I wrote up the home run derby contestants on our sister site The Hardball Times earlier in the day, but I thought I would give you some additional charts in case you were thinking about putting down some gummi bears on the outcome of the home run derby coming up soon. All stats in the charts are current Through Monday, July 15, and the odds come from Sports.Bodog.Eu. It looks like there are two front-runners according to these numbers.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
That’s right, we have a new number one. For many of you, it’ll be far too late to move Albert Pujols off the top of the heap. But, given how his season went last year, and the excellence he’s shown his whole career, and his combination of contact and power, and his bad batting average on balls in play, it seemed like the good bet was on him to recapture some magic once he was healthy. Maybe the all-star break will help him, but now the mounting evidence about his decline (three-year declines in ISO and HR/FB in particular) is just too much to ignore.
The replacement top dog is not by consensus, however. It’s a pick em, so my ranking got the extra weight. It’s what the boss does in situations like this. But it is worth noticing that all four rankers had a different number one first baseman. Who’s your number one?
New Britain, Connecticut — Rain, humidity, and the Western Division dominated the 2013 Eastern League All Star Game in New Britain, Connecticut.
The game took place at the home of the New Britain Rock Cats on July 10th, and there were a few standouts for Eastern and Western divisions, with the West side taking down the East side (ok, kind of a ridiculous hip-hop reference there)5-0.
Here’s some of the standout moments and talent that graced the field:
As a Seattle resident, I have the pleasure of attending a good number of Mariner’s games each year, mostly in the company of another founding member of ottoneu (owner of this team). A couple weeks back, we attended a game and marveled at the massive swings being taken by one Raul Ibanez, which led to one of us commenting, “It’s like he’s decided, ‘Screw it – I’m old and I am going to try to crush the ball, even if I can’t do anything else.”
It reminded me of the Jerry Seinfeld quip about old people backing out of their driveways: “I’m old and I’m coming back! I survived, let’s see if you can.”
Brooklyn, New York- In his two most recent starts, Giovanny Gallegos pitched like two very different pitchers. In his first year of short-season ball with the Staten Island Yankees, that’s unsurprising. While he got hit hard in his final start of June, it was good to see manager Justin Pope leave him in to work it out through three innings, despite coughing up an early 4-0 lead to the Hudson Valley Renegades.
Gallegos (pronounced Guy-A-Gos) struggled to throw strikes in the early part of his June 27th outing, unable to consistently locate his fastball. His fastball overpowers hitters low in the zone, but on that day, he couldn’t move it around the strike zone effectively.
Ricky Nolasco has a career FIP of 3.81. Ricky Nolasco has a career ERA of 4.44. If the season ended today, it would be the second time he’d ever shown an ERA under four. Given his skill set (good strikeout rate for a starter, excellent control) and home park (both versions of Miami’s home park were pitcher-friendly), it’s a bit surprising. But since that breakout second, full season in 2008, Nolasco has frustrated his owners. Now that he’s finally on the move to Los Angeles, which boasts a pitcher’s park, but also a better team, are all systems go? What about the fact that ERA becomes a better tool when you’re talking about 1000-inning samples? Is Nolasco somehow fatally flawed?
When I was on The Sleeper and the Bust with Mike Podhorzer a few weeks ago, he told me about his process for finding value in daily contests. The basic idea is that he breaks the rest-of-season ZIPS projections down to a fantasy points per game basis and then compares that to cost to find the biggest values. As I’ve learned, that process takes a bit of work, so I’m going to walk you through it.
The first step is to get the rest-of-season ZIPS projections into a spreadsheet. You can find daily updated projections from the ‘Projections’ tab at the top of the site. Then you need to eliminate the stats and columns that are not needed in order to calculate how many fantasy points a player is projected to score for the rest of the year. But don’t delete the games column; you’ll need it later to calculate projected points per game. Read the rest of this entry »
A couple months ago, I shared a piece that explained how I pro-rate standings in ottoneu leagues to figure out where I ACTUALLY stand and what I should be doing moving forward. Now that we are at the half-way mark, I wanted to revisit that piece, make a couple adjustments to my process, and update my plans.
If you haven’t read that piece, you can start with that and take a look at how I look at all stats on a per-game and per inning basis in roto leagues and the score I use in points leagues to see a more realistic look at what each team is doing.
Aaron Griffin struck out a season high four batters in his fourth and final outing of June, but that’s just part of what you’re going to get from the Rays RHP prospect.
Griffin was economical and used a mixed bag of tricks to get Brooklyn Cyclones hitters out, going four innings without allowing a run and holding them to just four hits.
Gavin Cecchini started the 2013 season where he ended it, in the Class-A (short season) New York Penn League, with the Brooklyn Cyclones. But the Penn League was not a proving ground in 2012, as he only played in five games, starting just one, and pinch running in the other four.
The shortstop, 20, has begun the season productive, consistent, and was noticeably bulkier than last year; he approximated he put on about between 10-12 pounds, in a conversation in early June. Regularly hitting second or third in the lineup, he’s had a hit in six of the eight games the Cyclones have played. He put together a five-game hitting streak, collecting three multi-hit games in that stretch.
