Archive for Uncategorized

The Yasiel Puig hype is out of control. After a hot spring, he landed on everyone’s fantasy radar and now here we are, four games into his major league career and already we are shipping his cleats off to Cooperstown and engraving the plaque. No one is screaming “small sample size” and no one is referring back to the throngs of ballplayers who made a big splash to open their careers yet did nothing to follow it up. Instead, we’re being inundated with comparisons to already well-established superstars, insane statistical projections and lists of Cuban-born players who have found success in Major League Baseball. In fact, the amount of Cuban history that I have seen, heard and read about in the past week is overwhelming. So much so that I have actually decided to try out a brand new strategy for my fantasy team. I have decided to become a fantasy racist. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ll stretch yourself into pretzels trying to convince yourself that a past great is a buy low. And sometimes it’s worth it — Cole Hamels and Matt Cain seem to be doing just about the same thing they’ve ever done, and betting on their career numbers is a good bet. But sometimes, there just isn’t enough grip on the mat to reach your finger to click that trade proposal button. The mat gets slippery, and for good reason.

Is Yovani Gallardo just a downward-facing dog with no bounce left?

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Among a slew of pitchers, there are three catchers whose names appear on the list of most auctioned players in the ottoneu world: Jason Castro, Chris Iannetta and Yan Gomes.

Catcher has been a bit of an odd position this year, with pre-season favorites like Salvador Perez and Miguel Montero struggling; unexpected contributions from the likes of Josh Donaldson and Evan Gattis; and the early season suspensions to Yasmani Grandal and Carlos Ruiz. It’s no surprise that so many owners are trying to get this position figured out.

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With every passing season, it seems that the amalgamation of starting pitching talent in the major leagues has gotten both progressively deeper and more dominant. Most of the speculation on the topic centers around the idea that the harshening regulations and increased testing of PEDs led to less runs being scored because hitters were physically weaker, and therefore worse at hitting.

That response to this trend feels narrative-driven at best, and I’ve found that most of the time, the simplest explanation is the best explanation. And the simplest explanation for the recent dominance of pitchers is: there just happens to be an inordinately large number of really good starters in the major leagues right now. Tonight’s games are no exception.

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Bobby Parnell notched his ninth save of the year in a 3-1 Mets victory over the Yankees tonight. For the Metropolitans, the win surprisingly sealed a series sweep against their crosstown rivals, providing them with some momentum as they head back into divisional play against the Marlins, Nationals and the Marlins again over the course of the next two weeks. For Parnell, it was his third consecutive save and the third outing in-a-row without surrendering a hit. The lanky right-hander whiffed one-of-three batters this evening, bringing his whiff rate to 25% on the season. The current 25% K% is actually higher than he’s had in the past two seasons — 23.9% and 21.2% respectively — despite missing fewer bats (8.6% SwStr%) than he has over that same time (9.8% SwStr% in ‘11, 10.1% SwStr% in ‘12). The previous data leads me to believe that Parnell’s strikeout rate could continue to rise if his ability to miss bats regresses toward his career 9.6% SwStr%. His recent success parlayed with the news that Frank Francisco was transferred to the 60-day disabled list today with continued elbow issues further proves that Parnell’s grip on the closer’s role in Flushing continues to get stronger.

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Finally, the “Updated Middle Reliever Tiers” are complete, for now. Each of the five standard pitching categories — and of course holds — played a role in determining these tiers.

The first two tiers were pretty simple to establish. Horses like Mark Melancon, Jesse Crain and Trevor Rosenthal seem to have separated themselves from the rest of the pack through the first two months of the season and are elite middle relief commodities at this point. But when it came time to find homes for the Aaron Loups and Cody Allens of the world, I felt like I was splitting hairs.

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Since you read Fan/RotoGraphs, you’re probably in the habit of looking at any number of peripheral stats while searching for your next streamer or roster plug. Allow me to add to the noise as you attempt to talk yourself into taking a chance on certain pitchers, while talking yourself out of others.

You might look at K%, for instance, which is a much better indicator of a pitcher’s usefulness than K/9, though K/9 is a much more common stat in that a number of sites will list it, and is included in lieu of K% on the default leaderboards at FanGraphs itself. Because K% displays strikeouts as a percentage of batters faced as opposed to the number of outs recorded (essentially what K/9 does), it is a better indicator of how efficient a pitcher is at striking batters out.

Understandably, then, K% correlates with IP, W, ERA, and WHIP at a significantly higher rate than K/9 does. Because I am an obsessive baseball lout, like you, reader, I recently explored differences in pitchers’ K/9 and K% just for the hell of it; while the results where not surprising, they were interesting. The results can be found here.¹

What was slightly more interesting was when I went started fooling around with F-Strike% and saw how it correlates with certain other 5×5 stats. Generally, it correlates well with those stats, especially WHIP and IP. Eno Sarris explored the effect of F-Strike% on BB% last summer, and found that F-Strike% “explains almost half of the variance in walk rate.” This jives with the -0.401 correlation between F-Strike% and WHIP that I found.¹

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As a player owed in just 2% of Yahoo! leagues, Luke Scott can be an attractive option for teams in need of power from the utility or first base spot. His availability depends on the league, I own him in a CBS league where he only can be played as a utility option but in a Yahoo! league where he can be played at first as well. For reference, he played six games at first base last year.
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Young pitching is killing it this year. My staffs, full of Matt Harvey, Shelby Miller, Jose Fernandez and David Phelps are treating me very well right now. From one standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to plan this kind of staff. The work done by Bill Petti and Jeff Zimmerman shows that, as a pitcher, you’re busy dying as soon as you’re born. So get the younger pitchers!

The problem is the lack of track record. In the case of two hot young things, we’re left with one start and a decision. When it comes to a redraft at least — in dynasties, those dudes are long gone.

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Home runs are obviously the best way to pick up points in a Draftstreet contest. You get credit for a point per total base, so home runs are worth four points. But in reality they are worth at least seven points because you also get a point and a half each for the run and the RBI. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to go for power in every slot on a salary cap team. The guys who hit consistently for power are priced accordingly, and you can’t afford to take a consistent power hitter in each slot.

Find yourself a stud or two with a favorable lefty-righty matchup against a bad pitcher and try to get your power there. But elsewhere, you’re going to have to find points in other ways. And one other way is to identify good situations for base stealers. A stolen base is worth two points, but really it’s worth 2.75-3 points because the player has to walk (.75 points) or get a single (one point) in order to attempt a steal.

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