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For all the Anthony DeSclafani and Chase Anderson love I’m getting in my inbox and Twitter feed, there’s equal parts consternation when it comes to Drew Hutchison and Shane Greene. Rightfully so. The point with the deep sleepers is to hit the lottery, but that holds a hidden second moment, just as important as the first: cutting bait before it’s too late. Have we reached that moment with the two early season duds?

First, it’s tempting to see every pitcher through the new stats on the website. Shane Greene is top 15 in Soft%! Anthony DeSclafani is top 20! Drew Hutchison is almost exactly league average in soft, medium, and hard contact allowed!

But we shouldn’t.

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Agenda

1. Stolen Bases, or a Lack Thereof
2. Daily DFS – Detwiler, Wood, Trout, EY Jr.
3. GB / FB Splits
4. Tomorrow’s Targets – Greene, Ray, Stubbs, Aramista
5. Factor Grid

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The baseball season is in full swing and prospects around baseball are already seeing their stock values start to shift up or down. Today we’re going to take a look at five names that you’re probably not overly familiar with right now but you might start hearing a lot more about them in the not-too-distant future.

Last Week: Prospect Stock Watch: April 24

Brian Anderson, 2B/3B, Marlins: This Brian Anderson is looking to become the third big leaguer of the same name. He’s played both second and third bases in pro ball. He’ll likely stick at the hot corner if he can show enough power to appease the traditional expectations of the position. Incumbent third baseman Martin Prado is signed through 2016 and Anderson is on a trajectory — dependent on his successes and failures in 2015 — to be MLB ready right around that time, although the club may need a one-year gap filler. The young hitter is holding his own at High-A ball in his first full professional season and will soon turn 22 years old. Eight of his 18 hits have gone for extra bases but his strikeout rate is above 20% so he’s got some work to do on making more consistent contact. [Value Steady]

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Let’s cut straight to the chase. Take a look at the statistical snapshots below:

Obviously, Player 1 is benefiting from a higher batting average on balls in play while Player 2 is getting burned a bit by his. Still, take away their triple-slash lines (but leave the isolated power) and you have two players with almost identical numbers, down to the six steals on eight attempts and the meager isolated powers (ISOs). Where they differ a bit is in plate discipline: Player 1 has a much healthier walk rate than Player 2 and a couple fewer strikeouts. So while Player 1 is benefiting from the a higher BABIP, he can also reasonably be expected to post a marginally higher batting average and noticeably higher on-base percentage. Most importantly, the two hitters are eligible at the same position and are, thus, substitutable.

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There is no stronger or more unpleasant current in the emotional maelstrom that is Fantasy Baseball than Dumper’s Desolation. This is the feeling you get when you are forced to give up on a player and jettison him, whereupon one of your opponents rescues him, and he (the player, but also the opponent) prospers. As an example, if one is needed: It’s Memorial Day, 2014. You paid good money for Jedd Gyorko at the start of the season ($14, if you happened to buy him in the Tout Wars mixed auction). He’s rewarded you by hitting about .170, and it’s not a subtly-potent .170. You’ve long since banished him to your reserve roster, and replaced him with a second baseman who’s not hurting you as badly but also not helping you—Gordon Beckham, let’s say. As far as you know, there’s nothing wrong with Gyorko physically; he’s just performing poorly. Now someone else on your roster is coming off the DL, and you need to free a spot. So you bitterly but confidently mutter “good riddance” and put Gyorko on waivers. Someone else grabs him and stashes him. A week or two later, Gyorko goes on the DL. He’s got severe plantar fasciitis, which is news to you and everyone else besides Gyorko and his podiatrist. A month or so after that, Gyorko, much refreshed, returns, and you watch helplessly as he posts a .260/.347/.398 slash line for the last two months.

An experience to be shunned at all costs, right? Yet in most leagues, dumping is a way of life; in fact, the better and more sophisticated the owner, the likelier (s)he is to have a roster that forces a difficult choice. And in Fantasyland as in the rest of the universe, Newton’s Third Law applies, and you’re going to have to control the equal and opposite reaction when it’s time to upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »

Is there a more perplexing pitcher this year than Alex Wood has been so far? His pitches are all there, in the same quantities, at the same velocities, and with the same shapes… and the results — when it comes to balls and strikes at least — are nowhere to be found. Even my favorite pitch type peripherals are all out of whack.

How does a pitcher with the same stuff fail so miserably?

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What an uneventful day for bullpens. Like zero things changed. Tony Cingrani pitched two frames for the Reds, his first action in forever. I can see him pitching the seventh for the Reds in the near future. Hector Rondon garnered his fourth save for the Cubs, following Pedro Strop and his sore foot.

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The Braves committed all of the errors possible on Friday, and Jim Johnson continued his run of ruin, taking his second loss on the year. He made it through his first five outings without surrendering a single run, but he’s given up at least one earned in each of his last four outings. There are no huge losses in velocity or movement, but this is just getting ugly. Jason Grilli hasn’t had a save opportunity since last Sunday, and curiously, he hasn’t seen the field since then. Fredi Gonzalez had an opportunity to live up to what he alluded to last weekend when he said that he wouldn’t hesitate to use Grilli in tied games on the road. Instead, he went with Johnson. Ken Giles kept his ERA at 0.00 when he pitched a scoreless ninth and picked up the win for the Phillies.

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After yesterday’s fine outing, Clay Buchholz may be a bit less of a buy-low candidate. Going into said start, Buchholz was sporting a foul 6.06 ERA with a 1.65 WHIP to match. FIP, xFIP, and SIERA told a different story, of course; they were 3.07, 2.73, and 2.84 respectively, on the strength of 19 strikeouts against just four walks in 16.1 innings of work. (He’s now got 29 Ks and 7 BBs in 22.1 IP with a 4.84 ERA).

But even with laudatory marks from famous ERA indicators, we’re still dealing with a small sample, and should be digging deeper to determine whether Buchholz is doing anything differently, or whether he’s actually improved over a pretty atrocious 2014.

Based on what I’m looking at, he’s definitely doing things differently.

First, let’s look at some numbers in a table that spans the full width of this text column. (Remember these stats are through his first three starts this year; they do not include yesterday’s game vs. Tampa Bay.)

The first several columns show an improvement in results so far in 2015; the last several columns offer reason to be optimistic that his traditional stats will even out. First, Clay-B has been horribly unlucky on balls in play, as compared to both his career mark and league average, and he hasn’t given up a line drives at a rate—nor does he pitch in front of a bad enough defense—to warrant such a high BABIP. To boot, he hasn’t induced a single pop-up yet this year, whereas he’s generally done so at a league-average rate in the past. Granted, his new ground-ball-heavy approach might lead to fewer pop-ups, but not no pop-ups. A higher rate of converted outs is nigh for ol’ Clayie. (Guessing that nickname won’t stick.)

You’ll also notice that Buchholz is getting more swings on pitches outside of the zone, and batters are making less contact when they swing at those pitches. Hence, a bump in his swinging strike rate. This, in turn, is also what’s helping his K%. Getting hitters to chase pitches out of the strike zone is generally a good thing; it’s definitely a good thing when they’re not even making contact with those pitches.

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With draft season over and duly reported upon, we have been brooding about what new worlds to conquer. Our long-promised sabermetric investigations are forthcoming, but they take time, and we’ll no doubt be staggering down many blind alleys and culs-de-sac before we get someplace worth bringing you to. We’ll keep providing progress reports—well, status reports, anyway—on Team Birchwood in the NFBC Main Event, but those won’t take long, even if our bargain-basement starting pitchers stop igniting upon exposure to oxygen and we move up in the standings.

Meanwhile, having been irritated during draft season by so-called experts touting so-called sleepers who were already well-known in places like Kazakhstan, we find ourselves even more irked by these same experts, now that the season’s started, touting waiver wire pickups that are probably making casual fans on Pluto sneer. Let’s quickly do a Google search and see what we come up with. “Week 3 Waiver Wire.…” Hmmm… pre-injury Jake Lamb. Odubel Herrera. Drew Pomeranz. Wade Davis, for God’s sake. We’ll accept arguendo that there are dilletantish Plutonian 10-team mixed leagues in which some of these guys might be available. But if you’re far gone enough to be reading not just Rotographs but this particular blog, you or somebody else in your league already owns them. So what exactly do you do when, say—this is of course completely fanciful–Brett Lawrie disables your left fielder with a slightly-misdirected hard slide and it’s time to go replacement shopping? Read the rest of this entry »