Archive for Giancarlo Stanton

Are the playoffs here yet? Because I’m a) tired of watching the Rangers lose, b) sweating out the day-to-day fluctuations in my big money roto league, and c) trying to find something new to say in this article twice a week. So after the jump I’m going to repeat a couple of things. First, I’ll have a chart showing how each of today’s probable starters have performed against batters of each handedness this year. And then I’ll pick a few players and recite some familiar analysis alongside them.

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When I was on The Sleeper and the Bust with Mike Podhorzer a few weeks ago, he told me about his process for finding value in daily contests. The basic idea is that he breaks the rest-of-season ZIPS projections down to a fantasy points per game basis and then compares that to cost to find the biggest values. As I’ve learned, that process takes a bit of work, so I’m going to walk you through it.

The first step is to get the rest-of-season ZIPS projections into a spreadsheet. You can find daily updated projections from the ‘Projections’ tab at the top of the site. Then you need to eliminate the stats and columns that are not needed in order to calculate how many fantasy points a player is projected to score for the rest of the year. But don’t delete the games column; you’ll need it later to calculate projected points per game. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if anyone has told you people yet, but it’s only April and the data we are looking at right now comes from what is known around these parts as a very small sample size. What that means is that there are still five more months….yes, months….of baseball still and numerous players will receive anywhere from 400 to 500 more plate appearances between now and the end of the season. Take a moment. Drink that in. Think about it for a few seconds. And while you do, remember this: a bad trade reputation spreads a lot faster around your league than a good reputation. Unless your league is filled with complete idiots (and that may very well be the case for some of you), your testing of the waters with ludicrous trade offers that you yourself would never accept in a million years is going to potentially come back and bite you in the ass. Read the rest of this entry »

In the couple weeks before Opening Day, hundreds of season prediction articles littered the baseball blogosphere. Naturally opinions varied, but almost nobody disagreed on one point: the Miami Marlins were expected to be terrible across the board and finish last in the NL East.

Well, more accurately, everything about the Marlins was expected to be putrid except Giancarlo Stanton.

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After the complete teardown that happened in Miami this winter, fantasy players might be forgiven for looking at the club as merely “Giancarlo Stanton and 24 guys who aren’t Giancarlo Stanton.” It’s not quite going to be Houston-level bad in South Florida as many expect, but it might be a tough team to watch — if, of course, anyone even shows up at the park to do so. Read the rest of this entry »

For all the years that I’ve been playing fantasy baseball, I’ve never really understood the idea of punting saves. Not that I don’t understand the concept, but that I don’t understand the rationale behind thinking that it’s a good strategy. You load up on starters with the hope of locking up wins and strikeouts while doing your best to stay competitive in WHIP and ERA. Perfectly viable strategy, right? But what about the fact that Wins is, more or less, an arbitrary category and while your guy goes seven strong and exits with the lead, some clown of a set-up man comes in, walks the leadoff guy and then serves up a two-run shot to tie the game. A great game for your starter, for sure, but you make no advancement in a category you’ve supposedly built your team to excel in. Read the rest of this entry »