Archive for Uncategorized

This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, rotation, and bullpen) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

Between Yasmany Tomas’ attempt at third base and the messy catcher situation, this infield might look quite different once the season starts. Elsewhere, there’s an obvious star at first base and two players in the middle infield who could provide solid value.

Catcher
Tuffy Gosewisch
Oscar Hernandez
Gerald Laird

In the minors
Peter O’Brien

Gosewisch, 31, has 179 career plate appearances with a .213 batting average and one home run. He has three career walks. Hernandez was the first overall pick in the Rule 5 draft last year. He is 21 and hit .249 in Single-A last season.

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Our long National League nightmare is over. Two and a half weeks and 750 draft picks after it began, the NFBC slow draft is done. Though we used it primarily as preparation for our NFBC Main Event draft in April, we weren’t opposed to success, though it may seem that way when you review what we did.

Our draft can be described, accurately and justly, as “high-risk, high-reward.” It can also be described, with equal accuracy and justice, as “feeble.” Laugh and weep with us as we explain what we were planning to do, what we thought we were doing, and what we actually did. And that’s right, wise guys, it was in fact a mixed-league draft, but we liked our opening line too much to jettison it.

Our strategy going in to the draft was animated by several insights, or, if you prefer, delusions. They were:

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Jeff Sullivan pointed out that Stroman discovered Roy Halladay’s Sinker and presented his arsenal change (Fourseam and Cutter swapped for more Sinkers):

Stroman upped his Sinker usage and was comfortable using the pitch despite the count situation. From Sullivan’s post on 2/13:

Stroman was comfortable using the sinker when behind in the count against all hitters. Same when he was ahead in the count. Same when he was even. Same on the first pitch. Same with two strikes. He’s got other pitches, a lot of other pitches, and he still has his four-seamer, too, when he wants to elevate some heat, but the sinker has given Stroman something he didn’t have: a groundball pitch he can locate and use to get quick outs.

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We’re entering draft season! FanGraphs Staff Two is busy preparing for our first day of drafting next Sunday. The goal is to finish in one afternoon, but we’ll have time for a second day if it’s needed. Ottoneu produces some lengthy auctions due to the deep player pool. I recommend you follow our example and target an early draft date.

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In our last séance together, we confided to you our passion for Ender Inciarte. That passion was sparked by our attempt to identify hitters who, over the course of the 2014 season, figured out something new about hitting, and were recognized as such by opposing pitchers. In doing that, we also came across hitters who appear to have been tamed during the season, in that they were both seeing better pitches and chasing more bad ones, with declining results. We provided lists of the top- and bottom-20 hitters, according to this metric. One of the top guys was Ender Inciarte. Now we’ll interrogate (as they used to say in Deconstructionland) those lists, see how they answer, and try to separate signal from noise.

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There is a long list of things for which you will not find us useful. On that list are, among other pastimes, auto repair, ballroom dancing, cat sitting, and identifying with microscopic precision how good players whom the world already knows to be good are going to be this season. We mention this because we are starting to see articles identifying “sleepers” for the coming season, and most of the guys identified strike us as being wide awake.

For example: we like Kolten Wong a lot. Indeed, as we will come to discuss in the fullness of time, we drafted him in our slow draft. But he’s a good example of the players who are turning up on sleeper lists, when in fact he’s well known to anyone who played Fantasy Baseball or followed Reality Baseball last season.

Here’s a young, highly touted prospect with a good minor league record who’s given the starting second base job in St. Louis, craps out, is banished to Louisville, comes back refreshed, and performs well. Why wouldn’t you have him in your sights?

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This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, rotation, and bullpen) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

As fantasy baseball players, we often find discrepancies between a player’s value “in real life” and his value in fantasy leagues. Or even between his actual value and his role on the team. The best relief pitcher isn’t always the closer, for example, or a nominal ace is really the third best starter on his team. This latter example might very well apply to the 2015 Blue Jays.

Most depth charts are going to show you that R.A. Dickey and Mark Buehrle are the Jays’ number one and two starters, respectively. They are the grizzled veterans, they have fairly lucrative contracts, and they have some track record of success. They have thrown a lot of league-average-or-slightly-better innings over the last few years, and that has real life value.

But the Blue Jays have an exciting crop of younger starters, two of whom were probably more valuable than their elders last year, and certainly project to be more valuable going forward—both for their actual teams and for their fake teams.

For the 2015 Blue Jays rotation, the gap between nominal real life role and fantasy value coincides with a vast gap in age: those 36 and older, whose value in real life doesn’t cross over very well to fantasy leagues, and those 26 and younger, whose fantasy upside for 2015 and beyond is considerable.

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Welcome. We are two brothers, aggregate age 122 years, of which roughly 106 have been spent as stat geeks and baseball fans, probably in descending order of intensity. One of us, Michael, resides in Manhattan and is a former academic economist, self-described as an idiot savant in econometrics. He’s why you’ll keep reading, if you do. The other, Dan, resides in Albany, New York, the hub of civic virtue, and knows how to type. He also knows just enough about economics and statistics to translate for the multitudes when his brother is speaking in tongues.

Astonishingly, Michael was a Fantasy Baseball virgin until last year, when his brother tarnished his theretofore-unsullied innocence by recruiting him to replace an owner who went AWOL at the last moment in a $50 buy-in league. It might as well have been an introduction to freebase, and overnight, homemade multiple regression analyses started popping up like toadstools. We’ll share the results of one recent study with you next time: an attempt to identify hitters who were pitched to differently, and reacted to the pitches they saw differently, in the second half of the 2014 season, betokening (we surmise) a newfound respect among their opponents. You don’t need our help to figure out that you might want to draft Nolan Arenado or perhaps Jedd Gyorko. But how about Ender Inciarte, Ike Davis, and Delmon Young, all of whom we recommend?

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This 30-part series will look at the projected Top 5 freshman contributors for each big league club for the year ahead. The rankings take into consideration a mixture of ceiling, readiness and potential playing time allocation, which is to say some players with lower ceilings may be ranked ahead of others with higher ceilings because they project to have a greater impact in the coming season.

In a Nutshell: The immense (and enviable) depth in the system means that there may not be many opportunities for prospects in 2015 despite the high level of talent ready to contribute. The club already has a solid mix of high-ceiling youngsters like Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts and newly-acquired veteran players like Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez to go with the established stars on the club. The biggest opportunity for youngsters to break into the Majors will likely come on the mound.

1. Henry Owens, LHP: As mentioned above, the enviable depth on the mound in Boston is evident but the back end of the Sox rotation could be vulnerable to injury and/or inconsistency — which could create opportunity for Owens. The tall, lanky southpaw spent most of 2014 in Double-A but also made six appears in Triple-A. His command and control are both hit and miss at times but, when he’s on, he can be down right dominant as witnessed by his 170 strikeouts in 159 innings last season. Just 22, he should be ready for The Show in just his fourth pro season.

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This 30-part series will look at the projected Top 5 freshman contributors for each big league club for the year ahead. The rankings take into consideration a mixture of ceiling, readiness and potential playing time allocation, which is to say some players with lower ceilings may be ranked ahead of others with higher ceilings because they project to have a greater impact in the coming season.

In a Nutshell: Pitching should be the strength of the Orioles’ freshman class of 2015, with no fewer than six pitchers nearly ready to take a big bite out of The Show. The more advanced hitters in the system don’t have huge ceilings but they could develop into solid complementary players.

1. Dylan Bundy, RHP: Bundy’s meteoric rise through the minors was halted by Tommy John surgery and he missed the entire 2013 season. The 22-year-old right-hander returned to the mound in 2014 but appeared in just nine games. He’ll hopefully enter 2015 with no restrictions and open the year in Double-A. If his elbow appears sound, and his command returns, he could be a solid contributor in Baltimore during the second half of the year. He still has top-of-the-rotation potential.

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