How Much To Upgrade Away Hitters at Colorado?

Just a quick note: This article got “lost” and was not published early last month. The information is still applicable.

Early last month, I was surprised by the scrub hitters being rostered for a game at Colorado.

These hitters would never be considered in a normal week but were assumed to morph into All-Stars. Truthfully, I didn’t have a good way to set an ‘add/no add’ cut-off, so here is my best attempt at a simple solution. I tried to come at the answer several ways, but I think the following procedure would be the easiest to use across most fantasy formats.

The first step is to find out how much to boost up a hitter’s production. For this value, I took all the opposing hitters from 2017 to 2021 who had 12 PA in Colorado and 50 PA during the season. Then I found the difference between their Colorado OPS from their Steamer and final season OPS. Finally, I found the median and average values from these differences.

A person could split hairs and do some fancy averaging of the values, but a 100 point boost in OPS works fine for me. And it is simple.

The valuation boost will stay at 100 OPS if the league rules allow just for the Colorado games to be counted (daily lineups or mid-week replacements). If the player must be started for the whole week, make sure to not give them the OPS boost for the whole week. For example, if a hitter has half his games at home and half in Colorado, the OPS boost for the week is just 50 points.

The next step is to find your league’s replacement level hitter. I was trying to find a way to remove this step but has to be included and can be a bit messy as seen in the sample. If there are already decent hitters available on the wire, there is no reason to roster some scrub going to Coors Field. But if the waiver is picked over, any regular subpar hitter getting the boost could be a reasonable option.

To find a replacement level bat, take the six or so available hitters with the highest ownership rates and find their median OPS value. Here is an example for one of my NFBC Main Event teams.

Note: I know stolen bases can have a major influence on a player’s rostership rate so managers might not want to include rabbits (i.e. Victor Robles) in the OPS valuation.

The difference in projections and results is a little jarring, but that’s probably why these disappointing hitters are on the wire. I can just go with a value of .700 OPS. In this league, the hitter in Colorado should be started if their original OPS value is at .600 or higher.

Here is an example of trying to decide if Kevin Newman and Phillip Evans should be started.

In this instance, the answer is mixed depending on the evaluation system the manager uses. In my NFBC league that allows mid-week moves, both should have been started for the partial week. The deal is that if this season’s results are used, Newman is below (.515) the bottom threshold (.600) and Evans is fine. If projections are used to evaluate the hitter’s talent, Evans barely makes the cutoff and Newman is a must-start.

The other issue is to check playing time, while both played each game during the series, the playing time for Evans wasn’t clear (started six of the previous 10 games). Don’t count on a game or two for a hitter in the massive stadium to carry the week.

Again, it’s not great, but it is a fairly simple system to help decide which hitters should be or not be started in Colorado.