Archive for Fantasy

Every year, we here at RotoGraphs publish tiered rankings for every position and update them throughout the year. What you will read below are, more or less, my end-of-season projections for National League outfielders, since the season hasn’t started yet. However, these rankings will change as the year progresses, and I would be a fool to tell you the tiers below will look the same in September.

No doubt, this is a contentious matter, and you can tell me how much of a moron I am in the comments.

Without further ado, here is the 2015 season’s first installment of tiered rankings for NL outfielders.

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This is meant to be less of an overly serious analysis as it is an exercise in projecting minor league players in a new and different way. Unfortunately, Chris Mitchell has largely done what I’m about to present, and with more sophistication at that, so I’ll have to strike out the new part. But different? Sure, to an extent.

While Chris’ KATOH predicts a hitter’s probability of major league success by projecting career wins above replacement (WAR) thresholds, my model predicts probability of future success in the context of various career accomplishments: Will he be a better-than-replacement level starter? An All-Star? A future MVP? Ultimately, the exercise is simpler and more qualitative, evaluating strictly AAA stats (rather than all minor league levels, as KATOH does) and making predictions according to various marginal changes in common statistics such as isolated power (ISO), stolen base rate (SB/PA) and age. Think of the model as a series of player comparisons. Also, please think of the model as not a replacement or substitute for KATOH but a complement to it, albeit a less intense one. I will use this tool for analysis, but only infrequently; I recommend you keep up with all of Chris’ KATOH posts (as well as Kiley McDaniels‘ prospect coverage) to fulfill your prospect consumption needs.

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The baseball community — owners, scouts, fantasy analysts et al. — is slowly learning how Cuban hitters plucked from the Cuban National Series (CNS) perform in Major League Baseball. Unfortunately, the sample size is not increasing very quickly. The common fantasy owner is helplessly resigned to rely on a) scouting reports, and/or b) his or her own eyes, probably via a batting practice video uploaded online. Ideally, a Cuban hitter’s salary would serve as a proxy for what one could expect offensively and defensively from his imported bat and glove, but the market, and the information that defines it, is far from perfect.

The market for Cuban hitters is a pendulum, but rather than coming to rest, it is in full swing: hitters such as Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig and Jose Abreu, who are all but locks to fulfill the value of their modest contracts and then some, have plumped up the market for international signees. The Diamondbacks’ Yasmany Tomas, therefore, should not be compared to Abreu simply because the average annual values (AAV) of their contracts are almost identical. The dynamics of this particular market are nebulous, changing with every transaction.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t compare Tomas and Abreu statistically. Comparing the CNS and MLB performances of hitters more recently signed out of Cuba can still give us at least a faint idea of how we can expect Tomas to perform. This is my hope, at least. I’ll be the first to admit the analysis that follows is not as rigorous as I wish it could be, as the sample of contemporary, fantasy-relevant Cuban hitters who recently played in the CNS simply lacks breadth.

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I’d like to talk to you about Dellin Betances.

Wait! Wait. No. No, I wouldn’t. I’d like to talk about Mike Podhorzer first. Mike has published a lot of great work covering the fundamentals of the xK% (and xBB%) metric for pitchers (and hitters), so if you are unfamiliar with or falling behind on his work, I recommend you first click here, here or here. But if you’re lazy, the short of it is: xK%, or expected strikeout rate, is an equation birthed from a linear regression that measures how a pitcher’s looking, swinging and foul-ball strike rates as well as overall strike percentage correlates with his strikeout rate. It doesn’t predict future strikeout rates as much as it retrospectively adjusts past strikeout rates; thus, it is a good tool for identifying pitchers who potentially benefited (or suffered) from good (bad) luck in a previous season – say, 2014.

Like many other metrics completely unrelated to xK%, however, there is evidence that certain players consistently out-perform (or under-perform) what their xK% rates predict their actual K% rates should be. (Mike alludes to this trend in his quip about Jeremy Hellickson, a xK% underachiever, in one of the articles linked above.) Similarly to how a power hitter will post consistently higher ratios of home runs to fly balls (HR/FB) than a non-power hitter, or how Mike Trout will probably post some of the highest batting averages on balls in play (babip) in the league for years to come, it appears there is some skill, or perhaps a particular characteristic, inherent to pitchers who consistently best, or fall short of, their xK% rates.

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Episode 107

The latest episode of The Sleeper and the Bust is now live! Jason Collette and Eno Sarris discuss batters and pitchers with zeroes still in their stat line, some injuries, and a look at Jesse Chavez and Homer Bailey.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us any fantasy questions you have that we may answer on our next episode.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the feed.

Thanks to Ian Miller aka Teen Archer, for the new intro music Approximately 53 min of joyous analysis.

Episode 95

The latest episode of The Sleeper and the Bust is now live! Jason Collette joins Eno Sarris to preview the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us any fantasy questions you have that we may answer on our next episode.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the feed.

Thanks to Ian Miller aka Teen Archer, for the new intro music Approximately 72 min of joyous analysis.

ADP results from NFBC

Episode 91

The latest episode of The Sleeper and the Bust is now live! Jason Collette joins Eno Sarris to preview the Seattle Mariners and the Miami Marlins.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us any fantasy questions you have that we may answer on our next episode.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the feed.

Thanks to Ian Miller aka Teen Archer, for the new intro music

Approximately 67 min of joyous analysis.

ADP results from NFBC

It’s unlikely any 2013 rookie will have the impact in fantasy that Mike Trout did last season. Actually, it’s kind of unlikely any rookie will have the kind of fantasy impact that Trout did last season again in our lifetimes. Sure, prospects are generally speaking poor bets for consistent production. Yet, every year a few of these long shot bets come through and pay off big. Over the last decade names such as Trout, Craig Kimbrel, Albert Pujols and Rocco Baldelli all helped bring home fantasy titles to their many delighted owners. You don’t even need to find a Trout – which is good because, again, that’s really unlikely! Sometimes a Todd Frazier fills a need perfectly for a team lacking a third baseman. Hitting on a useful prospect or two like that can really make the difference for your fantasy team.

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In the coming weeks, we’ll be covering each team’s potential depth charts in an effort to shine a spotlight on the interesting playing time battles that will be waged this spring. Obviously none of these depth charts are set in stone — rather they should function to focus your attention in the right places to find cheap fantasy value.

Bullpen arms come and go. The nature of pitching a mere 40-70 innings in a season leaves plenty of room for random variation. With that caveat out of the way, there might not be a better team to find cheap rate stats and holds than San Diego.

As our very own Jeff Sullivan noted earlier in the week, the Padres are moving the fences in at Petco Park. While this may increase the home run total, run scoring may not increase much — if at all. From a reliever standpoint, perhaps the most important thing to watch isn’t home run numbers, but the health of current closer Huston Street.
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Edit: The entire draft can be found in this Google document set up for your viewing pleasure.

The RotoGraphs crew has already finished one (slow) mock draft, and while there has been plenty of position and round based evaluation, what follows is a team evaluation. I’ll be the first to admit my mistakes and I’m not too proud to laugh at them either.

My final team is as follows, displayed in standard ESPN format. While normally 25 man rosters is the norm, I’ll have two empty BN spots. I would have filled those spots with two relievers. Read the rest of this entry »