Fantasy Baseball Advice

Last year, the only type of starts and luck that Charlie Morton had was bad.  Despite good stuff and pedestrian ratios (6.7 K/9, 2.9 BB/9), he put up some of the worst stats in recent history.  A 7.57 ERA in 79 innings during the year of the pitcher!  It was a 54 ERA+ (adjusted for park and era) which stands as the 5th worst ERA+ since 1945 for pitchers with 79+ IP.  It’s hard to say how much of his .353 BABIP was because he threw down the middle or back luck but let’s just say the latter.  It seemed like luck was balancing out in his first three starts this year as he went 2-0 despite throwing 6 Ks and 12 BBs in 22 innings.  But excluding an ugly win in Colorado (where just about every non-ace should be benched), his last three starts – including last nights 5-hit shutout – have shown significant progress.  In those 18 2/3 IP, he’s K’d 17 and walked 7.  So let your league mates focus on his ghastly K:BB for the season while you get him on the cheap.  I’d still bench him during bad match-ups but he looks primed to be a solid 5th/6th SP in shallow leagues.

Onto other fantasy baseball news….

Jake Peavy - A 3 hit shutout with 8 Ks against the Indians who’ve recently been scalping opposing pitchers.  To quote the great Larry King, “Sorry Mr. Westbrook but the best Jake pitching today is Jake Peavy”.

Bartolo Colon- How fitting.  Jake has his first great comeback start and the Fatman nearly matches him (8 innings, 0 ER, 3 hits).  Now they just need to thank their doctor who I think first starred in the Six Million Dollar Man.

Pedro Alvarez – 3-run HR for Alvy.  Maybe he’s finally figuring out how to get the lobster in the pot.  Reminds of this old joke about two elderly Pirate fans sitting on the Roberto Clemente Bridge.  One of them says, “Boy, the Pirates’ <fill in 3rd baseman> has been really terrible.”  The other says, “Yeah, I know, and too few at-bats.”

Jon Niese – 7 shutout innings with 7 Ks.  You made your Aunt and Uncle proud!

Matt Holliday and Lance Berkman - Yes, the Cardinals were victorious against the Astros and Bud Norris (with that last name, shouldn’t he be a Texas Ranger?) but both Holliday (quad) and Berkman (wrist) were out of the game by the 5th inning.  Much like the rest of our existences, they are ‘day-to-day’.  Bud Norris must’ve roundhouse kicked them with his mind.

Mark DeRosa – Left the game in the middle of an at-bat when he re-strained his wrist.  That hurts more than having your wrist restrained – depending on who’s doing it.  If it’s Mrs. DeRosa, I would not be check-swinging.  The official announcement is ‘day-to-day’ but I’d move the versatile DeRosa to ‘Left Out’ in all but NL-only leagues (where we unfortunately have him).

Kyle Lohse – Another strong (8 innings, 1 ER, 7 baserunners) yet not dominant (3 Ks) start.  He should change his last name to Wihn.  He’s now 5-2 with a crazy low BABIP (somewhere in the .215 range).  His ERA/WHIP might be due for regression but he’s still worth starting while he’s on this streak.

Craig Kimbrel – Okay, maybe it’s officially time to start worrying.  Tonight was blown save #4 and it was an ugly one – 2 ER & 4 hits  in 1/3 of an inning to spoil the Braves second straight extra inning victory.  This is after Jonny Venters threw two shutout innings in the 9th and 10th.  If it weren’t for the anti-lefty sentiment that fuels closer decisions and McCarthyism, Venters would be closer by now.  But my guess is Kimbrel won’t be a fugitive from the closer role as he’d been dominant his previous 4 outings (4 IP, 1 hit, 9 Ks).

Mark Reynolds – 0 for 5 with 2 Ks and a BB in the Orioles 15 inning loss to the Yanks.  He did manage his 2nd sB of the year but his average now stands at .184.  To those of you who said he couldn’t repeat last year’s .198 AVG, well, I guess you’re still technically correct.

Julio Teheran – 4 innings, 2 ER, 8 baserunners, and 1 strikeout.  This is after his first start where he threw 4 2/3 innings and managed 1 strikeout.  I know it sounds pervy but I’d trade in this 20 year-old phenom for a Minor.

Yovani Gallardo – A six inning win with 2 ER and 9 Ks.  That’s three straight wins for Yovani.  Have we finally seen the end of his evil telenovela twin – Oyvani Goneyardo?

Elliot Johnson - 2-3 with 3 RBIs as he started for the 3rd straight night.  Sam Fuld might be Mr. April but looks like someone is auditioning hard for Mr. May (TM to Dave Winfield).

Trevor Plouffe – 2 for 4 with 3 RBIs.  He’s shown some power in the minors (15 HRs in 445 AAA ABs last year) and a K-rate (22%) that screams .250-.260.  So, best case, he’s a J.J. Hardy in hi prime type.  Worst case, he’s 2011 J.J. Hardy.  Either way, I don’t think anyone minds seeing Gardenhire say “See ya” to Casilla when Nishioka comes back.

Neftali Feliz – A blown save after Hosmer took him deep to star the 9th.  Ron Washington was tempted to bring in Arthur Rhodes to face the lefty rookie but, when he approached him, Rhodes responded in a world-weary voice, “I’m getting too old for this s**t” and shared how he plans to spend his retirement.

Michael Dunn - Quick shoutout to the Mr. B‘s.  Dunn now has 25 Ks in 19 innings this year.  He can come in handy in daily leagues where you need K’s.

Clay Buchholz – Unlike Steve Howe and Dwight Gooden, Buchholz was able to go face-to-face against Coke and come out unharmed (7 shutout innings, no decision).  Buchholz is pitching well of late (he’d won four of his last 5).  More importantly, he’s been putting up some K’s (he’s now averaged 6 in his last 3 games).  His K/9 and BB/9 ratios were very average last year (6.2 and 3.5 respectively) and they’ve been about the same this year.  If he can keep K’ing guys like he has in the past 3 games, his value goes up significantly.

Danny Duffy - Making his first major league start, you can imagine the pressure Double-D must’ve felt to fit in with his Royal teammates.  4 innings and 10 baserunners (including 6 walks) later….son,  you’re going to fit in just fine.  Ignore for 10/12-team mixed leagues but I’d keep an eye on him for deeper leagues.

Scott Hairston – Is it me or does this guy have the face of an anthropomorphic frog?  No wonder why he’s an outfield while his father and brother are infielders – he’s a natural at shagging flies.

The Razzball Commenter League Master Standings are now available. We added a link in the top left of our main menu under ‘Razzball Commenter Leagues’ for future reference.

Early congratulations / unintended jinx to…

1. The Pesky Pole Dancers who are in 1st place among the 456 participants (38 leagues of 12)! And thanks for putting an image in my head of Johnny Pesky pole dancing. At least you didn’t name it after this guy.
2. Everyone in RCL 5 as you are currently the most competitive league (competitive index of 105).

We’ll do our best to update the standings on a regular basis. We’re currently talking to a commenter about becoming the league commissioner of which the duties will be to update the standings regularly, mine for interesting data, and sell used cars in Milwaukee.

League Competitive Index is based on the total stats for the whole league. The index page can be found here. The points formula is courtesy of Tom Tango at InsideTheBook.com and is: HR + SB + R/3 + RBI/3 + (H-.27*AB) + 2*W + 1.5 * SV + K / 5 + IP – (ER+H+BB/ 2).

One last item. It would be great if we can attach each team to a Razzball Commenter handle. Please fill out the below form so we can add your handle to the Master Standings page (note: you can also enter this for a leaguemate if you like).

In 2000, a gritty bunch of veterans, role players, and youngsters almost did the impossible – beat the New York Yankees in a World Series.  Led by the mad genius of Bobby Valentine, the silver foxiness of Steve Phillips, and the support of a well-capitalized owner who gladly stayed out of the public eye (Fred Wilpon), the 2000 New York Mets were almost at the top of baseball’s pyramid.

But what happens when a financial industry wizard and a certifiable baseball GM scheme together to implement the same strategies that fueled the recent Wall Street collapse?  In the case of the New York Mets franchise, disaster happens – the culmination of one of the greatest turnarounds in baseball history.

In The Skim Is In – How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team From First to Worst, financially-successful journalist and sportswriter Mike Lupica chronicles the remarkable story of one team’s Dante-like journey from World Series team to a paragon of all that’s wrong in America.  By misquantifying the game’s tangibles, Bernie Madoff and ‘boy (was he not a) genius’ Omar Minaya were able to skim out that extra 2% that separates a losing organization from a winning organization–they were able to deliver to New York something that the Royals had never brought to Kansas City: a pyramid of incompetence that entombed a whole franchise.

Following are some excerpts from the book:

Tricking Yourself Into Thinking You’re Smarter Than the Competition:

….Minaya, along with passionate sidekick Tony Bernazard, developed metrics that let them take advantage of aspects of the game that they felt were undervalued such as FIS (fluency in Spanish) and LoCoZo (short for ‘loco como un zorro’ which translates to crazy like a fox).  As Minaya saw it, “People would see a 40 year old Moises Alou as injury-prone and unlikely to repeat his past successes but we knew he still spoke fluent Spanish and anyone who pees on their hands has LoCoZo to spare.  For $15 million, we got two years of .340+ AVG with power from Moises.”  To the rest of baseball, they saw that Moises only managed 377 ABs in those two years and this money could have been invested in a billion better ways.  But it was strategies like this that helped Minaya feel he outsmarted baseball by tying up unwanted players like Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo to multi-year contracts, ‘outfoxing’ the Yankees and Mets to sign Johan Santana and Carlos Beltran to $100 million dollar contracts, and cutting losses with uni-lingual, even-tempered prospects Heath Bell, Matt Lindstrom, and Brian Bannister.

Whiffing On Andrew McCutchen:

….Mets scout Rodrigo Ciudad was accustomed to life as a Mets scout.  Responsible for scouting all of the United States, Rodrigo’s region was nowhere near the Mets’ preferred baseball hotbeds of the Caribbean, Latin America, and Venezuela.  With most teams employing multiple scouts in his region, Ciudad tended to focus in warm weather climates that were more conducive to baseball talent and his love of fresh mango dusted in sugar and chili powder.  It was on one of these mango-missions that he heard about a Florida high schooler named Andrew McCutchen.  Ciudad liked what he saw in the young outfielder and was even more encouraged when the Mets didn’t sign a top free agent and would keep their 1st round pick.  Unfortunately, Minaya lost a bet with Jeff Wilpon over who would get to make the first pick in the 2005 amateur draft.  Wilpon, the owner’s son, ignored Ciudad’s pleas, saying “We’ve already got a better version of McCutchen in Lastings Milledge.” and spent the 9th pick of the 2005 draft on Mike Pelfrey.  To add insult to injury, the hapless Pirates drafted McCutchen and the Reds followed that pick with Texan High Schooler Jay Bruce.

Turning A Lucrative Franchise Into an Over-Leveraged Shell

….Fred Wilpon was always wary of ‘get rich quick’ schemes.  He made his money through shrewd real estate investments.  If George Steinbrenner was an IPO that struck it rich, Wilpon was a trustworthy mutual fund – steadily accruing value over time.  Bernie Madoff was the same way.  He wasn’t in business for the quick buck.  He was in it for the slow billion or so bucks.  They quickly became friends and, for 10 years, didn’t overlap business with friendship.  Wilpon started by investing $10 and, upon getting $11.50 back the next year, slowly invested more and more funds from his company (Sterling Equities).  The consistency was welcome to the Wilpon as inconsistency might’ve required him to do research into how the money was being made.  Smart enough not to meddle in the day-to-day dealings at the Met offices, Wilpon focused on building up the right-side of the Sterling Equities balance sheet (to the tune of $500+ million in debt), building a new stadium, and starting a new TV network.  His financial prudence led him to avoid selling branding rights to the new stadium to a ‘fly-by-night’ company like Enron, striking a deal with the responsible CitiGroup.  You can imagine the disappointment when his trust in Wall Street and consistent profits proved to be his very downfall….

Grey and I were invited back for Yahoo’s most prestigious expert league – the Yahoo! Friends & Family League (the other Yahoo!-sponsored leagues we’re in include acquaintances and hoi polloi).  The league has 14 teams consisting of 7 Yahooligans, 3 guys from Rotowire.com, 2 from Hardball Times, and one from Wall Street Journal and Razzball (two sites with a ton of audience overlap).

The format is 14 team, MLB, 5×5, 1250 IP cap, Roto, Snake Draft with the following roster format:  C/1B/2B/SS/3B/4 OF/CI/MI/2 UTIL/9 P/3 Bench.

The four differences  vs. our other expert leagues are:  1) Only one catcher, 2) 4 OF and 2 UTIL vs. 5 OF/1 UTIL, 3) Snake draft vs. auction draft, and 4) 1250 IP cap.

The roster differences are minor as we generally don’t spend a lot on catcher anyway and we planned to draft a 5th OF as one of our UTIL spots.  The snake draft was a somewhat welcome departure vs. auctions as they tend to take less time and keep us sharp for snake draft commenter questions.

The IP cap was a factor in our decision making.  It requires that teams use the equivalent of roughly 5.5 full-time starters (180 IP each = 990 IP) and 3.5 relievers (60 IP each = 210 IP).  So our plan was to draft only 4 quality starters and we’ll play matchups for the rest.

Otherwise, our strategy going in was just to draft as good a team as possible.  See below for our roster.  You can see the other rosters here and post-draft comments here.

Overall, I think we succeeded on drafting a team that has a shot to win.  We got what we think are 4 solid SPs (F-Her, D. Hudson, Lilly, Garza) and two Hodgepadres (Stauffer, Richard) which we can start at home.  The offense has a solid mix of upside plays (Cruz, Castro, Alvarez, Nishioka) and reliable vets (Posada, Miggy, Morneau, Torii).  I ran the rosters against our projections and our team came out on top with our biggest strengths in HR/RBI/AVG/Saves and our biggest weaknesses in SB/Wins/Ks.  But everything’s so close (e.g., 6 teams within 6 SBs of each other) that you have to take it with a grain of salt.  As I mentioned in the NL LABR post, I don’t think you can win a league at the draft (assuming you draft against peers) but you can certainly lose it.  And we didn’t lose it.

A couple of other notes:

1) I’ve found that our post-draft projected AVG is looking better across a number of our teams.  I think the improvement I made in calculating the impact of AVG in Point Shares has helped.

2) I found that our rankings – based on Point Shares – had a number of outfielders at the top of our draft boards for a lot of the draft.  This is either because I’m smarter than everyone else and value OFs correctly or I’m dumber than everyone else and value OFs incorrectly.  Either way, we stuck to a strategy where we wouldn’t draft more than 2 OFs in the first 9-10 rounds and felt comfortable with our two top OF choices (Cruz, Pence) who were also near the top of the Yahoo! default rankings by the time we picked them.

3) Several teams stocked up on Middle Relievers in response to the 1250 IP cap – conceivably because the best middle relievers will deliver better ERA/WHIP/K per inning than lower-level starters (I think starters still provide a better W/IP ratio).  The only flaw I see in the logic is that determining quality Middle Relievers in the preseason is a fool’s errand.  There just aren’t a lot of ‘dependable’ middle relievers.  So we were more than happy to fill out the rest of our hitting slots and grab Stauffer/Richard vs. speculate on Middle Relievers.  They’ll be plenty of opportunities to go MR fishing during the year if we want to go that route.

Let us know what you think of the team….

Yahoo! Roto Arcade invited us back to be a part of their 14-team Head-to-Head ‘Pro-Am’ league.  They were so anxious to get things started that the draft was scheduled for February 23rd.  Something’s wrong when draft day is closer to Groundhog Day than Opening Day.

Our team’s performance in this league last year mirrored our top hitter Justin Morneau’s season – a great start with plenty of 2nd half headaches.

The format of the league is 14-team H2H, 5×5 roto (1 point per category you win for week), weekly changes, auction draft, 2 C /1B/2B/SS/3B/5 OF/CI/MI/UTIL/3 SP/2 RP/4 P/4 Bench.

Grey wrote a recent post on H2H draft strategy. For this specific draft, our two main strategies were:

1) Draft at least 7 quality starting pitchers

H2H teams tend to throw more starts per week than in standard leagues.  So the pitching talent on the free agent wire is weaker (because more SPs on rosters) and the impact of top starters is watered down by all the additional starts.  We wanted at least 7 quality starters so we can take advantage of the pitchers with the best matchups (including 2 start weeks) and avoid having to compete too much with all the other teams over the free agent pitching crumbs.  If that meant losing out on top tier starters, so be it.

2) Focus offense towards high R/HR/RBI.

Grey and I both feel that SBs are streaky where H2H rewards steady.  So we focused our offense on the steadier R/HR/RBI stats with a goal of being just middle of the pack in SB and AVG.  We wanted just enough in SB and AVG that we could break even on these categories while winning the other three the majority of the time.

Below is our roster.  We spread the dollars around to a ridiculous degree – ending up with only two players above $20.  This wasn’t our plan but our competitors went beyond our player values on the top tier players (including a ridiculous $62 bid for Hanley Ramirez).  We felt that the player depth didn’t warrant such high bids and that our stinginess would be rewarded as the draft wore on.

Based on my calculations, we ended up with $306 in value on our roster for our $260 – more than any other team.  That counts the 4 bench players.  My rough estimates on just the top 23 players – based solely on starts and using standard roto – is that we’re a top 3 team that’s very strong in R/HR/RBI (top 3 in each) and weakest in ERA/WHIP (which we hope to improve by maximizing matchups).

Mike Napoli C $13
Kurt Suzuki C $6
Justin Morneau 1B $21
Adam LaRoche 1B $8
Kelly Johnson 2B $13
Ryan Raburn 2B $10
Starlin Castro SS $7
Neil Walker 3B $6
Matt Holliday OF $32
Mike Stanton OF $19
Bobby Abreu OF $9
Nick Swisher OF $9
Jose Tabata OF $7
Denard Span OF $4
Domonic Brown OF $6
Daniel Hudson SP $9
Matt Garza SP $9
John Danks SP $8
Gio Gonzalez SP $8
Edinson Volquez SP $7
Jhoulys Chacin SP $7
Ian Kennedy SP $5
Johan Santana SP $3 (to stash on DL until mid-year)
Heath Bell RP $11
John Axford RP $10
Drew Storen RP $7
Joe Nathan RP $5

NOTE:  We still have about 10 spots available for Fantasy Razzball – the game where you try to manage the worst team possible.  If you’d like to sign up, click here.  If you would like more info on the rules/format, see here.