Archive for Sell-High

Just about every league has a Mike Soroka owner. Then again, the Braves’ All-Star rookie landed at the break as a top 20 starting pitcher in Roto value. He has the fifth-lowest ERA (2.42) and 13th-lowest WHIP (1.05) among all pitchers with at least 80 innings, and 6.0 runs of support per nine innings has left him with a dazzling 9-1 record.

Soroka also ranks seventh in sinker usage with a 47.4 percent rate. His primary offering is, in general, a notoriously bad pitch for swings-and-misses and not especially good for limiting extra-base hits. As one would expect from a pitcher who uses a sinker nearly half the time, Soroka has been below average at getting strikeouts. While the major league average K% is 22.8 percent, Soroka has registered a 20.1 percent rate in the first half. When you consider that many of the below-average strikeout pitchers are left unowned in many leagues, Soroka has been something of a liability for strikeouts for fantasy owners.
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Yesterday, I devised a new expected strikeout rate for pitchers and used it to identify qualified starting pitchers who over- or under-performed in 2018. I’m reluctant to make out the exercise to be more than it is. I simply wanted to take the most intuitive approach to describing a pitcher’s strikeout rate (K%): by using the plate discipline exhibited by opposing hitters. Today, I seek to do the same for hitters. I can tell you now the discussion will be much more qualitative than quantitative.

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Mike Foltynewicz, a first-ballot Hall of Namer, immediately strikes me as someone who outperformed his strikeout rate (K%) in 2018. I don’t have to look far for confirmation: his 27.2% strikeout rate outstripped his 10.3% swinging strike rate (SwStr%) by a mile. Because whiff rate correlates so strongly with strikeout rate, it serves as a useful proxy for what one could expect of a pitcher’s strikeout ability.

I generally follow this rule of thumb when I’m reluctant to get too into the weeds when assessing peripherals: SwStr% * 2 = K%. It’s imperfect but useful in a pinch. Folty violates this rule of thumb pretty dramatically. Of 13 qualified pitchers who struck out at least 27% of hitters, his 10.3% swinging strike rate falls well short of the shortlist’s 2nd-lowest mark (Charlie Morton, 11.9%). Foltynewicz’s 2018 performance has already wilted under what amounts to very little duress.

Still, I wanted to allow Foltynewicz the opportunity to redeem himself. Whiff rate does not a pitcher make; there are other components to plate discipline allowed such as chase rate (O-Swing%) and zone rate (Zone%), among others, that describe each pitcher in much finer detail. I broke down a pitcher’s plate discipline allowed into its component pitch outcomes:

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It’s probably been awhile since you’ve read a traditional “buy low, sell high” article.  In today’s golden age of baseball analytics where complex physics and statistics can be boiled down to a few simple indicators accessed instantly using one hand, it’s not very often that we (readers, fans, fantasy players) find ourselves in possession of knowledge before the masses.  For example, try “selling” Avisail Garcia and his recent .375 wOBA around your league without getting some type of response that includes “yeah, but he had a .392 BABIP”.

Thankfully, despite all the data available at our fingertips, the one ingredient that will always play a critical role in the mixture of value is the human element of perception, which can swing wildly in different directions depending who you’re dealing with.  Today I’d like to isolate a few players who’s perception may be suppressing their actual value a little more than it should be, which may represent a buying opportunity for savvy fantasy owners prepping for 2018.  The good news is you don’t have to stand in line to land these deals, but you will still need to get them early.

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Never before have we seen so many talented young pitchers. And, although I don’t have concrete evidence to support it, it feels like we have never seen so many name-brand starting pitchers struggle.

Everyone slumps. David Price, for example, is slumping. But with an atrocious strand rate (LOB%) and elevated batting average on balls in play (BABIP), it’s the type of slow start that savvy fantasy owners should target as a buy-low opportunity.

Other starters enduring equally slow starts can’t be defended quite as easily. Inversely, still more starters are masking their ugly peripherals with typical production, as expected. You may want to consider selling the names below. All three make me sad because, while not especially old, each of them has stared down his mortality at one point or another this season, as we normal folk do every day when we look in the mirror. All our demises are imminent, a truth made painfully true by the beautiful yet cruel sport we love so.

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Last week, I introduced xISO, a metric that calculates a player’s expected isolated power based on his batted ball profile (per FanGraphs’ recently added batted ball data courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions). Having looked at a handful of underachieving National League outfielders for its induction, I’ll expand the analysis of xISO here today.

I’ll reiterate some key points. I used all 12 years’ worth of batted ball data for all player-seasons in which a hitter qualified for the batting title. The OLS regression specified pull rate (Pull%), hard-hit rate (Hard%) and fly ball rate (FB%) as explanatory variables and produced the following equation, which I deliberately omitted last week:

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Neftali Feliz and LaTroy Hawkins both picked up their first saves of the season last night. Per ESPN’s live draft results, Feliz was drafted as the 25th reliever off the board on average and just inside the top 200 overall. Hawkins was drafted 38th among relievers and went at pick 226 overall. These are a couple of the names you wound up with if you chose not to pay for saves.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I assume the plan if you own guys like Feliz and Hawkins is to ride them out as long as they hold on to the closer’s job and squeeze as many saves out of them as you can. I ascribe to the “don’t pay for saves” philosophy and scrounge around late in drafts and on the waiver wire to acquire my saves. Typically when I get a guy who has the ninth inning job, I ride it out until he loses the job. But it occurs to me, as it may have occurred to you, that maybe it’s better to cash in that asset after a string of un-blown saves. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember how great it was during Jason Kipnis’ rookie year? You probably got him for cheap in your draft and right out of the gate, he starts producing. Sure, he hit just .256 for that first month, but he also had three home runs, 12 RBI and four stolen bases. Not bad for your low-budget, rookie second baseman. But then the calendar flipped to May and Kipnis flipped a switch…a power switch, that is. He batted .295 for the month, hit another five home runs with another 18 RBI and another seven stolen bases. Two months in and he’s already paying big dividends. With a solid  month of June, he totally crushed it in the first half, batting .277 with 11 home runs, 49 RBI and 20 stolen bases; basically the line you hoped he would have by the end of the season. And just to help make you feel more comfortable about his performance, his walk rate was slightly better than league average (8.9%), he had just a 15.4% strikeout rate and posted a solid .345 on-base percentage. He was the total package. Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike some of our other awards where there was very little dissension in the ranks, the Rotographs staff were pretty split as to who would be our Hare for the National League. For those who missed Eno’s introduction, the Hare is essentially the best sell-high player of the season. I’m not sure what it says about the NL that there were just too many good options; I went in thinking that it would be Bryan LaHair in a runaway, but once I started thinking about my options, he barely remained in my top three. Read the rest of this entry »