The Sleeper and the Bust Episode: 464 – May Standouts
by Paul Sporer
June 1, 2017
6/1/17
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Leading Off: Question of the Day
- Trading Trout: Jeff’s Piece
- What would you take for Mike Trout in a non-keeper roto lg?
Notable Transactions/Rumors/Articles/Game Play
May Standouts: Hitters
- Justin Bour 11 HR, 201 wRC+
- Brett Gardner 9 HR, 184 wRC+
- Zack Cozart 6 HR, 164 wRC+
- Tommy Pham 5 HR, 4 SB, 157 wRC+
SP Performance Standouts
- Robbie Ray 2.56 ERA, 0.91 WHIP, 22% K-BB
- Zack Godley 2.20 ERA, 1.04 WHIP, 14% K-BB
- Jimmy Nelson 2.28 ERA, 1.16 WHIP, 22% K-BB
- Alex Cobb 2.95 ERA, 1.13 WHIP, 9% K-BB
SP Skill Standouts
- Trevor Bauer 5.82 ERA, 1.41 WHIP, 23% K-BB
- Drew Pomeranz 4.30 ERA, 1.40 WHIP, 21% K-BB
- Vince Velasquez 5.02 ERA, 1.40 WHIP, 18% K-BB
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Approximately 62 minutes of joyous analysis.
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Not sure what’s worse, the audio quality of this episode, or putting Zack Godley and Jimmy Nelson over Robbie Ray…
Given their ERA predictors (SIERA/FIP/xFIP of 3.55/3.27/3.50 for Ray, 3.54/2.99/3.12 for Godley, and 3.84/3.41/3.73 for Nelson) there mayyyy be an arguement to be made for Godley, but I’ll take the 11 K/9 guy all day long for fantasy purposes.
LOL you’re that perplexed by Godley and Nelson over Ray only to immediately show why it’s plausible given the ERA indicators? Strong point.
Apologies for the audio quality. Eno and I have struggled to get clean recordings all year for some reason and I cleaned it up the best I could. Believe it or not, it was worse before the clean up.
And just blindly taking Ks is fine, but not an inherently winning strategy, so stop pretending Ray is the automatic choice. You literally cannot use half of his starts. He’s flawed.
The ERA indicators are one piece of the puzzle and Ks are another. All I’m saying is that they’re close on one of those metrics, and not at all close on the other.
And if you’re saying half of his starts are unusable, and the ERA indicators are, in aggregate, better or equivalent, then you’re also saying the other half of his starts are absurdly valuable. So maybe you have the ability to use him wisely and avoid a few landmines. But even if you start him for the good and the bad, he’s still more valuable on balance.
That option really isn’t available in most leagues as most are weekly. And the pitching pool isn’t really deep enough to facilitate in most formats, either. Meanwhile, Godley has a tremendous swinging strike rate that could have him closing that K gap going forward.
It’s just funny that you were seemingly appalled by the idea of Ray third only to acknowledge that it’s very plausible and a perfect reasonable way to rank them.
Not saying it’s impossible that things shake out differently than projected, but in compiling a ranking, or doing a one-to-one comparison, you have to consider the most likely outcomes. And I think you just said in this podcast that you’d rather have your 89th ranked pitcher from your update two weeks ago than your 52nd ranked pitcher from that same post. Has that much changed in the last two weeks?
Weird what was going on with the levels changing. For a lot of the pod it was hard to hear you at all, Paul. Have you guys switched to new software?
We’re going back to try.cast. This recorder I’ve been using is pure trash. It’s been rough with Eno’s recordings ever since Callgraphs stopped being supported on Skype—thanks for always sucking, Skype! I know the audio quality is poor. I tried to make it as listenable as possible. I only have these issues on mine and Eno’s calls and have no idea why it’s like that.
Yeah I remember you having trouble with calls with Eno before the season started, but it seemed like the last few were pretty good! Anyway, bad audio is better than no audio. Thanks for cleaning it up to at least make it listenable. The Eno chats are always entertaining
The tryca.st trial was only a month and that worked well. I’m going to pony up and pay for it because it’s waaaaay better than this garbage recorder.