Insect Trust Flashback

With draft season over and duly reported upon, we have been brooding about what new worlds to conquer. Our long-promised sabermetric investigations are forthcoming, but they take time, and we’ll no doubt be staggering down many blind alleys and culs-de-sac before we get someplace worth bringing you to. We’ll keep providing progress reports—well, status reports, anyway—on Team Birchwood in the NFBC Main Event, but those won’t take long, even if our bargain-basement starting pitchers stop igniting upon exposure to oxygen and we move up in the standings.

Meanwhile, having been irritated during draft season by so-called experts touting so-called sleepers who were already well-known in places like Kazakhstan, we find ourselves even more irked by these same experts, now that the season’s started, touting waiver wire pickups that are probably making casual fans on Pluto sneer. Let’s quickly do a Google search and see what we come up with. “Week 3 Waiver Wire.…” Hmmm… pre-injury Jake Lamb. Odubel Herrera. Drew Pomeranz. Wade Davis, for God’s sake. We’ll accept arguendo that there are dilletantish Plutonian 10-team mixed leagues in which some of these guys might be available. But if you’re far gone enough to be reading not just Rotographs but this particular blog, you or somebody else in your league already owns them. So what exactly do you do when, say—this is of course completely fanciful–Brett Lawrie disables your left fielder with a slightly-misdirected hard slide and it’s time to go replacement shopping?

We’re here for you. In our brief intervals of FIL (that’s Fantasy-Independent Life), we’ve been reading and enjoying Going Into the City, the recently-published memoir by the great music/literary/cultural critic (and ardent baseball fan) Robert Christgau. Since 1969, he’s been issuing, in various forms and in various publications, brief reviews of current recordings. He calls this feature, or anyway used to call it, with Marcusian irony—this is 1969, remember—the Consumer Guide. Christgau used it to elaborate on and explain his theory of Pop. But he also meant it as exactly what he called it: purchasing and listening recommendations for people who spent money and time on popular music but had less time to investigate it than he did and didn’t have access to free records. His favorite part of it, he says, was unearthing commercial duds and obscurities and telling people about them—sharing (and infecting others with) his enthusiasms. As he notes in his memoir, anybody can recommend the Rolling Stones, but it’s an accomplishment to recognize the greatness of the Insect Trust (this is 1969, remember), and a trip (again—1969) to think that someone out there, once apprised of this greatness, appreciates your suggestion and feels that life has been enriched thereby.

If you read any of our posts during the run-up to the draft, you know that obscurity and apparent failure are our bread and butter. (Actually, to borrow from Woody Allen, obscurity is our bread, apparent failure is our butter.) Why tell people about Wade Davis when you can be gloriously wrong about Sergio Santos? So continuing in this vein, we hereby institute the Birchwood Brothers’ Consumer Alert. It’s not a “Guide” because we’re staggering around like the rest of you, only more so. But, like the rest of you, we’re consumers of baseball statistics and the proper names attached to them, spend a lot of time on these things, and seek the Fantasy equivalent of the Insect Trust. We’d be doing this anyway—we are in fact doing it anyway—so we might as well tell you about it.

Here’s how we conceive of it. Each week, guys get hurt or get healthy, give subtly encouraging or subtly disappointing performances, get used differently, change spots in the batting order, get called up, get sent down, get caught taking investment advice from Lenny Dykstra, and so on. We will (1) report on some of those developments, insofar as they seem Fantasy-relevant and not too obvious to mention, and (2) speculate on what to do about them. We pledge that we won’t promote anyone owned (according to Yahoo) in more than 25% of Fantasy leagues, and that we won’t un-promote anyone who’s owned in fewer than 50% of leagues.

Which brings us to this week’s flyer, the first-ever Birchwood Brothers Consumer Alert Pick Hit (terminology in homage to Christgau). Behold Jake Marisnick. We are mystified as to why he’s not owned in more leagues, but he isn’t, and we didn’t look just at Yahoo. But, you may say, in 2014 Marisnick had 237 major league plate appearances, in which struck out 71 times (28.3%) and walked 8 (3.4%) with an OBP of .281, which given his speed (which nonetheless helped him get a .336 BABIP) is very sad and indicative of weak contact. To which we respond: 1) while not great, his minor league numbers are better and he is only 24; 2) his hard contact rate improved in the second half of the season; and 3) we think Dan Rosenheck’s work showing that some spring training statistics do matter sheds some light on Marisnick. Ignore the .404 OBP and the high rate of extra-base hits. Focus instead on the fact that, in 47 spring training appearances, he struck out only 8 times and walked 3. That kind of growth is sustainable—and indeed, And so far in 42 regular-season appearances, he’s struck out only 6 times.

Marisnick’s gold-glove-caliber fielding will keep him in the Houston lineup. If he gets 500 PA, strikes out only 20% of the time, and walks 5%, his average is going to be closer to .270 or .280 than .250 with that .336 BABIP and a very reasonable 10 HR projection (Bill James thinks so). He will be on base about 150 times and should be in a position to attempt around 30 steals, with about 24 successful. Ten home runs, 24 stolen bases, an above-average BA, and a decent number of runs scored, courtesy of the power hitters who follow Jose Altuve in the Astros’ lineup, makes for a top-75 (or maybe better) outfielder. And that’s if he continues batting 9th in the order–if he starts batting 2nd, say, the numbers should be even better.

And if you’re looking to drop somebody from your roster, may we suggest Mat Latos (owned in 67% of leagues)? We expressed some enthusiasm about him before the season, but score one for the guys who actually watch games, as opposed to just watching stats: the drop in pitch velocity is real, harmful, and quite possibly permanent. If you need to open a roster spot, we suspect you won’t miss him.

Meanwhile, what of Team Birchwood in the NFBC Main Event? Well, if our pitching were doing as well as our hitting, we’d be in 7th place overall among 450 teams. Conversely, if our hitting were doing as badly as our pitching, we’d be in 441st place. As it is, we’re midpack: 218th. Our response was to spend 25 FAABs (out of a total budget of 1000) on Travis Wood. Our starting pitchers at the moment: Alex Wood, Gio Gonzalez, Drew Hutchison, Trevor Cahill, Chase Anderson, Travis Wood, Dallas Keuchel, Mike Leake, and Ian Kennedy on the sidelines. We’re using all of the active starters this week except Hutchison, whose last two starts have been dismal. This should be a signal for him to pitch a one-hitter against the Orioles, as he did last year.