Archive for paul goldschmidt

The day after the regular season ended, MLB.com’s (and FanGraphs alum) Mike Petriello posted the following tidbit on Twitter.

Have to admit, "Paul Goldschmidt & Christian Walker having almost the exact same season" is not exactly what I expected after the ARI/STL trade:

Goldschmidt
.260/.346/.476
.346 wOBA
11% BB
24% K
.216 ISO

Walker
.259/.348/.476
.346 wOBA
11% BB
26% K
.217 ISO

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) September 30, 2019

Like Mike, I was surprised by the similarities between the Diamondbacks’ former and current first basemen. I was well aware that Paul Goldschmidt had taken a step back this season, and I also knew that Christian Walker had acquitted himself well as Goldschmidt’s replacement in Arizona. Even so, it didn’t occur to me that this pairing could create a dilemma on draft day in 2020.
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It has begun! May your leagues bring you much joy. What follows is one approach to auctions that should bring you future joy.

I participated in two auction drafts. In both, I decided to spend little on pitching. In The Fake Baseball’s Friends and Family League (TFBFFL), I spent almost the minimum on our (co-own the free team with Zach Sanders) rotation and bench. I spent $16.00 on 12 pitchers ($2 max), but the results were not horrible: Drew Hutchison, Homer Bailey, Carlos Martinez, Henderson Alvarez, Shelby Miller, John Lackey, Sean Doolittle, Carlos Rodon and Rafael Montero. I dropped Chad Qualls already for Zach McAllister. We have enough bats to upgrade.

In my next auction, I wanted two better pitchers, but I still gave myself a $40 cap. I wound up spending $45 on the following:

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Not too long ago Paul Goldschmidt’s season ended. The event that caused it resulted in a little retaliation, that may or may not have taken Andrew McCutchen out for a little while. In the aftermath of the McCutchen injury – and the Diamondbacks’ overall bad year – Goldschmidt’s season sort of became lost, carried away in the tide of Tony La Russa’s press conference, and the Pirates’ anger and sadness over losing their best player in the midst of a push for October. We aren’t here to debate unwritten rules and the policing of the game, though. It’s become a cumbersome topic that I don’t really care enough about to debate, but we needed some background, and my lede writing is below replacement level.

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In the leagues I run that have inexperienced and/or casual team owners, I always use the standard 5×5 roto categories because I feel that it would give me and the other experienced players an advantage. I know that the casual players in my leagues are using the rankings provided by the website on which we’re drafting or some other set of rankings from a major industry source. And almost all of those rankings are based on standard categories. If I replaced, for example, home runs with slugging percentage, I would be able to identify the players whose valuation or ranking would change with the different category. But the noobs would be using rankings made with home runs in mind.

I polled my Twitter followers to find out the most common uses of non-standard categories so that I could determine the players whose valuation/ranking changed the most when non-standard categories are used. The most common answers were OBP replacing batting average (which I covered here), slugging percentage replacing home runs, and OPS being added as a sixth category to the standard five hitter categories. Sorry if your league has a different non-traditional format.

Below are charts showing the biggest changes in SLG and OPS leagues. For an explanation of the methodology used, check out the OBP piece I just linked to. And if you’d like to see how all 242 hitters that I have projected are affected by SLG replacing HR or OPS being a sixth category, you can find the SLG list here and the OPS list here.

First up, guys who get a bump when slugging percentage replaces home runs.

Miguel Cabrera and Paul Goldschmidt are even more valuable in slugging percentage leagues, and they close the gap between them and Trout in auction leagues. Joey Votto shows up on this list just as he did in my OBP post. He’s obviously excellent, but the standard categories aren’t the best measure of his excellence.

Unsurprisingly, we see a few young first basemen here who haven’t reached the ‘power potential’ some thought they might. But really they just haven’t put up big home run totals. Freddie Freeman and Eric Hosmer may never settle in as 30+ HR regulars or even 25-30 HR regulars, but if you play in a slugging percentage league, their power plays. And Brandon Belt gets the biggest boost by switching to SLG. It’s possible his ballpark has something to do with it, but he’s very much in the Freeman/Homser mold. The only non-1B/DH player on this list is Yadier Molina who was 4th in the league in doubles last year.

Now the guys who you would prefer in a home run league. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes you do. We all do. We all know who Paul Goldschmidt is, and if you don’t, then you have no business being involved in fantasy baseball, plain and simple. The only reason for the headline was for the pure enjoyment of a good play-on-words. In fact, choosing which pun to use for the title was the hardest part of writing this article. Goldschmidt Sandwich? You’ve Got Some Goldschmidt on Your Face? Goldschmidt Happens? I Drafted The Best First Baseman in Fantasy Baseball and Took a Big Goldschmidt on the Rest of My League? The options are endless and the debate over which one is funnier is probably more complex than the debate over which first baseman is the best in fantasy baseball. It’s tough to argue against Zach Sanders’ ranking of Chris Davis as number one thanks to his power output this year, but looking forward, I’ll take Goldschmidt over him every chance I get. 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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Recently I’ve taken a look at early season changes in contact rate and fly ball rate because of Russell Carleton’s research showing we’ve reached the point in the season where the sample for those statistics has become ‘reliable.’ There has been some debate in the comments about what reliable means and how much the small season sample can help us in predicting what a player will do the rest of the season.

I look at it like this. For the statistics that have crossed that reliability threshold,  we can look at the players who have seen the biggest changes in either direction and feel safe that their skill has improved or decreased to some degree. That doesn’t mean regression isn’t coming. It just means that at the end of the year it wouldn’t be a surprise to see a player with an improvement or decline from their career mark in a particular category. Although the improvement or decline at the end of the year is not likely to be as extreme as it is at this point in the season.

Today I want to look at the hitters who have seen the biggest changes in ISO because a fair number of players have now crossed the 160 AB threshhold shown in Carleton’s research. Below are the guys who have seen the biggest increase in ISO. After that, we’ll examine whether some other statistics back up the power surge. And a little bit later we’ll see if we can’t figure out how much regression to expect. Read the rest of this entry »

There are plenty of things that I am thankful for this year. Adam Jones’ breakout and Melky Cabrera’s PEDs bust which proved his 2011 was indeed unsustainable without a little illegal assistance — two articles and a bold prediction (found here, here and here) I took a mess of heat for in the comments section that still have me smiling at the haters — are two such examples. But what I am most thankful for in the fantasy baseball world is the mess of young, raw talent I own in my primary keeper league that has no contracts and a keeper structure that has a minimal inflation rate. Mike Trout, Brett Lawrie, Jason Kipnis, Jason Heyward, just to name a few. But I can’t keep them all and at first base I am left with a tough choice that I will turn to you for some thoughts: Would you rather keep Paul Goldschmidt or Anthony Rizzo? Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing with our retrospective of first basemen fantasy performances, it’s time to check out number seven on Zach Sanders’ First Base End of Season Rankings and take a look at the Arizona Diamondbacks’ lumbering slugger, Paul Goldschmidt. Though technically not a rookie due to 156 at-bats in 2011, this was Goldschmidt’s first full season in the bigs. Not only did he meet most expectations, but he actually exceeded quite a few and his end of season value of $16 puts him right on the cusp of elite first baseman status. Read the rest of this entry »

They say that, in life, timing is everything. Yes, success is often something you achieve when you put in the proper amount of work, but for many, it can simply be a matter of being in the right place at the right time.  Sometimes, it can be an amazing occurrence in life, at least when it happens to you, and other times you just sit there and watch in complete disbelief, wondering how some people can catch such a break. It can be as big as randomly meeting someone who, in the end, offers you your dream job, or as small as simply flipping on the TV and catching a ballgame in the fourth inning that ends up being Matt Cain’s perfect game. 

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