Archive for OF

Previous rankings:
March/April (Preseason)
May

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The more I do this, the harder it gets. Each month I struggle with shedding my preconceived notions of a player’s value and coming to grips with the performance we have actually observed. And then there’s the additional element of teasing out what’s real and what’s not. Occasionally, there’s no change. That makes it easy. But for the guys who have made strides or taken big steps back — that makes it a bit harder. And then there’s accounting for over- and under-performance. Trying to anticipate when regression will occur, if at all, makes my head hur.

Also, there are just so many outfielders. And so many of them seem to be performing at a high level this season. It can be excruciatingly difficult to tease them apart. At a certain point, we’re splitting the microscopic hairs that grows on regular hairs. Full tiers become indecipherable blobs.

You know the rules, but if you don’t: hitters are pretty fluid within tiers. It’s not feasible to talk about every single guy, so feel free to ask questions (or leave criticisms) in the comments. (I know I left off a lot of hitters who make up the shallow side of a platoon or ride the pine. ) If I omitted a legitimate someone, let me know; unless it’s a part-time guy or a prospect, I probably just forgot. It happens from time to time.

I love Bob’s Burgers, so I’m going to name the tiers by my favorite episodes of all time. Because I can! This is off the top of my head, though, so I’ll probably screw up my own list. Oh well. Fight me!

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When Dylan Higgins invited me on to the Field of Streams podcast last week, he asked me what I typically like to write about. My answer was an incoherent, stammering mess, but the gist of it was I like to write about all sorts of things. The trajectory of my writing has changed a lot over time.

I think I originally wanted to write primarily about market inefficiencies in fantasy baseball. The constant instantaneous misvaluation of players fascinates me, and effectively exploiting these inefficiencies make champions. Occasionally, I return to this topic.

That occasion is today, and today, I’m in the mood for blind résumés. I cherry-picked some stats for three players, whose names I stripped away, and I want you to decide, before reading any farther, in which order you would take these players.

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Previous rankings:
March/April (Preseason)

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For this post, I had written something entirely different, but I woke up early to change it. All of it. I didn’t dream about it — no, not quite. But I came close. This month has proven to be pretty difficult. Maybe “finicky” is the word.

So many hitters are producing at similar levels with similar peripherals to support them that it’s hard to tease them apart. I tried a full re-rank and I had clustered something like 20 or more guys together twice. I try to limit each particular tier to maybe a dozen hitters, so coming away with only three-or-so tiers was problematic. That’s why I decided to wake up early and do this over. The ranks haven’t changed much, but certain guys have moved a lot, and I will try to identify which guys are most likely to move up or down by the time the June iteration of these rankings roll around.

Also — and this is totally unrelated — I think more readers were infuriated by my omission of Tommy Pham (who has all of one plate appearance this year) than my ranking of A.J. Pollock over Bryce Harper. Y’all crack me up sometimes.

You know the drill: I rank National League outfielders, you yell at me in the comments. Consider all rankings fluid within tiers but not between them (except at the top and bottom of each tier, perhaps). Normally, I would tell you that players should be reserved to their respective tiers, but I think there’s much more opportunity for movement here than ever before (ever before, in the context of me doing this since the beginning of last year). Lastly, if I omit a name, politely let me know in the comments.

Unless it’s Tommy Pham. Then shhhhhhhhhh.

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I alleged, behind closed doors, that I would cook up something pertaining to batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and the new shift data FanGraphs now hosts on its leaderboards. But, alas, such allegations — that I, uh, made, against myself — were false. There are more pressing matters to which I must attend.

Such as Gregory Polanco. Polanco, of the consensus top-100 prospect rankings in 2013 and 2014 prior to his debut. Polanco, of the pleasantly solid production that still, almost 1,000 plate appearances later, somehow, somewhat inexplicably, disappoints us.

If you don’t own Polanco, you may not know his weighted runs created (wRC+) currently ranks 8th among all National League outfielders. Better, his wRC+ isn’t elevated by an unsustainable BABIP or home runs per fly ball (HR/FB), like the seven hitters who rank ahead of him (except Bryce Harper, who is superhuman bordering on not human at all). One could argue, with nonzero persuasiveness, that Polanco is the (second-) best pure-hitting NL outfielder in the game at this exact moment. It’s a very specific subset of hitters, yes, but if you bestowed that title on me, I’d be pretty jazzed.

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Oh, man. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, man. IT’S BASEBALL SEASON. Woo! We survived the offseason. We made it. Thank you for joining me here today.

Unfortunately, with only one (and a half-ish) day(s) of baseball under our elastic baseball belts, I can only conduct as much analysis as the smallest of small samples will let me. Not unfortunately, fantasy owners freak out during the first couple of weeks of the baseball. I’m no psychologist, but dang, do owners overreact. You don’t see these kinds of overreactions during the season — however many months of baseball has already been played, and changes to players’ stat lines shift much more slowly in August than April.

In other words, April is incredibly noisy. There’s gotta be a signal in there, yeah? I’ll serve up names of National League outfielders who had particularly good first games of 2016, and I’ll tell you over which players with higher ownership rates (using Yahoo! percentages, arbitrarily) I’d rather own them. It could be controversial, but hey.

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You can’t please everyone. Not that being a fantasy baseball analyst is like being the president, but being a fantasy baseball analyst is like being the president. You can never make everyone happy, and Eno Sarris occasionally asks you for foreign policy recommendations. Worse, the people who are happy don’t vocalize their contentment while the people who are pissed are more than happy to let you know. Such is the nature of the beast.

It’s all good, though. This is my second year ranking National League outfielders, and you know what? I’m ready. My skin is a little thicker, my stomach a little rounder. It’s a new year, new me. Put it on a shirt!

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2015 Visualized: Shortstop
2015 Visualized: Third Base
2015 Visualized: Second Base
2015 Visualized: First Base
2015 Visualized: Catcher

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For the next few weeks, the RotoGraphs staff will devote an entire week to each defensive position, including spotlights on particular players as well as trends throughout the 2015 season. This week, we’re highlighting outfielders.

I don’t claim to be a Tableau (or data visualization) whiz by any means, but I thought it would be cool to visually represent the outfield landscape in 2015 — with some analysis sprinkled in.

Steamer and ZiPS represent premier player projection systems; FanGraphs’ Depth Charts combines the two, and the writing staff allocate playing time accordingly. The playing time part is less important relative to the combined projections, as aggregated projections tend to perform better than standalones.

I compared projected wOBA (weighted on-base average) from the preseason to actual wOBA (1) by team and (2) by player within team. Unlike WAR, wOBA is a rate metric, so it does not need to be scaled according to playing time.

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The storybook narratives of 2015 do not limit themselves to the Mets or the Twins or the Rangers or the Astros. Surprises abound each year, usually in the form of a former prospect who finally hit his stride or a journeyman Minor Leaguer who catches lightning in a bottle. Perhaps they’re more surprising, then, when they come from seemingly established players.

For example, Bryce Harper finally evolved into the Bryce Harper of prophecies’ past, basically hitting twice as many home runs as projected. Except the evolution happened, like, two or three or seven years sooner than expected. I don’t know when it was supposed to happen, but surely it wasn’t supposed to happen at 22 years old.

And Carlos Gonzalez, at 29, has hit a career-high 37 home runs, a healthy dozen-or-so more than any of his previous four seasons — all after having arguably the worst April of his career (rivaling 2011).

I’m thankful the Tigers traded Yoenis Cespedes into the National League so I can write about the dude now. Aside from Matthew Kory’s assessment of Cespedes’ chances to win a Most Valuable Player (MVP) award two weeks ago, we have pointed little attention to how Cespedes earned his way into MVP discussions in the first place. The injustice ends here.

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Disclaimer: Yesterday, the author wrote the words organized below. This morning, a doctor person surgically repaired the author’s faulty body. During the day, he will rest in bed, likely incapacitated, lest he be tempted to incoherently, and probably embarrassingly, address your comments. He apologizes for the inconvenience this delay in correspondence may cause.

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Unless you’re in a year-long roto league — or, wait, are there year-long points leagues? Is that a thing? — you’re probably neck deep in playoffs. Maybe some of you are vying for the championship. Maybe some of you are trying to avoid last place and a sexy calendar photoshoot as punishment for it, as I just successfully did last week.

The RotoGraphs staff has published several pieces recently focusing on waiver wire finds to help your playoff push. For roto leagues specifically, we’ve reached a point where a couple weeks’ worth of standard performance may not affect runs, runs batted in (RBI) or batting average, but a sudden burst of home runs of stolen bases can make all the difference.

After digging through the scrap heap, I found yet more players (strictly National League outfielders, mind you) that can help owners trying to catch lightning in a bottle. However, some the following names could also help in shallower leagues and are worth keeping in mind as dynasty or keeper considerations.

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FanGraphs’ leaderboards are like iron ore mines. They abound with potentially valuable commodities, but sometimes it takes effort to unlock the potential and extract the value.

There’s only so much you can write about a certain subsection of players (National League outfielders) without beating a dead horse. Alas, I’ve tried to find peculiar reasons to write about particularly interesting hitters. And, ah, FanGraphs’ leaderboards, they’re helpful in this regard, especially when broken down by splits.

Baseball Info Solutions’ (BIS) opposite-field batted ball data are no exception, as exemplified by this table of opposite-field hard-hit rate (Hard%) leaders among NL outfielders:

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