Archive for Roberto Hernandez

I wanted to highlight Pitcher over and under performers. Naturally, Mike Podhorzer has already done that and more concisely and eloquently than I ever could. In conjunction to what he did (ERA vs. SIERA within this year), I wanted to look at pitchers’ skills and luck relative to last year.

By “skills” I mean K%-BB%, combined Contact% and SwStr%, GB/FB and IFFB%. These columns are in green.

By “luck” I mean BABIP, LOB% and HR/FB. These are in some emotional shade of red.

I took all the 2014 vs. 2013 differentials and z-scored them. I summed them up and presented them under column 3 (“SKILL”) and column 4 (“LUCK”). In short, these are not their skill and luck scores for 2014, but their change relative to 2013…in relation to how much everyone else from this list changed (50 IP qualifier).

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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 love to gamble because almost nothing is more fun to me than watching a sporting event and caring about the outcome. I like it when something is at stake. That’s why I play fantasy baseball, and it’s why I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing daily fantasy this season. But I do not like to lose money. This is of course an obvious thing to say. Who does? But I think it bothers me more than most.

I grew up with a very cheap father. Admittedly, we weren’t exactly rolling in dough as he was a high school choir director and my mom worked part-time at a church. But we were much better off than you would presume us to be if you ever saw us out at dinner, which was a very rare occasion. But if we did go out to eat, my dad would blurt out “four waters” before the server had the chance to finish saying, “What can I get you guys to dri…” This was always very embarrassing. I understood that a Dr. Pepper wasn’t an option unless it was my birthday and somewhat respected the reason for that edict. But he could have at least let me order my own water to save a modicum of my dignity. Read the rest of this entry »