Forensic Accounting

“Who knows how his audit stands save heaven,” says Hamlet as he contemplates offing Claudius in light of the latter’s prospects for a pleasant hereafter. We’ve always loved the idea of God as the ultimate IRS agent: dissemble as much as you like, but he knows that you’ve been paying the nanny off the books and that you made out like a bandit at your garage sale.

We think of this now because it’s time to review our first-half ledger, and since by definition we’re examining how the players we’ve recommended in this blog have done, there’s no place to hide. This week, we’ll take a look at players we recommended during the pre-season, either in our Cold Predictions post or at some other point—everyone we went out of our way to discuss and promote before April. We don’t think we missed anyone; correct us if we’re wrong. Next week, we’ll give a full statistical report on our in-season Pick Hits and Muscular Boys, who are the guys we’ve been endorsing or dispraising if you need, respectively, to fill or unplug a roster spot. We may also issue a progress report on our preseason list of “Unusual Prospects,” who were huge-longshot minor leaguers to consider in abyssally deep drafts. But the only takeaway worth taking away on that one is that you may want to grab catcher Tomas Telis if the Rangers ever get around to promoting him, as they should.

As to the major-league predictions, a couple of preliminary points. We got some right and some wrong, but (with one possible exception, as to which see the comment below on T.J. House and Jordan Schafer), we don’t have an overarching explanation of why which was which. Sometimes one type of stat flagged a successful player, sometimes the same type proved to be a snare and a delusion. We also have no idea how we stack up against other forecasters. Our specialty, if you can call it that, is the marginal, the obscure, the ignored, and the forgotten. By and large, we were looking for players who’d be 20th-round or later picks in a snake draft, or $1 or reserve-round buys in an auction. So more of our launches are going to crater than those of the forecasters whose idea of a bold prediction was Kolten Wong or Carlos Carrasco.

Let’s take a quick look, though, at our ventures into Wong/Carrasco territory. We were mistaken about the unfathomable Jedd Gyorko, although he’s shown some signs of life this month. We envisioned a partial bounceback from Carlos Beltran, which didn’t happen. We got more or less what we thought we’d get from Rougned Odor and Marlon Byrd, but we can’t take any credit, because what we thought we’d get isn’t all that different from what you thought you’d get. We made good calls on Yasmani Grandal (to whom we assigned “a non-trivial shot at a Mesoracoesque breakout, and of being the third- or fourth-best Fantasy catcher rather than the 14th”) and Luke Gregerson (who we thought was the clear likely winner of the Astros closer sweepstakes, and whom we expected, as of early March, “to outperform some of the guys ahead of him—Nathan, Mejia, McGee, Reed, Perkins, maybe a few others.”).

Now for our work with the downtrodden. We’ll divide these picks into four categories: Catastrophically Awful; Wrong, But Not Dishonorably So; Approximately Right, But What’s the Big Deal?; and The Blind Pig and the Acorn.

Among the catastrophically awful we find T.J. House and Jordan Schafer. House (for whom we modestly predicted some Cy Young votes) had four dismal April starts that can’t have been any more excruciating for him than they were for his owners. Then he went on the DL with tendinitis, came off the DL for another four undistinguished starts in Triple-A, and went back on the DL, where he remains. Schafer, for whom we humbly forecast the AL stolen base crown, was handed the Twins’ center field job, as we’d envisioned, was terrible for about a month (.217/.250/.261, with zero SBs in three attempts), as we hadn’t, went on the DL with a knee sprain, and got released before he played again.

For both players, the tipoff may have been spring training. We noted Schafer’s underwhelming Spring SB rate at the time, but didn’t take it seriously. Now it looks as if we should have. We don’t know whether the knee sprain was a brand new injury, which is how it was reported, or an aggravation of a preexisting one, but it doesn’t matter: even before the sprain, it seemed probable that Schafer had simply lost his speed. The fact that Schafer—supposedly recovered, 28 years old, and a decent outfielder who’s in the all-time top 100 in SB rate—hasn’t caught on anywhere else suggests that the rest of MLB also thinks so.

House is an even more interesting case, Fantasywise. Analysts occasionally flag improved performance by hitters in the second half of spring training as the sign of a good regular season. A-Rod is the obvious example of this in 2015, though of course he’s a special and unusual case. But does it work with pitchers, too? Does it work to treat spring training as a “season” with Fantasy-significant contours? We don’t know. Dan Rosenheck has done groundbreaking work on the subject of the significance of spring training stats–he’s concluded they’re significant–but as far as we know nobody else has, and even Rosenheck (again as far as we know) hasn’t explored this mini-season issue. House was quite good in the first half of March and not good in the second half. We’d guess that he was hurting in the second half and didn’t tell anyone about it. But, as with Schafer, it doesn’t matter. The spring training stats were there for all to see, and unambiguous once you posit that second-half performance is meaningful. By ignoring them and relying on House’s second-half performance in 2014 as an indicator of his 2015 regular-season performance, we put ourselves at a disadvantage.

Back to the bookkeeping. We were wrong, though not humiliatingly so, about Grady Sizemore and Peter Bourjos, whose improvement during the second half of 2014 turns out not to have mattered in 2015. Bourjos’s fielding and SB/CS stats suggest that he’s in the same foundering boat as Schafer. We predicted Todd Cunningham would win the Braves’ center field job. That was when his competition was Eric Young Jr. rather than Cameron Maybin, against whom we wouldn’t have liked his chances. But we confess that we thought Cunningham was a .270 hitter, rather than the .240 hitter he appears to be. We also predicted that Junichi Tazawa, rather than either Koji Uehara or Edward Mujica, would be the Red Sox closer by the end of May. We were a little bit right, because Mujica got shipped out after Tazawa vaulted over him, but also kind of wrong, because 40-year-old Uehara is still doing business at the old stand. Of course, there’s still the possibility that Uehara will be traded and start doing business at a new stand, in which case Tazawa inherits the job. But the Red Sox personnel decisions have been, shall we say, erratic, and for all we know what they’ll get in exchange for Uehara is Jonathan Papelbon.

We weren’t “wrong” about Mike Leake and Juan Nicasio, but we’re disappointed. We thought an improved Reds bullpen would let Leake throw fewer innings with better results. Instead, he’s having the same season he always does, which still makes him more valuable than he gets credit for being. Our claim for Nicasio was modest: we said he’d have “positive value” this season, which he probably does, just barely. But we expected him to find his way into the Dodgers’ starting rotation once the front line started getting hurt, and that’s just not how Don Mattingly sees things. As to Jonathan Singleton: we haven’t given up. We knew he didn’t have a job; we surmised he was no longer utterly clueless against left-handed pitching (check) and envisioned a midseason callup (check); but we also envisioned the callup would be attendant upon his getting a regular place in the Houston lineup (nope). If he does, we still like his chances.

Now for the acorns: Our heartthrob Ender Inciarte and our new poster boy Josh Phegley, for whom we predicted “at least 250 at bats” and “at least 10 home runs with a batting average that doesn’t embarrass him or you.” Don’t ask us how you’d have known to draft Inciarte and Phegley rather than House and Schaefer; we got ‘em all.

Finally, a pick that goes beyond acornness to clairvoyance. The first sentence of our Cold Predictions: “Jose Ramirez will hit .180 and spend most of the season in Akron.” Actual batting average: .176. Actual location: Columbus, which bespeaks our weak grasp of either Ohio geography or the Indians’ farm system, but is close enough. Of course, some stickler for detail will point out that the second sentence of our Cold Predictions was “Just kidding.” As post-ironists, you of course understood that we were just kidding about “Just kidding,” and wouldn’t have made the mistake of drafting him. Meanwhile, though, Ramirez electrified the home crowds in Dayton with a .349/.415/.477 slash line and some good fielding, while Francisco Lindor has an OPS of .568 in Cleveland, so now Jose is back in the bigs. He went 0 for 3 on Sunday. Stay tuned.

Life as we prefer it resumes as 2:10 Friday. Meanwhile, if the withdrawal symptoms grow too acute, have a look at yesterday’s post by Alex Chamberlain, discussing the momentous Birchwood-Brothers-hosted Rotographs midseason draft.