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Let me preface this article by saying that I watch A LOT of baseball.  I also have an extensive analytical background and am always analyzing baseball stats looking for value in players.  Last week, I was watching an Orioles game and the starting pitcher was a player I have never heard of.  His name is Tyler Wilson.  While watching the game, I was very impressed with his overall make-up and the confidence he displayed in each one of his pitches.  Many times what separates a pitcher from being able to start at the big-league level versus being destined for the bullpen is the ability to throw multiple pitches.  The ability to throw each of those pitches effectively, however, can be what separates a good starting pitcher from a great starting pitcher.  The more I watched of Wilson, the more intrigued I became about his future outlook, and the more motivated I became to write this article.  (I went back and watched all of Wilson’s starts this year before writing this article.)

To give you a little background, Tyler Wilson has never been an elite prospect.  He attended college at the University of Virginia, where he was overlooked by fellow staff-mate, and future 1st round pick, Danny Hultzen.  Wilson was drafted by the Orioles in the 10th round of the 2011 MLB Draft.  Ever since being drafted, he has quietly excelled at every level.  He doesn’t have the dominant strikeout numbers that you look for in pitching prospects, which is a big reason he has gone overlooked for much of his career.

After climbing his way through the organizational ladder, Wilson made his major league debut with the Orioles last year and eventually made the team this year out of spring training.  Although he made the team in a bullpen role, early season injuries to the Orioles pitching staff opened up an opportunity and Wilson has really taken advantage of it.  Enough of the background though.  Let’s move on to what I saw while actually watching him pitch.

Tyler Wilson features a cutter and a two-seam fastball.  Each of these pitches sit in the 89-91 mph range and both show a great amount of movement.  The cutter is most effective against right-handed batters when thrown on the outside portion of the plate.  Check out the video below to watch him fool Kansas City Royals outfielder Lorenzo Cain with three straight cutters:

He essentially gave Cain, a very good hitter, three of the exact same pitches in a row…and Cain couldn’t touch them.  In every start this year, Wilson has pounded the outside corner with this cutter and has had fantastic results.  Don’t think by any means though that he is a one trick pony.  As soon as you start to expect that cutter on the outside corner, Wilson will come right back in on you with a two-seam fastball:

Look at the horizontal movement on that pitch!  Absolutely filthy!  Wilson has showed a ton of confidence in both of those pitches so far this season as he uses them to pound both sides of the strike zone and his command of them has been exceptional.  He is not afraid to throw them in any count and they are equally effective vs both left-handed and right-handed batters.

While his fastballs both seemed to be plus pitches upon first glance, I started to have thoughts that this guy might be for real as soon as he started throwing his curveball.  Wilson’s breaking ball sits in the 77-79 mph range.  I was astonished by how well he was able to locate his curve and the amount of movement on each and every one he threw.  Watch him send White Sox slugger Jose Abreu down swinging in the video below:

Abreu had no chance.  In his most recent start against the Twins, Wilson’s curve looked even better.  Check out the one he threw to Byung-Ho Park:

Both of those pitches came in a 2-2 count.  Many pitchers are scared to throw a breaking ball in a 2-2 count, especially to players with plus power such as Abreu and Park.  If you miss your target, two things can happen.  One — you leave the ball up in the zone and it gets hit out of the stadium.  Two — you throw it in the dirt; the hitter lays off; and now you have to pitch to this slugger with a full count.  Wilson isn’t scared to throw his curveball in any count and that is what makes him so dangerous.  You never know when to expect it, but at the same time you have to expect that he can throw it at any moment.

The last pitch in Wilson’s arsenal is his changeup.  This pitch has a ton of downward movement and produces a lot of groundballs.  While there were many better examples that I could have shown you of his change-up in action, I wanted to show one of his bad ones.  Even when he missed his target, the batter was still fooled by the amount of movement on this pitch.  Check out the following pitch to Royals SS Alcides Escobar:

The catcher set up down in the zone and Wilson clearly misses his target.  Luckily it didn’t seem to matter as the pitch had an insane amount of horizontal movement, running in on Escobar and jamming him.

Take a look at the chart below, showing the vertical and horizontal movement on each of Wilson’s pitches:

The middle portion of this chart is empty.  All five of his pitches have a tremendous amount of movement, and none of them move in the same direction.  The fact that he is able to command each of these pitches so well and keep hitters guessing with which one will come next is the reason why he has had so much success.  A big reason why hitters are having trouble guessing his pitches is because of how well Wilson is able to repeat his delivery.  The chart below shows Wilson’s release point for each type of pitch:

As you can see, his release point is almost identical with all five of his pitches.  At this point, I have watched all of his starts from this season and was very impressed.   I then decided to do some research and was immediately impressed with stats such as his career BB rate and low WHIP, but wanted to dig further.  I began to look through the PITCHf/x data because I was curious to see how effective each of his pitches actually were.  Based on the PITCHf/x value metric, all of his pitches so far this year have graded as above average.  If you are not familiar with the PITCHf/x value scale, someone who has a fastball ranking of zero means that he possesses an average fastball.  Any value above zero means that pitch is above average.  Obviously the higher the number, the better the pitch.  The same goes for negative numbers and pitches being below average.  See the table below for the breakdown of Wilson’s arsenal:

Based on the above values, the change-up has been Wilson’s most valuable pitch this season with his curveball close behind.  Obviously it is very early in the season and we are working with a small sample size…but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun!  While doing this research, I set out the goal to find every starting pitcher who throws five or more above-average pitches.  Below is the list of players who fit that description:

IP = Innings Pitched
FA = Fastball
FT = Two-Seam Fastball
FC = Cut Fastball
SI = Sinker
SL = Slider
CU = Curveball
CH = Change-up
KC = Knuckle Curveball
EP = Eephus

There are only five pitchers who have thrown five or more pitches above average so far this season!  Wilson is in great company, as the other four pitchers are all All-Star-caliber players and borderline household names.  Being that this is such a small sample size, I decided to look back at last year’s stats to see how many players fit this description over a full season.  Using the same parameters and setting the minimum IP to 100, the following table was produced:

Once again, the names on this list are some of the top pitchers in baseball.  A few of these pitchers have a pitch that graded out as below average, but since they had five or more different pitches all individually grade as above average, they made the final cut.

As you can see, it is very rare to have a pitcher who has five legitimate plus pitches.  I am very interested to see if Tyler Wilson can maintain these results over the course of a full season, and I really hope he is given the opportunity to do so.  If he continues to pitch the way he has been, the Orioles will have no choice but to leave him in the rotation.  Although he has had limited success, Wilson has struggled in each of his starts when facing the lineup the third time around.  This could be due to the fact that he is still in the process of being stretched out from his bullpen role.  When in the bullpen, you don’t have to prepare to face the same hitter three times.  I am hopeful that once he is fully stretched out and back into his starter mentality, he will be able to make the necessary adjustments and continue to throw all of his pitches with confidence.  If he can continue to make quality pitches as he faces the lineup for a third time, I believe Tyler Wilson has the chance to become a very special pitcher.

Memorable quotes I heard during the TV broadcasts:

“Everyone thinks that I pitch with a chip on my shoulder but I really don’t.  I just go out and compete.  I don’t think of it that way.” – Tyler Wilson

“I think he understands himself.  He can maintain his game-plan throughout the game.  He’s going to keep us in the game and give us a chance to win.  What more can you ask for?” – Pitching Coach Dave Wallace

“I love that he can make the ball run in and then cut away.  He pitches to both sides of the plate.  Not a lot of young pitchers can do that.” – Manager Buck Showalter

…no Buck, not a lot of young pitchers can do that.

Twitter – @mtamburri922

Dynasty leagues are a little bit like the stock market.  What makes a good owner is finding things that may go up in value; this can be players, draft picks, or even money (not all leagues allow trading money, but ours does).  When you find a player that you think will go up in value you try to trade for him, pick him up, or draft him.  Anyone can sign good players in the auction for a lot of money, but what sets the good teams apart is their ability to find the players that are going to go up in value, or as we say “break out.”  I’m a fan of David Peralta.  He has already made quite an impact for teams in 2015.  Hitting .312/.371/.522 will do that.  The good thing for us is that he is not being properly valued right now in fantasy baseball leagues.

Now is the time of the year for rankings.  Every single site out there is coming out with their rankings getting everyone all set for their leagues.  Thankfully, we have sites like FantasyPros to get us consensus rankings and average draft positions.  Right now experts rank David Peralta an average of 40th among outfielders.  He is being drafted on average as the 38th outfielder off the boards.

David Peralta came up as a starting pitcher with the St. Louis Cardinals.  After multiple shoulder injuries he decided to bow out and head back home to Venezuela where he remade himself into an offensive player.  After an impressive year in an independent league he was signed by the Diamondbacks.  He quickly shot up through the system, learning fast for a player already in his mid 20s.  He’s only had a year and a half in the big leagues now, but he’s still been improving.  From what I understand, he is a very hard-working and upbeat player.

Numbers?  How about an improved hard-hit rate, going from 30% in 2014 to 35% in 2015?  A wRC+ jump from 110 to 138?  A HR/FB jump from 9.6% to 17.7%?  Even within 2015 he improved all three of those stats, getting up to a 38% hard-hit rate and a 162 wRC+ in the second half.  That’s destroying the baseball.  He’s spend most of his time batting fourth behind Goldschmidt and Pollock, so the RBI opportunities will continue.

You want to know what the most shocking thing is?  He only started 116 games.  The logjam in the Arizona outfield was to blame.  Well guess what, Ender Inciarte is gone and Yasmany Tomas sucks.  David Peralta is going to have no problem being the permanent cleanup hitter.  If we just took his 2015 stats and ignored any improvement whatsoever and prorated them for a reasonable 150 games we would be looking at 79 runs, 22 home runs, 101 runs batted in, and 12 stolen bases.  That’s even giving him two whole weeks off.  If you bake in some improvement due to his second-half numbers it’s not very hard to see 25-30 home runs with 200 combined runs and RBI.  Those numbers look a lot like what we’d expect from someone like Ryan Braun, Adam Jones, or Matt Kemp, all of whom are going in the 15-25 range.

The only website I’ve seen give Peralta his due was ESPN when Tristen Cockroft put him 25th among outfielders.  So at the very least that means I am not the only one thinking this is a huge value opportunity.  For dynasty leaguers, you need to go out and get him now.  He’s more than likely got a nice cheap contract or he might even be available in an auction because someone didn’t think he’s worth keeping around.  Listen to me, get him now and lock him up.  It’s a done deal.  Guess what, I’ve already done that in my league.  I traded Ken Giles ($1/3) for Peralta ($4/1) and a second-round draft pick back in November, so I put my money where my mouth is.  That was before Giles was in Houston and in our league contracts can be doubled up each additional year so I traded away about seven years of a top-10 closer for three or four years of Peralta and a second-round pick (for the minor-league draft).  But enough about me, don’t worry about my deal.  Go and get him.  Rarely are breakouts this easy to predict.

The timeless struggle between pitcher and batter is one of dominance — who holds it and how. Both players use a repertoire of techniques to adapt to each other’s strategies in order to gain advantage, thereby winning the at-bat and, ultimately, the game.

These strategies can rely on everything from experience to data. In fact, baseball players rely heavily on data analytics in order to tell them how they’re swinging their bats, how well they’ll do in college, how they’ll perform at Wrigley versus Miller.

Big data has been used in baseball for decades — as early as the 60s. Bill James, however, was the first prominent sabermetrician, writing about the field in his Bill James Baseball Abstracts during the 80s. Sabermetrics are used to measure in-game performance and are often used by teams to prospect players.

Baseball fans familiar with sabermetrics, the A’s, and Brad Pitt have likely seen Moneyball, the Hollywood adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book. The book told the story of As manager Billy Beane’s use of sabermetrics to amass a winning team.

Sabermetrics is one way baseball teams use big data to leverage game theory in baseball — on a team-wide scale. However, by leveraging their data through the concepts of game theory on a smaller scale, baseball teams can help their men on mound out-duel those at the plate.

Game theory studies strategic decision making, not just in sports or games, but in any situation in which a decision must be made against another decision maker. In other words, it is the study of conflict.

Game theory uses mathematical models to analyze decisions. Most sports are zero-sum games, in which the decisions of one player (or team) will have a direct effect on the opposing player (or team). This creates an equilibrium which is known as the Nash equilibrium, named for the mathematician John Forbes Nash. What this means is that if a team scores a run, it is usually at the expense of the opposing team — likely based on an error by a fielder or a hit off a pitcher.

In the case of pitching, game theory — especially the use of the Nash equilibrium — can be used to predict pitch optimization for strategic purposes. Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight advocates using big data and sabermetrics to analyze each pitch in a hurler’s armory, then cultivating the pitcher’s equilibrium — the perfect blend of pitches that will result in the highest number of strikeouts, etc.

Paine has gone so far as to create his own formula, the Nash Score, to predict which pitcher should throw which pitches in order to outwit batters.

In perfect game theory, the Nash equilibrium states that each game player uses a mix of strategies that is so effective, neither has incentive to change strategies. For pitchers, Paine’s Nash Score uses their data to find the optimal combination of pitches to combat batters, including frequency.

Paine does point out that creating this kind of equilibrium in baseball can be detrimental to a pitcher. He is, after all, playing against another human being who is just as capable of using game theory to adapt strategies to upset the equilibrium.

If a pitcher’s fastball is his best, and his Nash Score shows that he should be using it more often, savvy hitters are going to notice. “ . . . In time, the fastball will lose its effectiveness if it’s not balanced against, say, a change-up — even if the fastball is a far better pitch on paper,” writes Paine.

In this case, a mixed strategy is the best — in game theory, mixed strategies are best used when a player intends to keep his opponent guessing. Though pitch optimization using Paine’s Nash Score could lead to efficiency, allowing pitchers to throw fewer pitches for more innings, it could also lead to batters adapting much quicker to patterns, thus negating all the work.

Take a look at Chris Davis’s stat line in August: 11 games, 45 PA, 14 Ks, 7 BBs, 6 HRs. Nothing really jumps out; it’s pretty typical for Chris Davis. Looking deeper though, this selection of plate appearances is actually quite remarkable. 27 out of the 45, or 60% of them, ended with a strikeout, walk, or home run, known as the “three true outcomes” where the ball does not end up in play.

As Baseball Prospectus explains in its definition of TTO, the statistic actually gained relevance with the introduction of DIPS, FIP, and other pitching estimators that ignored the outcomes of balls in play. While still not commonly used, it’s certainly interesting to take a look at once in a while to see what players are taking luck into their own hands.

Chris Davis is actually not the most extreme three true outcome player. Despite his 60 TTO% August, his season-long percentage through August 13 stands at 48.9%, good for 5th in baseball of those who have at least 300 plate appearances. The rest of the top-10 leaderboard features both good names and bad. On the good side, we have Giancarlo Stanton, the only player to feature a HR% over 8% (his is 8.5% , and he actually leads second-place Nelson Cruz by 1.4%). Other names you might associate with quality players are Bryce Harper, Joc Pederson, and George Springer, all of whom have a K% under 30% and a HR% of over 4%. The players who might not be as happy to be on this list include the aforementioned Chris Davis, Chris Carter, Steven Souza, Kris Bryant, and Colby Rasmus, who all feature a K% of 31% or higher. Mike Zunino, who comes in at 10th, sports a walk rate and home run rate of just 5.6% and 2.8%, respectively, but more than makes up for it with a 34.2% strikeout rate, second only to Souza.

Now that we’re done with the fun facts, let’s get into what it really means. TTO players are swing-for-the-fence players, those who aim to hit the ball over the wall every time they make contact. This is the cause behind their multitude of strikeouts. It also accounts for their walks, with the reasoning that pitchers are simply afraid to throw them hittable pitches.

The real question becomes “Are these TTO players valuable?” Looking at a graph comparing TTO% to wRC+ over the past 15 years, there is little correlation. It seems as though it is slightly more productive to be a TTO player, mainly because of the home runs and walks. This is far from a correlation though, as many bad players have a high TTO% and vice versa.

If we split it up into its parts, we might get a better view. League average TTO% has risen over the last decade, from 27.3% in 2005 to 30.3% this year (with a high of 30.5% in 2012).

We know the overall percentage has risen, but what’s driving it? If you’ve been following baseball, you know that the quality of pitchers has improved in recent years. Predictably, this has led to a decrease in walk rate and home run rate.

If 2/3 of the TTO% has decreased, but TTO% has still increased, that must mean the change in the third category must be drastic. This happens to be exactly the case. While BB% and HR% have fallen approximately a combined 1% over the past 10 years, league wide K% has risen by 4%.

What this means is that nowadays, if you are a TTO player, it’s likely much of that is coming from your strikeouts. In fact, out of the top-25 TTO% players with at least 200 PAs, only Paul Goldschmidt has a K% under 20%. Does this make high TTO% players bad? As I said before, there really isn’t a correlation, You’ll see players like Bryce Harper and Mike Trout with a high TTO%, while Buster Posey has one of the lowest because of his low K%.

The reality is, there are many different kinds of players. Some have adopted this TTO mentality, but others have stayed with a more conservative contact-focused approach. Without further information, it’s difficult to say which strategy is better. As a fan of statistics, I prefer the TTO players because it’s much easier to predict their performance. I don’t think they care much about that though.

Also, if you were curious, here’s a list of the top TTO% players with 200 PAs, created using FanGraphs data through August 13.

I have every reason to hate Dee Gordon.

Prior to the 2012 season, I found myself struggling to figure out who would get the final keeper slot in a longtime, highly competitive fantasy league I played in. It came down to two players: Mike Trout and Dee Gordon. They both would have cost me the same, but Gordon was coming off a rookie campaign where he batted .304 with 24 steals in a miniscule 224 at-bats. Trout, on the other hand, was heading into 2012 with what seemed to me like a more clouded future. He had just posted a pedestrian .671 OPS with a 22.2 K%–albeit as a 19-year old–the year prior. He was also blocked in LF at the time by the great Bobby Abreu, and was looking at possibly another year of seasoning in the minors. In the end I chose Gordon, and the rest is terrible, nightmare-inducing history.

So how strange that I find myself here now, defending Dee Gordon, the very man who hoodwinked me into choosing him over Mike mother-flippin’ Trout.

Ironically, I think the hate for Gordon has gone a bit too far this year. It’s odd to think that there’s any hate for a guy coming off a season where he led all of baseball in steals while also posting a top-25 batting average of .289. But some people seem awfully down on the guy coming into 2015. Perhaps they too were burned by his 2011 breakout, and refuse to make the same mistake twice. Though I can’t fault them if that is the case, there is reason to believe that Dee Gordon’s days of breaking our hearts are over.

The first thing to point out are his batted-ball rates. As the graph illustrates, there weren’t any earth-shattering changes occurring here. It is worth noting, however, that Gordon set a career high in groundball percentage and a career low in fly-ball percentage. And if you’re willing to consider 2013 an aberration like I am (he only managed 106 plate appearances that year), he has actually been gradually trending in the right direction with both his fly-ball and groundball percentages while maintaining a fairly steady line-drive rate. Spikes in groundball percentages are rarely considered ideal, but when a player has the elite speed Gordon does, the odds of turning a weak dribbler or a grounder towards the hole into a hit get a very favorable bump.

Which brings me to perhaps the most eyebrow-raising aspect of Gordon’s 2014 season: his bunt-hit percentage (BUH%). After averaging a 28.5 BUH% over the prior three seasons, Gordon posted a ridiculous 42.6 BUH% in 2014. To put that number into perspective, here’s how it stacked up against the league’s other elite speedsters:

Bunting for hits is a skill. The fact that his success rate rose by nearly 15% last year tells me that he worked on and dramatically improved this skill. Perhaps more importantly, though, it tells me that he’s keenly aware of how dangerous a weapon this skill can be for him when used effectively. When paired with his declining fly-ball rates–and especially his new career low IFFB% of 8%, down from 13.2%–the numbers start to paint the picture of a player who may have finally begun to consciously tailor his plate approach to his strengths.

While I will never forgive Dee Gordon for what he did to me, I do see reasons to be optimistic about his 2015 season. Should his elite ability to bunt for hits carry over into this season, his .346 BABIP shouldn’t see as much regression as people seem to think, and another year of plus average and a stolen-base crown seems well within his reach.

For every Dontrelle Willis–who continues to get looks from Major League teams despite over eight years of complete ineptitude–there exists a handful of other players who fade into relative obscurity only a year or two removed from a dominant season. All it generally takes is a down year resulting from–or paired with–an injury to send a guy spiraling below the radar. These are often the players that can return the most value during fantasy drafts if you can make the distinction between a year that’s an aberration, and one that is a bellwether for a significant, irreversible decline in skills.

While I can’t say with complete confidence that Curtis Granderson’s 2014 doesn’t fall into the latter category, there were a couple of encouraging things going on below the subpar surface stats that make me think he can return some solid value this year, especially considering where he’s going in most drafts.

Granderson was 33 last year and coming off an injury-shortened season. He was also trading a left-handed pull hitter’s haven in Yankee Stadium for the cavernous confines of Citi Field. All things considered, it was natural to expect some significant regression. And when he hit .136 through his first 100 at-bats of the season, it seemed like the Mets might have had a disaster of Jason Bay-like proportions on their hands.

Fortunately for them, Granderson managed to right the ship to an extent, putting together a couple of excellent months. His final line of .227/.326/.388–dragged further down by a nightmarish .037 ISO, 16-for-109 August–wasn’t spectacular by any stretch. But there were some nice takeaways buried in there.

For one, his bat speed doesn’t seem to have slowed enough to justify the statistical hits he took across the board. Despite seeing 56.3% fastballs–the most he’s seen since 2010 by a wide margin–his Z-Contact % of 85% was in line with his 85.8% career average, and not far removed from the league average of 87%. I suspect the uptick in fastballs resulted from opposing teams banking on an age-slowed swing, but Granderson’s contact rates on high velocity pitches in the zone didn’t suffer for it.

Granderson also set a career high in O-Contact % with a 62.7% rate. This could usually indicate a lack of plate discipline as much as it could a sustained bat speed, except that Granderson’s O-Swing % of 26.2% is roughly the average of what he did in the four years prior. He also managed to post the second-highest walk rate of his career (12.1%) and his lowest strikeout percentage since 2009 (21.6%). These are not particularly impressive rates in their own right, but in the context of Granderson’s career they do help to dispel the notion that last year was the beginning of the end for his hitting ability.

That is not to say, of course, that I foresee a return to the 40 home run, .260+ ISO form that he flashed in his early Yankee years–there’s no way he ever touches the absurd 22 HR/FB% that sustained that run. But with the right field fences at Citi Field moving in–a change that apparently would have resulted in 9 more home runs for Granderson had it been done last season–and some improvement on last year’s uncharacteristically bad .265 BABIP, I would not be at all surprised to see a home run total between 25 and 30 to go along with double-digit steals and a batting average that won’t kill you. And that has value when it is being drafted as low as Granderson currently is.

Last week I looked at the AL, so it is time to talk about the Senior Circuit depth. After that I will discuss the limitations that I think exist in both my approach and Jeff’s, part of which could be a new form of MVP debates. What is depth?

Again, I started with a rough look at front line versus second for the teams:

I had to adjust my method of using the multiple of using front divided by second line a little bit to account for the Reds and Phillies who have negative second line projections by using absolute values.  The National League is structured in a more stars and scrubs way this year versus the American League where there are no teams that you point at and think they will be horrible.  In Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Arizona things are looking pretty grim on the front lines though I could argue that Atlanta has some upside relative to how much Steamer seems to hate their outfield and starting pitching.

This changed how my depth ranking compared to Jeff’s by making the Diamondbacks and Mets look pretty good depth-wise only due to a combination of okay backups mixed with pretty low overall front line WAR.  This is a limitation of the multiples I use as shrinking the numerator can make for a lower multiple if a bad team has a couple of decent bench players.  I will come back to the discussion of what is depth in a second.

Only one other team was ranked far away from Jeff, the Pirates, and they look a lot like the Yankees did in the AL.  In Pittsburgh, they have good players all over the front lines, but the team is going to depend on those guys a lot according to the projection.  Jeff is giving them credit for guys like Sean Rodriguez who could be capable fill-ins according to the projections, not a sentiment I necessarily disagree with and is something recommending the way he approached it.  So what is depth?

I think you can argue several different approached to depth.  Jeff is looking at total number of theoretically useful players, I am looking at a ratio of front line to second line performance to see how much the team is expected to lean on it’s front line, but I also think you could look at two approaches similar to these.  How many capable fill-ins and back-ups are there, Jeff’s number of players minus the number of starters in it would be a simple possible approach to look at how many holes are behind the first group.  Another would be total WAR drop from group 1 to 2 as a percent of front-line, or in other words how much worse is the second group in percent terms.  I could keep going as I have at least three other possibilities, but hopefully you get the point that depth is not a concrete concept just like what does valuable mean in MVP.

What I think might be the best statistical approach to this sort of problem is to have multiple independent people do what I and Jeff have already done and then aggregate the rankings.  Then our approaches can be biased by whatever version of depth we lean toward and let the problems with any given system of measurement be offset by the others.  This isn’t necessary to evaluate all teams, the Reds depth is bad period, but if you look at teams like the Yankees who I think are a little harder to project this year it could be useful.  Since I am a hobbyist who nearly no one knows or cares about, you can now disregard that pipe-dream, though I think over time a system like that would help in understanding how valuable depth is.

The 15-team LABR Mixed Draft is the most exciting of the expert fantasy drafts each year. Amateur fantasy owners from all over the globe tune into the live spreadsheet broadcast and debate each one furiously on social media.

Most of these amateurs are looking for expert guidance to help them in their own draft. They see a player getting drafted well above their ADP and they often move the player up on their own personal big board.

I do not think this is the best way to approach and absorb the most information out of LABR. When one expert reaches on a pick, we have no idea if there is a consensus. It could have been just one expert making a stand on a player he himself feels strongly about, or there could have been several owners who felt the same way about that player. We just don’t know.

What we do know is that when certain players drop well below their public rankings, there is an agreement of pessimism. That is the information that could be significant for the rest us. Every owner in the league letting a player fall well below their ADP is the expert consensus we should be looking for.

Here’s a quick look at nine players who the experts are cool on.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago Jeff Sullivan looked at a quick depth check for all the teams in baseball.  Depth is a hard thing to measure, so I would prefer to look at it in another way and see if anything else shows up or if I can corroborate what Jeff saw.  This is the result from the AL, as I got in an hour or two and realized I wouldn’t have time for all 30 teams this week, so I will get you the rest next week.

What I did was look at the front-line players for each team and their projected WAR from Steamer.  Then I looked at the backups to see theirs.  Front line includes all eight position players, DH, five starters and six relievers.  Second includes a backup at each position (sometimes one player for a couple), 6th and 7th starter, and three relievers beyond the first six.  Here are the outcomes:

From a depth perspective two things can be relevant, total production expected from the second line and the difference between the first and second lines.  For the difference I want to talk about the difference as the front line being a multiple of the second to keep from the absolute gap looking bad when it is only relative to a strong first string.

You can see what teams Steamer really likes, like the Mariners, who some might not have expected.  They have three high level front line players carrying them in Robinson Cano, Kyle Seager, and Felix Hernandez along with a bunch of 1 to 3 win guys in Hisashi Iwakuma, Austin Jackson, Nelson Cruz, etc.  I don’t like Logan Morrison as much as them but they do have a pretty good mix of talent.  Their second line is not as strong, but it is still around the middle of the pack but the bulk of that coming from Chris Taylor so maybe slightly misleading.

The Red Sox are the clear winners in the second line and the White Sox, who upgraded the front line considerably in the offseason, are clearly not deep based on Steamer’s assumptions.  The Red Sox have Xander Bogaerts backing up shortstop and third, Allen Craig for left and first base, and Ryan Hanigan at catcher.  Pitching is not nearly as deep for them, but their rotation is starting from a solid foundation and they have a reasonable front line bullpen.

In Chicago, injuries to front line starters are expected to be crippling.  Chris Sale, Jeff Samardzija, and Jose Quintana make for a good front of the rotation, but beyond them you are looking at John Danks, Hector Noesi, and Erik Johnson who combine for a negative WAR projection.  That is what makes their depth look so weak.  They are also missing a good backup everywhere except for Emilio Bonifacio who will help out at several positions.

I’m not going through each team, but I do want to match this up with what Jeff found in his.  I ranked them by the multiples method I already described, so the most depth would be the lowest multiple for front line over second.  Both systems put the Red Sox number one and the White Sox last.  Doing an AL ranking they also agree on the Twins (2nd), Orioles (7th), Blue Jays (11th), and Rangers (12th).  There are only a couple of teams on which we really disagree.

Jeff had the Yankees’ depth as 5th and my system had them at 14th.  They have 15 front liners above the 1 WAR threshold he used, but they have little else to go on so in my system they look pretty shallow.  The Royals are the other team on which we disagree.  Again, the Royals front line is full of useful players, but only one of their backups is above that level in Jarrod Dyson.  That gave them a middle of the pack ranking for Sullivan.  In mine Dyson’s rather large number for a second line player along with Erik Kratz, Christian Colon, Kris Medlen and a couple other little guys added up to a pretty decent set of second tier players.

Depth does not make a team good, but for some of the contenders this could become a very big deal.  I would be especially concerned as a fan for Detroit or Toronto who I would think are expecting to contend but have very little behind their studs.  A good team has more than depth, but a potential good team can be completely derailed without it.

I got caught up in an interesting Twitter debate Friday afternoon regarding Astros 2B Jose Altuve with FantasyAlarm.Com’s Ray Flowers that prompted a detailed response from Flowers about our Altuve dispute where he doubled down on his assertion that Altuve’s ADP of 10th overall is huge mistake.

The main crux of his argument is that Altuve is not an across-the-board contributor. He claims Altuve’s lack of power in this current environment makes him a terrible choice at the end of the 1st round.  In this article I’m going to demonstrate why this shouldn’t be a major concern for you.

Hitting Your Marks

In 5×5 rotisserie leagues, the goal is to construct a lineup that gives you a chance to accumulate as many points as possible in the various categories. In NFBC 15-team leagues, I’ve come up with these target numbers for each category.

Hitting each of these five offensive targets should put you in the Top 3 of each category, accumulating at least 65 of the maximum possible 75 points. There are 14 hitting positions to fill, so you are looking for these averages per active roster spot:

Value Is Value

The key to winning fantasy baseball leagues is to constantly find the best value in each of your picks no matter what round you are in. Getting power-happy in the early portion of the draft has been a trendy tactic over the past couple years as power has declined in baseball. Let’s look at a couple of the players Flowers suggested he’d rather pick over Jose Altuve in the 1st round and their Steamer projections:

NFBC has a player rating system that compares a player’s statistics to league average and creates a score to show what their true 5×5 Roto value is. Based on the above 2015 Steamer projections, here is where each of these players would have finished last season:

Altuve is the more valuable player based on 2015 Steamer projections (and most likely more valuable based on any credible projection system).

And now we get to Flowers’ main point. He says that “Power is harder to find than ever before.”  He is absolutely right but that does not mean there isn’t an island of misfit power bats available in the middle rounds. You should not be worried about missing out on power in the early rounds because THERE IS home run pop that you can add later in the draft.

In a recent NFBC draft of my own – where I took Altuve 12th overall – I had the powerful but flawed Chris Carter land right in my lap in the 10th round, 139th overall. Let’s look at his projection:

Carter, a source of tremendous power, has been scaring the daylights out of fantasy owners for the past couple of years. Nobody wants to take on his treacherous batting average as it will surely drag their team average into oblivion. Well because we took the proper value in the first round (Altuve), we are now in a position where Chris Carter is worth significantly more to us than to the guy who took Anthony Rendon or Adam Jones. We get extra value from Carter because we can absorb his batting average better than they can!

Here is what our first round pick, combined with Carter would look like as a composite player. Remember, we need 18 HRs, 66 Runs, 66 RBIs, 11 SBs, and .270 Avg to crack the Top 3 of those categories.

If we were to have chosen Rendon or Jones in the first round, Carter would be a terrible fit for us in the 10th round. We’d be in solid shape in three categories, but face crippling deficits in stolen bases and batting average. But because we chose Altuve (the most valuable of the 3 players), it allowed us to spend some of our excess batting average and stolen bases to acquire a middle-round power bat that nobody else wants to touch. With Altuve+Carter, we exceed our minimum requirements in FOUR categories and are not very far behind in a 5th.

A NFBC Draft Champions league that I won in 2013 stands out in my memory. The early rounds of the draft provided me a surplus of batting average and stolen bases, and I continued to take the best player available each round after that. The brutish Adam Dunn, who was coming off a terrible .159, 11 HR season, was getting drafted around 185th overall that year as people feared the damage his average would do. Because of the excess wealth I accumulated in other categories, Dunn was worth more to me than everybody else. I determined that if Dunn were to bounce back to the .220 range, I could absorb his average and bet that his home run power would return. After all, he did average 40 HRs a year for seven straight years prior to his 2012 abomination. I ended up being able to reach above his ADP and take him in the 11th round, 165th overall. He provided me with 41 HRs, 96 RBIs, and 87 runs in 2014 and was a key cog in winning the league.

Finding Speed

I suppose the counter argument to this approach would be, “Well we don’t need batting average lagging Chris Carter or Adam Dunn in the 10th round. Since we accumulated the extra power with Rendon or Jones, we can go after a speed merchant in these rounds. Perfectly reasonable case to state. You should be trying to balance your roster out. But does it work better than Altuve+Carter? Let’s look at the speedy Ben Revere, who went late in the 8th round of my draft, 118th overall. Under this scenario, since we took more power early, let’s grab this high average/stolen base machine from the Phillies and make up the ground we lost, right?

And our new composite player:

Revere is a light hitting lead off man with virtually zero pop. You have now elevated your composite player into the upper echelon in stolen bases and batting average at the expense of HRs, runs, and RBIs. Despite Revere getting drafted a round or two earlier than Carter, the combinations with Rendon or Jones are worse in those three categories compared to Altuve+Carter.

There’s a myth going around that cheap steals are always available late in the draft. While it’s true you can occasionally hit the jackpot on a Dee Gordon from time to time, it is a very risky play to ignoring steals early in hopes of finding one of these guys late. These players are also dangerous to the health of your power categories as you can see from the Revere example. It just seems like an unnecessary strategic risk to plan on these guys delivering for you. Other owners plot this same strategy and often they reach above ADP to grab one of the speedsters you were also planning on supplementing your power with. Roster construction? Out the window.

Also, Chris Carter is not your only option to complement your team in these middle rounds. There are several very good targets to keep an eye for if you’re lucky enough for Altuve to land in your lap at the end of the 1st round. Lucas Duda (.234, 24 HR) and Marcell Ozuna (.255, 22 HR) were both available in the 9th round. I personally drafted Brandon Moss (.248, 28 HR) in the 12th round. Pedro Alvarez (.242, 26 HR), I got in the 14th round. Again, I could absorb these averages because I repeatedly took the best player available earlier in the draft, often players with overlooked batting averages. I constantly kept an eye on my roster construction to ensure I could absorb these lower batting averages and lack of stolen bases.

In 2014, there were 56 hitters drafted between selections 201-to-300. 16 of these hitters would hit at least 18 home runs. Meanwhile, 15 of the 56 managed 11 steals.

Back to my particular draft this year, after choosing Altuve 12th, I took Jacoby Ellsbury with my 2nd round pick, 19th overall. Between these two players, Steamer projects only 24 home runs between them. Even though I happened to not grab any huge raw power bats in the first two rounds, I still managed to construct a 14-man lineup that is projected to hit the magical 250 HR mark without falling behind in the other categories.

Altuve and .300

A repeated argument was also made that Jose Altuve “is not lock to hit .300 this year”. I believe this is a very pessimistic position to take and I haven’t heard a sensible reason for it. This is a player who hit .286 over his first 1300 PAs as a 22-23 year old youngster. Despite increasing his Swing% rate to over 50% last year, he made more contact than ever (4.4% SwStr) with an uptick of power on his way to a ridiculous .343 average.  This is an elite hit tool.

Not even the most bullish Altuve supporter would think he’s going to hit .343 again. That would be a very unfair expectation. However, not a single person who is bearish on Altuve has made a compelling argument why this 24-year-old can’t hit .300 again. Of course Altuve is “not a lock to hit .300”. By that argument there is no player who is a lock to hit any of their projections, including Mike Trout.

Yes, HR power has declined over the years. But so has batting average. Over the last six years the league average has fallen from .264 to .251. You are not going to find too many players past the 10th round who are going to give you 600+ PAs of near .300 average to complement your sluggers, and if they do hit those numbers they are tremendously weak in other categories.

To wrap this up, I’m telling you not to buy into the hysterics that there is no power available after the early rounds. Do not buy into the major regression talk. You should have no fear in drafting Jose Altuve with your first selection if he’s the best value on the board.