Points Leagues – Rapid Fire

The theme today is Rapid Fire.  Now, I love a good action movie but I’m not talking about the 1992 film, Rapid Fire, where Brandon Lee uses all his skills to slice and dice the aggressors to win in the end.

   

Well, come to think of it, I think that’s EXACTLY what we’re going to do today.  Today’s article is all about looking at analytics in order to draw conclusions that’ll help you beat your enemies…err, I mean league mates. I mean, that’s what we’re all about, right?  The appropriate response is, “Yes, Sensei!”

Baseball players come in two styles, those that Uchi and those who Nage.  Don’t worry, we’ll cover both.  But first, a reminder how the scoring is done for these analyses.  As you know by now, this Sensei likes to use the NFBC RazzSlam scoring in his Dojo.  I’ll be covering stats generated during the first three weeks of the season.  I’m omitting the Tokyo series (yes, I get the irony) since I specifically covered that in detail previously.

Also note, for those of you playing on a different platform, your scoring system may look a lot different.  Don’t fret, I’ll be spending most of my time in the world of analytics.  For specific discussions involving points scored, you can do your own analyses easy enough.  Plus, I have something specific for you later.

“Senpai, Kiotsuke!”

That means, “Students, give me your attention!”  We’re about to start.  Remember, this will be rapid fire.

We’ll start with Uchi players (those that STRIKE the ball).  

Hikite

“Hikite” means pulling hand.  When ball players pull the ball, that generally means more power.  Let’s see if logic and math add up in the early season.  So, here are the players that are pulling the ball most, along with their HardHit% and Points/game ranking so far.

There are some interesting fantasy names here (Spencer Torkelson, Matt Mervis, Isaac Paredes, etc.) but overall, I’m not too impressed in how Hikite translates to fantasy baseball Points leagues. 

Tsuki

“Tsuki” means punch.  So, let’s take an “oppo” approach and look at the players who are early season leaders in going opposite field.

 

Nope, Tsuki isn’t really translating to points either.  While it doesn’t track in general, we do see that if Gleyber Torres can stay healthy, he could be a nice point producer.  For players like Xavier Edwards and in deeper leagues, Leody Taveras, we want OBP because they do most of their damage on the basepaths.

What a great transition…

Ashi

“Ashi” means foot.  You guessed it, we’ll now look at how speed is contributing to our Points league teams.

Now we’re getting somewhere.  At 5 points per SB, the points start adding up quickly when players get on base (opportunity) and not getting caught much (success).  So, would anyone argue if Kyren Paris garners early-season fantasy MVP votes?

Kumite

“Kumite” means sparring.  Does Statcast track brawls (punches thrown, punches landed, etc.)?  That would make for some interesting analysis, but perhaps another day.  For our last Uchi analysis, we’re going to look at WAR to see if there is a general correlation with Points league success.

Here we see 5 of the top 15 in WAR are also currently amongst the leaders in fantasy points per game. Although not pictured, this trend expands to 32 of the top 50 and 74 of the top 100.  I’d say there’s a nice correlation here.

Now, we’ll cover the Nage players (you guessed it, those that THROW the ball).

Tsuki

On the offensive side, we used Tsuki (“punch”) to describe Opp%.  For pitchers, it has a much more direct meaning by looking at punchouts.  Although a K only results in 1 point in RazzSlam, they may be more valuable in your non-NFBC leagues, so we’ll compromise and look at K/9 and K%.

With the exception of Mitch Spence and Ryan Gusto, this list is completely SPs.  That’s kinda odd as we normally see high leverage RPs dominate K/9.  You’ll also note most of these names are not picked in the first few rounds of fantasy drafts – yet another plug to wait on SPs in Points league drafts.

Empi 

Empi means “elbow”.  Yea, I’m just going to leave that one alone.  My sympathies to all the North Siders.

Kihon

Kihon means “basic techniques.”  In my baseball mind for pitchers, that translates to FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) and is a measure of a pitcher’s effectiveness independent of defense.  I’ll add in xFIP as well so we can see which way we expect the pitcher’s FIP to move in the coming weeks and months.

You’ll note in this first table, that we have a mix of SP and RPs.  The negative delta means the pitchers may be a bit over their skis in the early going and a negative correction is on the horizon.

Conversely, this table shows the other end of the spectrum.  We see so many SPs who may be a little slow out of the gate but could be good “buy low” candidates for our fantasy teams.

Kumite

Let’s look at WAR on the pitching side too.

Here we see almost half (7 of the top 15) in WAR are also currently amongst the leaders in fantasy points per IP.  Expanding it out like we did with the hitters, we find 35 of the top 50 and 83 of the top 100 in WAR are captured.  That’s even better correlation than the hitters.  Lesson learned:  Pay attention to WAR when you shop on the wire!

Where We’re Going

For all you “other” platform Points league players, I promised to give you something specific.  Here it is.  This tool is made just for you.  That’s right, Rudy has put together a projection sheet looking at the week ahead and providing relative Points league scoring for general CBS, ESPN, Fantrax and Yahoo leagues.  This table is updated on Friday-Monday mornings to reflect the upcoming Monday-Sunday baseball week.

For those with a visual preference, here’s what it looks like, sorted for Fantrax leagues:

Pretty cool, huh?

Here is a snapshot of Razzball’s top 15 players for the week of April 14:

How’s that for rapid fire!

Summary

This whole exercise was meant to encourage you to look at the full arsenal of weapons at your fantasy baseball disposal.  I just gave you a sampling here.  As we saw, some have more of a direct correlation with our needs (i.e., points) while others serve in a more supporting role.  In some way, all have value.  Let’s use them.

No matter your baseball flavor, Razzball has you covered.  Simply go to the Razzball Roto Deluxe Homepage and get started.

As always, you can find me on Twitter/X (@Derek_Favret) and on BlueSky (@dfavret.bsky.social).

Sayonara, my friends!