Archive for fantasy baseball

It was Zach Britton, and not Dellin Betances, who got the save for the Yankees in their 3-2 win over the Red Sox in Tuesday night’s series opener. I have made Britton and Betances co-closers in the grid below, with both receiving the “Hot Seat” label. However, it’s not Britton’s adventure of an inning or Betances’ recent struggles that have put them on the hot seat, but rather that Aroldis Chapman could return as soon as Wednesday. It appears that Chapman’s worst-case scenario is a Thursday return, in the event that Aaron Boone wants to give the lefty an additional day of rest following Monday’s sim game.
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Wednesday’s slate of starting pitchers is not fully set, as there are still no fewer than five teams listing TBD as their starter as of this writing. I have filled in some of the blanks, projecting that Stephen Gonsalves will be the Twins’ primary pitcher and Sam Gaviglio will start for the Blue Jays. That increases the number of widely-available projected “starters” to eight, using a 25 percent ownership rate on Fantrax as a cutoff point.

While most owners are forsaking these hurlers, a few are reasonable streaming options, particularly in deeper formats.
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Edwin Diaz and Blake Treinen have stepped up as the elite relievers in 2018. We can’t know how Pedro Strop would have stacked up with The Big Two over a full season, because he was a setup reliever for most of the first half. However, after taking over for Brandon Morrow (biceps) after the All-Star break, Strop has been close to automatic as the Cubs’ closer. Only Diaz, Treinen and Jose Leclerc have had more Roto value among full-time closers in the second half (per CBS rankings).

Though he was not in a save situation, Strop was typically solid on Thursday, keeping the Cubs tied with the Nationals through 1.2 innings. With the Cubs taking the lead in the top of the 10th inning, Joe Maddon elected to have Strop bat in order to bring him back for a third inning. He pulled up with a hamstring injury while running out a grounder, and Randy Rosario had to come in to get the save.
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The beginning of September is not so long ago, and as the calendar was flipping and major league rosters were expanding, Carlos Rodon was one of the most productive starting pitchers in all of fantasy. He ranked 11th in Roto value among starting pitchers for July and August combined (per CBS rankings) and ninth in fantasy points in standard CBS points leagues over the same period. In short, Rodon had been performing like a fantasy ace for two solid months.

He was consistent, too. Every single one of Rodon’s nine starts in July and August was a quality start, and six of them lasted seven innings or more.
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For someone who had managed to pile up 28 saves, Bud Norris never seemed to have a firm grasp on the Cardinals’ closer role. Now he has lost his grip on the job entirely.

On Sunday, Mike Shildt named Carlos Martinez as the team’s new closer, and Norris is being moved to a lower-leverage role, albeit one that will still involve the later innings. Martinez had already been called upon to close out Wednesday’s 7-6 win over the Nationals, as Norris was unavailable, and then he recorded his first save as the team’s official closer on Sunday. His 1-2-3 ninth inning finished off a 5-2 win over the Tigers.
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Thursday’s slate was short on games — just four of them — but it was not totally devoid of closer developments. Two of the contests went to extra innings, and in the case of the Braves-Diamondbacks game, closer failure played a role in the game going beyond regulation. The Braves rolled into the bottom of the ninth inning with a 6-4 lead, but Brian Snitker did not have A.J. Minter to close out the game, since he had thrown 36 pitches in Wednesday’s loss to the Red Sox. Instead, Snitker turned to Jesse Biddle, who entered with a streak of nine straight appearances without an earned run, covering 8.1 innings.
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For a pitcher who has been ignored by the vast majority of fantasy owners this season, we’ve given Felix Pena quite a bit of attention here at RotoGraphs. Back in July, both Jeff Zimmerman and Paul Sporer noted Pena’s somewhat limited sleeper appeal. More recently, Jeff pointed out Pena’s declining fastball velocity and strikeout rate in his analysis of most-dropped players.
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Heading into Tuesday night’s game against the Nationals, we had already been given an indication that if the Cardinals needed a closer, they were not likely to go with Bud Norris. Mike Shildt told reporters that he was probably going to avoid using his incumbent closer on the night after he had given up Bryce Harper’s game-tying home run, which came the day after he yielded back-to-back 10th inning homers to Eugenio Suarez and Brandon Dixon. In fact, neither Norris nor Carlos Martinez were available for Tuesday night’s game against the Nationals, so Shildt set out to use Jordan Hicks as his closer, should he need one.
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When I started writing Two Good Starts, Two Bad Starts earlier this season, the idea wasn’t to point out trends in small samples so that fantasy owners could act on them right away. That is almost always a bad idea. It was to identify changes in pitcher performance that could conceivably turn into longer-term trends, which in turn could be useful guides for making roster decisions. It could have easily been called Who To Put On Your Watch List.

Now that Labor Day is behind us, there isn’t much time left for small samples to become sufficiently large samples for making decisions. Then again, if you are still in contention, roster decisions will be especially crucial going forward. If you’ve been on autopilot in starting Jon Gray every week, there’s no time like now to consider if he is potentially worth benching. Similarly, if you continue to dismiss John Gant, even as he has shaved close to a run off his ERA over the past four weeks, you may be doing so at your own risk. Or maybe not…
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Just shy of a month ago, on the day the Rays dealt Chris Archer to the Pirates, Thomas Bassinger of the Tampa Bay Times looked into why the hometown team’s presumed ace had put together a less-than-ace-quality season. The explanation was clear and compelling. Archer was leaving his slider out in the middle of the strike zone too often when he was facing lefties. That went a long way towards shedding light on why Archer had yielded a respectable .312 wOBA against right-handed batters but a bloated .347 wOBA against lefties in his final go-around with the Rays.
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