Introducing the Razzball Pitcher Planner and Hitter Planner

After hitting the ‘Publish’ button on my recent post titled ‘Razzball Streamonator TKO’s ESPN Fantasy Forecaster‘, I pictured reading and answering the comments to be like a victory lap*.  Look at me, I’m Cal Ripken!  While I got a healthy share of pats on the back from Razzball Nation (thanks as always!), some commenters were also kind enough to note that Streamonator and Hittertron could learn something from the ESPN Fantasy Forecaster – notably the handy dandy 7-day grid with all the probable starters.

* Extended victory lap – check out the right sidebar item on Daily Draft Wizard titled ‘Which projections are best?’  Razzball beat some respectable contenders in the roto/DFS game (NumberFire, RotoGrinders, RotoWire).  Boo-ya!

That inspiration/challenge + a few scraps of spare time = the Razzball Weekly Pitcher Planner and Weekly Hitter Planner. The Weekly Pitcher Planner updates every morning and doubles as a weekly tool as well as a tool a daily player can use to plan ahead a few days in advanced.  The Weekly Pitcher Planner includes the following:

• A rolling 10 day MLB Schedule + Probable Pitcher grid broken out by team.  The Streamonator $ value of each start is listed near the pitcher as well as their Razzball Commenter League % ownership to help identify free agents in your league.  To make it even easier to identify streams, there is a *STREAM* added next to every start that is valued at $8+ and the pitcher is owned in less than 80% of RCL leagues.  You can type ‘stream’ for any of the 10 days and the grid will filter to only the streaming candidates.
• A Two start pitcher table – updated Friday-Monday – showing the projected 2 start pitchers for the upcoming Monday-Sunday, their two opponents, and the combined $ value of their two starts.
• A table with the Top 10 Streaming Pitcher Candidates In Next 3 Days (defined as less than 80% owned).

The Weekly Hitter Planner updates every morning and has three key areas:

• A Hitter Planner grid that sorts the 30 teams based on the attractiveness of their next week’s games (available Friday-Monday) and a rolling next 7 days’ worth of games.  There are counts by team for how many Home/Away and LHP/RHP games.  But the most helpful part of the grid is the value assigned to each MLB team’s offense based on three variables:  # of Games, Park Factor (index of runs scored in park by an average offense) and Pitcher Factor (index of opposing starting pitchers’ average WHIP neutralized by the pitcher’s home park).  These factors are combined to create a single index for each team.  So for the week of September 1st, the Padres and Rangers are the top offenses at a 120 index (20% better than the average offense) thanks to weak opposing pitchers (107 index), favorable parks (Padres have a 104 index – aided by 3 days in Colorado), and 7 games for the week.  Colorado is at a 112 despite 6 home games as their combined Park and Pitcher Factor of 121 is adjusted down to 112 because they play 1 less game than most teams.  In addition,
  • The math – for those who care – is the average team for the week of 9/1 plays 6.5 games and thus teams that play 7 have a ‘games index of 107.6 (7/6.5*100), teams with 6 get an index of  92.3 (6/6.5*100), and the Astros + White Sox who play only 5 games get crushed with a 71 (5/6.5*100).
•  A Top 20 Streaming Hitters for Next Week table that shows the top 20 projected hitters who are owned in less than 80% of Razzball Commenter Leagues.
• A Top 20 Streaming Hitter Games In Next 3 Days table that calls out the 20 most attractive hitter days over the next 3 days for hitters owned in less than 80% of Razzball Commenter Leagues.

Hope everyone enjoys the new tools.  Please provide suggested improvements or note bugs either on this post or on the respective pages.