jon Roegele’s research at least, it could be seen as a negative even if you show up as a velocity gainer on our lists today.

On the other hand, it’s probably better to combine velocity loss with things like a drop in zone rate and an inconsistent release point — things that Josh Kalk put into his injury zone work — and not just rely on velocity loss alone.

That said, a tick on the gun is still worth something in run prevention. And so let’s look at which pitchers are happy or hurting on the radar gun.

Read the rest of this entry »

To distract ourselves from the relentless midpackness of our NFBC Main Event Team, we have been ruminating about loftier matters. What, we wonder, should be the stat categories and rules of the ideal full-season roto-style Fantasy Baseball League, which let’s call the Universal Baseball Association? We invite you to play along at home, or, as is more likely the case, at work.

First, let’s consider categories. There are five criteria by which we judge our choices of categories. These are:

Fidelity. We’ve often said that, in Fantasy Baseball, you’re not drafting “players” or “teams,” but rather proper names that represent collections of stats. That’s too facile, though. What you’re drafting (or claiming or FAABing) is a bunch of stat collections that, in the aggregate, are supposed to look something like a Reality Baseball team’s aggregate stats do. For one thing, you want your league to reward player performance that corresponds to performance that succeeds on the field. For another, you don’t want your teams to lack the balance that successful Reality Baseball teams have. You don’t want to leave out anything important, except to the extent that Reality teams do, and you don’t want to overemphasize any stats. For example, you don’t want categories that encourage you to do without relief pitchers, or (important point) relief pitchers who happen not to be closers, or players who can run.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s rankings update time! But sadly, this will be the last one of the season. In the past updates, I have listed a bunch of guys on the DL at the end. This time around, they have been completely omitted unless they are expected to return in the coming week.

My usual caveat on how I rank pitchers follows:

It’s essential to remember that ERA is not a skill. It’s just a result. So I don’t really care what a pitcher’s ERA is at the moment. What I’m really interested in is their peripherals and any changes in pitch mix and/or velocity. And even if their peripherals have changed, you then have to ask yourself if it’s sustainable. Again, more likely is that what we initially forecasted is what is going to be posted the rest of the way, though obviously this is not always the case.

As a reminder, the tiers are named after the best characters from the FXX show, Man Seeking Woman.

Read the rest of this entry »