Archive for slump

I committed Matt Holliday to my disabled list Monday, marking the 14th(!!!!) DL move I’ve made for my primary team this season. Perhaps the state of my team is implied by the length of its disabled list. If not, I’ll make it clear: my team has been bad. Pretty darn bad.

All of my drafts were especially poor. I drafted the same terrible, injured, underachieving players in every league, so it has been generally a nightmare all around. The hole I dug for myself is deep. Kyle Lohse broke ground on said hole with an 8-run Opening Day outing that lasted all of 3-1/3 innings, and we never looked back. Woe is me. Alas, it’s barely the second week of June, and I have already resorted to my Hail Mary play: buy low on everyone in sight.

Calling it “buying low,” however, is a bit misleading. It’s a shallow league, so there is arguably a stronger incentive for owners to cut bait on underachieving name-brand players in order to ride the hot streaks of unknown quantities, given they crop up more abundantly. What I’m actually doing, then, is loading up on underachievers from waivers. My team is already underachieving. These guys are already underachieving. How much worse could it get?

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I am humbled by the interest in my expected isolated power (xISO) equation since its inception. A fairly simple but helpful tool, I take solace in hoping it maybe has helped one fantasy owner identify a smart buy-low candidate — or reluctantly cut bait on Carlos Gonzalez. I also appreciate the feedback and recommendations for improvement and expansion. I will take care to consider their implementation when I have more available time.

It’s important to remember that Steamer and ZiPS also provide updated and rest-of-season (RoS) projections for most players. Hitter ISOs aren’t listed on the page listing all projections — only slugging (SLG) and batting average (BA) are included, forcing the user to perform some light arithmetic — but ISOs are listed on each hitter’s personal page. And they are not fundamentally different from the expected ISOs I have calculated for you today (spoiler alert). For reference, I crunched the correlation coefficients of every qualified hitter’s current xISO versus his current Steamer and ZiPS ISO projections:

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There’s something beautiful about an empty canvas because of its potential. The painter can turn it into literally anything — anything from a masterpiece to utter crap. The painter can make mistakes. She can paint a miserably bad portrait, yet still have time to amend it, perhaps creating an entirely different work — a different and better portrait, the ugly original buried deep beneath several layers of paint. The final product is a marvel, though the journey there was not smooth nor seamless.

Or right from the start she can paint the perfect landscape. And that’s great, except she continues to paint until it is no longer the masterpiece it once was but a mess of dimensionless color, unrecognizable and void of merit.

Such are the stories of the seasons of MLB hitters. A player can suffer a miserable April — the ugly portrait — yet slowly build up to a respectable end-of-season stat line. Conversely, a player can have a monstrous April — the perfect landscape — yet watch it slowly fall apart over the course of the next five months.

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Yesterday, I noted that Carlos Gonzalez’s isolated power, as determined by my expected isolated power (xISO) equation, mirrored his current production. This would be great news if we were talking about CarGo circa 2013.

Unfortunately, we’re talking about the 2015 incarnation of CarGo, he of the .109 ISO, .188 batting average and .233 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). The latter-most statistic might be the first talking point a proponent of his brings up in his defense: CarGo’s BABIP is atrocious right now — it’s just a matter of time until his bad luck turns around. Indeed, there may be some truth to this sentiment.

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Chris Carter is off to a bad start. This is an unambiguously true fact. Jeff Sullivan, among other Twitterers (Tweeters?), have succinctly illuminated this unambiguously true fact:

selection of players with ISO of .000 Curtis Granderson Brandon Phillips Desmond Jennings Logan Morrison Chris Carter

— Jeff Sullivan (@based_ball) April 21, 2015

Carter has supplemented the zero extra-base hits with four singles, 21 strikeouts and nary a run batted in to speak of through 51 plate appearances. (FYI, that’s a 41.2-percent strikeout rate.) His atrociously bad start is the talk of the Twitter town, and it has Astros Manager A.J. Hinch dropping him in the batting order. As of last night, Carter’s ownership had dropped to 67.7 and 73 percent in ESPN and Yahoo! leagues, respectively, as owners have jumped ship.
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