Archive for 2020

Well… this all feels sort of pointless now. But if you need a distraction from any coronavirus-induced anxieties, let this be a brief respite.

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You can catch up on the first 10 rounds here and middle 10 rounds here. I’ve beaten to death the term “threading the needle” throughout these posts, but it’s an apt description for what I feel like I’ve had to accomplish with my particular strategy. “Walking a tightrope” is another.

The more time I’ve had to sit with my team, the longer I’ve had to disabuse myself of the notion that my team is any good. I still think it is, at least on the hitting side of things, but the pitching is as weak as it has been my last two seasons — or, if not as weak, at least as shallow. Most likely, I’ll be spending most of my FAAB (free agent acquisition budget) chasing pitching replacements, which is what I’ve done most of the last two years, too. Oh well.

Let’s wrap this sucker up, stream-of-consciousness style.

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It’s draft season, which means it’s also draft recap season. Last year, I partook and subsequently recapped a few of my drafts. Folks seemed to enjoy them and/or find them beneficial. That’s good!

Incidentally, and unfortunately, all the drafts I recapped turned out terribly, and all my good teams (my league-winning National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) Online Championship team, my 3rd-place Tout Wars team, etc.) I let slumber. One of those terrible teams was my Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational (TGFBI) squad. I’ve returned to fight off my demons.

I will say: I feel much more well-prepared than I did last year. I feel more cogent, more lucid. Last year, I barely prepped. I was overconfident because of my 2018 success, in part, but primarily I was overwhelmed and burned out. I held firm convictions about hardly any player, which goes against every fiber of my fantasy baseball being.

This year, the opposite. I’m eager to correct my flaws from last year, starting, first and foremost, with actually preparing. Doesn’t mean I won’t totally botch this draft. I don’t fancy myself particularly good at 15-team leagues, excelling instead at 12-teamers, especially auctions. But, hey, no excuses. At least this time, someone else, instead of my own damn self, will have beaten me.

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New year, new deserved barrels metric. In October, I took a crack at devising a “deserved barrels” metric in which I took the basic components of a barrel — a hitter’s exit velocity (EV) and launch angle (LA) — and determined the capacity in which the components relate to Statcast’s barrel rate metric (barrels per batted ball event, or “Brls/BBE %” on Baseball Savant). I included squared terms (EV², LA²) assuming the relationship is not linear. (A launch angle that’s too steep is detrimental, for example.)

Further offseason research led me to additional insights:

• Launch angle consistency (“tightness”) is important, correlating with higher BABIPs and more repeatable EVs.
• Launch angle grade in general is important, especially for batted ball quality, not just batted ball frequency, as indicated by batting average on balls in play (BABIP).

There exist many measures of contact quality; barrel rate captures how often a hitter produces high-quality contact. (Hard-hit rate functions similarly but ignores launch angle, to my knowledge, making barrel rate arguably superior.) It only made sense, then, that the latter finding above — that launch angle tightness matters to batted ball quality — should be incorporated into my deserved barrels work somehow.

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Oftentimes, I write out of inspiration. This time, I write simply to write, because the subject happened to creep up into my thick ol’ skull without provocation, which I guess is a type of inspiration in and of itself but not wholly what I had in mind. No one specifically needs this post right now, or maybe everyone does. I don’t know.

Something I do see and have seen before, however, with frequency, are mentions of such-and-such player rising or falling in the ranks, usually by virtue of average draft position (ADP). ADP is a measure of a player’s rank by aggregating data for a whole boatload of snake drafts. It’s a good way of assessing a player’s market value.

The problem with ADP is, unless you have completed research nearly identical to this, you can’t possibly be expected to know how a player’s ADP rank might equate to a dollar value at auction. Having this knowledge, this intuition, is arguably helpful in understanding how much you’re staking on any particular player. Moreover, changes in ADP become easier to digest. Possibly. For me, it does. If you’ve never participated in an auction draft before, maybe it doesn’t.

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Using a format similar to the one Paul Sporer recently posted for 2020 Roto player rankings, below is the 2020 ranking of the Top 75 Outfielders for Ottoneu fantasy baseball.  Ottoneu leagues are auction style, but with no salaries listed (league dependent), think of these lists as simplified “snake draft” rankings (“which player would I take before the next”), or a value ranking of players above replacement level for 2020. Players with multi-position eligibility may receive a slight bump in value (2020 positions listed).  You can reference average Ottoneu player salaries here, but keep in mind these salaries fluctuate throughout the winter as rosters shape up towards the January 31st keeper deadline for all leagues.

Previous 2020 Ottoneu rankings:

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Using a format similar to the one Paul Sporer recently posted for 2020 Roto player rankings, below is the 2020 ranking of the Top 20 Second Basemen for Ottoneu fantasy baseball.  Ottoneu leagues are auction style, but with no salaries listed (league dependent), think of these lists as simplified “snake draft” rankings (“which player would I take before the next”), or a value ranking of players above replacement level for 2020. Players with multi-position eligibility may receive a slight bump in value (2020 positions listed).  You can reference average Ottoneu player salaries here, but keep in mind these salaries fluctuate throughout the winter as rosters shape up towards the January 31st keeper deadline for all leagues.

Previous 2020 Ottoneu rankings:

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Using a format similar to the one Paul Sporer recently posted for 2020 Roto player rankings, below is the 2020 ranking of the Top 20 Shortstops for Ottoneu fantasy baseball.  Ottoneu leagues are auction style, but with no salaries listed (league dependent), think of these lists as simplified “snake draft” rankings (“which player would I take before the next”), or a value ranking of players above replacement level for 2020. Players with multi-position eligibility may receive a slight bump in value (2020 positions listed).  You can reference average Ottoneu player salaries here, but keep in mind these salaries fluctuate throughout the winter as rosters shape up towards the January 31st keeper deadline for all leagues.

Previous 2020 Ottoneu rankings:

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The past three years, our Justin Mason has organized too-early mock (#2EarlyMock) drafts ahead of the next fantasy baseball season. The 15-team snake drafts have taken place each September, which means I’m recounting this about two months too late. However, with some early offseason developments and the release of Steamer’s 2020 projections, the wait at least offers the benefits of both hindsight and foresight.

There’s no such thing as average draft position (ADP) data in September, so we rolled into these drafts blind to everything but our own recency biases. The dynamic is compelling, if frequently odd, and can be difficult, frustrating, but ultimately enthralling to endure. Ideally, my commentary here will not painfully boring and might provide insight into my “process” on a microcosmic level.

My draft was not without fault, but I do feel good about it. I’d like to think that means something, as someone highly critical of his drafts and rarely feels truly “good” about a roster I’ve compiled. I don’t play in many deep leagues, so 15-team drafts routinely jack me up. Somehow, I feel like not having ADP information actually benefited me; I feel like I scripted my draft more cogently than usual. But also, it’s fairly clear where I made suboptimal decisions. Overall, I don’t think it turned out half-bad, especially for a 15-teamer.

The results of my draft follow, and the minimum (“Min”) and maximum (“Max”) pick information comes from Smada’s ADP information compiled from all six #2EarlyMock drafts.

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A couple of weekends ago at BaseballHQ‘s First Pitch Arizona conference, The Athletic’s Eno Sarris and I talked about hitter metrics most descriptive and/or predictive of power. In Eno’s presentation, he included a quip from analyst Hareeb al-Saq:

“Knowing barrels on top of average EV [exit velocity] tells you a lot. Knowing average EV on top of barrels tells you a little.”

Eno was surprised by this finding — that barrel rate is a more beneficial metric than average EV, or even EV on a certain type of batted ball event (BBE), such as fly balls and line drives. Incidentally, this is something Al Melchior and I researched last year for which we reached the same conclusion: barrels, whether as a percentage of batted ball events or plate appearances, correlate more strongly than average, maximum, or fly ball/line drive EVs did to common power metrics such as home runs per fly ball (HR/FB), isolated power (ISO), or hard-hit rate (Hard%).

However, it made more sense to Eno when I articulated that calculating barrel rate is simply the act of isolating a hitter’s most-optimal batted ball events. In other words, the inclusion of launch angle (LA) adds another explanatory dimension to EV. In my head, it’s like having two separate circles — one for EV, the other for LA, each containing every individual batted ball outcome from the season — and overlapping them. The overlapped portion of the Venn diagram signifies barrels, and it changes in size depending on the quality of the batted ball events.

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Using a format similar to the one Paul Sporer recently posted for 2020 Roto player rankings, below is the 2020 ranking of the Top 20 First Basemen for Ottoneu fantasy baseball.  Ottoneu leagues are auction style, but with no salaries listed (league dependent), think of these lists as simplified “snake draft” rankings (“which player would I take before the next”), or a value ranking of players above replacement level for 2020. Players with multi-position eligibility may receive a slight bump in value (2020 positions listed).  You can reference average Ottoneu player salaries here, but keep in mind these salaries fluctuate throughout the winter as rosters shape up towards the January 31st keeper deadline for all leagues.

Since a majority of Ottoneu leagues are points leagues (offense based on linear weights), you’ll notice speed is less of a factor here than Paul’s rotisserie ranking lists.  Even if you don’t play Ottoneu, this list might be a good proxy for OBP, OPS, or sabermetric leagues, so keep that context in mind as you review.  If I’ve missed an important player, or you believe I’ve wildly over or under-valued someone, please let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to update.

In 2019, the 29 qualified first basemen averaged the following production:

• 5.88 Points Per Game (P/G)
• 30 HR
• 10% BB%
• 22% K%
• .227 ISO
• .268 AVG
• .353 OBP
• .495 SLG
• .354 wOBA
• 120 wRC+

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