Archive for Jose Quintana

I got a suggestion to write a column on my favorite starting pitchers to target (thanks @cwsoxfan!), but in truth, that column is sort of scattered all over the place. For example, my last post for RotoGraphs included some analysis on why I will be targeting Joe Musgrove. I’ve written about several pitchers I’m ranking above ADP and the industry consensus, such as Matthew Boyd, Carlos Rodon, Anibal Sanchez, Mike Minor and Jaime Barria, in other pieces.

Still, there are a number of starters whom I do like better than other fantasy owners do, including those in the industry, but I have yet to write about them to explain why. For this piece, I will focus on five starters who will likely be frequent targets for me, based on my rankings as compared to ADPs. These aren’t exactly sleepers, though. Rather than going deep in the motherlode for bargains, I’ll be taking a look at widely-owned players who could provide a generous return if you are able to draft them at or near their ADPs
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This offseason, I’m taking the time to study the arms that deserve a little bit of extra attention. Sure, every starter should get a bit more than your standard gloss over, but you know Max Scherzer is a top tier starter and you’re aware that Andrew Cashner will not come close to repeating his 3.40 ERA. I can also imagine that Jose Quintana will be getting this standard treatment by many. You’re going to have some that consider him a stable arm and grab him as a #2 SP and you have others – myself included – that treat him as someone who will wait to see him fall before considering him for your staff.

But that was the old me. Quintana made a significant tweak in his approach this season and I didn’t know any better.

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Folks, if you want to do something else we can totally forget about this. Right?

Sigh. The whole reason people like making predictions is that they garner a ton of traffic — power rankings, anyone? — and almost nobody ever holds them to reviewing them because the damn season is so long. It’s like a dog returning to its vomit or whatever, I think.

But anyway, here’s my a review of my word vomit from back in March:

1. Kyle Gibson holds top-50 value in leagues this season.

Welp. It was a disastrous season for Gibson, who saw a drop in groundball rate and strikeout rate and a jump in walk rate, leading to an ERA in excess of 5.00. Basically speaking, all the strides he appeared to be making late last year lapsed, despite his slider and changeup becoming even better pitches this year than last. Inexplicably, he threw both of them a lot less than in 2015. (0/1) Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I took a look at the best fantasy hitters over the past calendar year by running the results of that split through Zach Sanders’ z-score method for calculating fantasy value. The motivation for that post was to make an argument that when voting for All-Stars the second half of the previous season should be considered. I understand that the “Past 1 Calendar Years” split on the leaderboards includes stats that were pre-All-Star break 2013, but…close enough. And I also realize fantasy value doesn’t necessarily equal All-Star, but, again, close enough. I quickly want to highlight the starting pitchers I’d vote into the All-Star game (ten per league) based on their performance over the last 365 in the image below. After that I want to discuss a few guys whose ownership percentage is out of whack with their performance in the past calendar year. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday Blake Murphy updated something I looked into awhile back, which was hitters with a reverse platoon split. This reminded me of another unusual split I came across earlier this season. Despite the fact that Arizona has a the 4th most hitter-friendly basic park factor and is the 8th most homer-friendly home run park for right-handed hitters, right-hander Paul Goldschmidt has been better on the road in his career. During his call up season and first full season (2011-2012), Goldy had a .338 wOBA at home and .382 wOBA on the road. Some of that was a strikeout rate that was 3% lower on the road, but that alone isn’t enough to account for a 44 point difference in wOBA.

He has been basically as good at home and on the road this season, but he has still been slightly better on the road. This just seems so strange because the average basic park factor for his road games (weighted for the number of games he has played in each park) is 99.27, and the HR as R factor for his road games is 99.17. That’s compared to a 105 basic park factor and 105 HR as R factor at home in Arizona. In other words, Goldy has had conditions 6% more favorable at home in his career, yet his wOBA is significantly higher on the road.

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