Advanced Fantasy Baseball Daily

R.I.P. Kamala a.k.a. James Harris

Ramon Laureano Suspended For Brawl

Laureano was suspended for the Brawl (you can see it in the attached video) that ensued when he could no longer take the antagonist Alex Cintron's (Oakland's Hitting Coach) taunts and threats. Considering he never landed a punch or really even got the opportunity to try before being tackled, his punishment (especially in the short season) seems severe. That is why we have appeals.
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Don't Call It A Comeback

Charlie Blackmon cannot be stopped this season. Last night he collected another three hits to bring his batting average to .500 in 68 At-Bats. Blackmon is the first to achieve this feat since Barry Bonds in 2004. If he starts stealing bases again I would vote for Blackmon as Fantasy MVP! If nothing else his performance is fun to watch in a season with all sorts of unpredictabilities (and some sort of obvious) making the sport difficult to manage. Not to mention he makes the Rockies look good which is incredibly difficult given their tendency to do weird stuff to build their team.
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Unwritten Praise

Had I written the sleeper/breakout reports I used to write every pre-season this year, I would have spent a good amount of inches on Nick Solak. I love the guy. I tried to trade for him in my AL-Only league only to be rejected multiple times. If I had written about him I could be bragging about my level of fantasy genius. He looks like the Rangers new center fielder and plays just about every day.
From Baseball Prospectus:

The Rangers’ answer to that conundrum appears to be: everywhere. In 15 games, Solak has seen time in left field, center field, second base, first base, and at DH. The latter is probably his ultimate home, but the important thing for Texas is that he’s starting to do what they’re counting on him for: hit. And he’s about the only Ranger doing so. Even before Tuesday’s three-hit outing, Solak led the Rangers with a 121 DRC+. The power hasn’t been there (no homers and just three extra-base hits) but his BABIP (.293) doesn’t suggest he’s been getting lucky; he’s shown a keen recognition of the strike zone, too, with just seven strikeouts against six walks.

And In Completely Unrelated...

Presidential Candidate Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris as his running mate. I think this is a solid choice especially given his previous promise to select a woman and POC. Some in the Black Community blame her for the incarceration and long prison sentences of POC during her time as a State Attorney in California. This is ridiculous. She was doing the job she was hired to do putting away drug dealers and the like. She did not arrest anyone. She did not write the laws she was enforcing. She did not invent the sentences. She only did her job to the best of her ability. It should be a plus not a mark against her. If she does her job as VP half as well we will all be better off for it.

Fantasy Baseball Bats Disappear in Odd 2020 Season

Baseball Bats Slump Hard

 This has definitely been an odd season. 2019 featured a juiced ball that sent baseball's offense soaring to new heights. Even little middle infielders were contributing to the onslaught against starting pitchers. The 2020 season seems to be providing the pitchers with a bit of revenge, though maybe not quite as much as the slumpers on your fantasy team would lead you to believe. Check out this piece from Eno Saris of the Athletic:

The Giants had just four batters projected to be better than league average before the season, and one of them was Buster Posey. The Brewers’ Lorenzo Cain was one of only 12 center fielders projected to have an above-average bat across baseball this year. In Yordan Alvarez, the Astros had a player that was projected to have the 10th-highest OPS in baseball this year. These teams all lost vital cogs when these players opted out or were unable to join their teams.

But is there any evidence that this missing talent skews more toward the hitters? When it comes to non-COVID IL visits, the evidence is clear that pitchers are actually suffering more. Even when you look at the two teams most affected by the virus so far — the Cardinals and Marlins — though they are missing a lot of players, neither team was projected to be above league average with the bat. Friends, family, and fans of course are rooting for their recovery and return, but their absence does not explain the drop in league-wide offense.

A subscription to the Athletic is well worth a few dollars per month or the discounted annual rate. Eno goes on to give several reasons for the hitters slow start to the season - The Hitters Being Ahead of the Pitchers, The Ball is Less Lively, Pitching Strategies are Optimized, Even More Shifting, A Bigger Strike Zone and A Lot of Missing Talent. 

I have certainly experienced the missing talent. From my three teams alone I've lost Lorenzo Cain, Yoenis Cespedes and Nick Markakis (I traded him before he came back) to opt outs. I have had to do without Jorge Mateo, Mike Moustakas, Miguel Rojas, Drew Smiley, Tim Anderson, Justin Verlander, Ken Giles and Roberto Osuna! I am not the only one suffering. The fact that I have managed to stay near the top in these leagues is testament to that. 

The good news is if you managed to draft a good pitching staff you are probably doing pretty well. The current league average hitter is a new level of pathetic. If your guys are batting .220 or better, getting on base at .300 or better and hitting a few homers - that with solid pitching has been a winning combination in a lot of leagues. 

Not All Bad News:

MLBTR went through a few of the potential breakout batters for 2020. These guys are all off to strong starts and if by chance they are available in your league you should grab them post-haste!

JaCoby Jones, OF, Tigers: .333/.391/.786

Kyle Lewis, OF, Mariners: .373/.440/.567

Dylan Moore, OF, Mariners: .333/.388/.689 

Austin Slater, OF, Giants: .333/.450/.667

Donovan Solano, INF, Giants: .458/.476/.661

Mike Yastrzemski, OF, Giants: .306/.442/.629

The Giants (and Mariners) should be rocking with this news but instead they loss Buster Posey to an opt out, Brandon Belt to injury and poor performance, and a gang of guys getting old really fast! But back to the good news - these underrated guys are also doing great so far:

David Fletcher, INF, Angels: .313/.400/.493

James McCann, C, White Sox: .345/.387/.655

Giovanny Urshela, INF, Yankees: .312/.393/.583

Teoscar Hernandez, OF, Blue Jays: .300/.321/.620

(I wouldn't call it a comeback but...)

Charlie Blackmon, OF, Rockies: .484/.514/.703

I wonder why so many more breakouts are in the American League...

 

John Sickels Retires From Baseball

 I was sad to see this on Facebook this morning, from John Sickels:

I am retiring from baseball.

The pandemic has put a lot of things in perspective for me. There are no minors to write about, which means no money coming in.  And I realized that the only thing keeping me connected to the game was money and that aspect of my career had grown stagnant in recent years.

As an analyst, I was one of the pioneers, starting on-line baseball analysis back in 1996. I was at the top of the game for a long time and am proud of that. But nowadays, there are lots of people doing this work, and the best of them do it better than I do.

It is time for me to clear the field and leave it to people who are the innovators. I'm a dinosaur nowadays, and I want to go out on my own terms rather than just fading away. The universe is telling me it is time.

John was one of the very best for a long time. ESPN, Minor League Ball and the Athletic all benefited from his analysis and writing skills. He will be missed. 

Back In Business

 It has been a while. I was writing sporadically at best and less and less frequently as time went on. Unfortunately, I slacked so much that I neglected to renew my advanced fantasy baseball domain and lost it. I've moved everything over to the new Advanced Fantasy Sports. Along with the domain change comes a change in direction which I'll explain. 

Writing baseball articles started to feel repetitive. I got tired of writing variations of the same sort of thing every day. So, I have a new plan. For the 2021 pre-season you will once again get my preparation articles, transaction reviews and sleeper predictions. But along the way you'll also get updates on the movies, tv, comics, books and so forth that keep me entertained. You may even see the occasional political article but I promise not to judge if you have a different opinion on things. In fact I encourage you to share your differing opinions. I don't think an echo chamber helps anyone. 

Between now and the end of the truncated 2020 season you'll see the occasional rant or idea about players or anything else. If you have questions or need advice on your fantasy teams, please leave me comments and I'll do my best to help. I'm not nearly as out of touch as my sporadic posting might suggest. 

I hope to see you around.  

Slow Start Blues and Waiver Ideas

How are your fantasy teams doing? ( I really want to know). The first couple weeks of baseball season are tough. Your squad can either look great or lousy and there just isn't enough data to be certain of anything. Thus patience becomes vital. I obsess over the early box scores and beg my players to start hitting! This is when a brief distraction will do you well. You could kill a lot of time and win a few bucks at netbet.co.uk. Bury yourself in a tomb like OathBringer. Maybe give DFS a shot. The important thing is not to panic and do something you'll regret in a month or two.

In some leagues you might still have a shot at Greg Holland. After his first disastrous outing for the Cardinals he might go cheaper than expected if you are waiting to win a faab bid. I think he'll be fine. The Cards pretty apparently rushed him back and Mike Matheny's lack of game strategy didn't help. I placed a healthy bid in my leagues where he is available. Saves are saves.

Another interesting name to consider for an early waiver claim or injury replacement is Niko Goodrum. He was a second round pick of the Minnesota Twins who was a bit slow to develop. He was signed by the Detroit Tigers as a six-year minor league free-agent. The Tigers have him on the major league roster and he is getting some good playing time. He qualifies at first base and second base in a lot of leagues (a fairly unique position group). He is off to a pretty good start - batting .250/.318/.450 with a homer and three stolen bases in his first 22 plate appearances. His skills suggest he is capable of reaching 10 homers and 20 stolen bases if the playing time sticks. You could do worse.

Your league is probably catching on that Joey Lucchesi is no joke. He is not of the recent class of fireballing pitchers that dominate the propect lists but he is pretty damn good. He was the minor league pitcher of the year for the Padres who may just have the best group of prospects in the game. He has been compared to Kyle Hendricks and I like the comparison. His major league debut wasn't great (though the skills were obvious) but his last two outings including last night's six innings, eight strikeouts and zero earned runs in Colorado not excluded have been fantastic. Sign him up while you still can.

I'll be back.

Beware the Conventional Wisdom!

You might think that a guy like me who has written for a bunch of fantasy sports sites and keeps this sporadically updated blog active would recommend you read a lot of fantasy articles. You would be wrong. I read a ton of stuff but only a relatively small portion of it is actually about playing fantasy sports. Why not?

Fantasy articles as a whole (including this one) are about telling you who or what is good for your fantasy success and who or what is not. There is nothing wrong with that but as an owner you reach a level of knowledge and experience eventually where these articles (most of them) just start to confirm what you already think you know. The problem is most so-called experts (or analysts) are not spending a hell of a lot more time than the reader of a blog like this would spend researching and comparing and contrasting information to reach a conclusion. There are absolutely exceptions and those should be the relatively small percentage of fantasy articles you spend your precious time reading.

Instead you should spend a greater portion of your time studying the actual players and the skills they possess relative to other players and the context within which those skills are employed. You will want a passing familiarity with ADP and mass market values but no need to obsess or memorize them. The tougher your league the less these things will matter in your draft or auction. This is because the true experts when playing among other experts are not going to follow trends they will set new trends that their fans will then follow (even if the fans are just the other guys in your league).

Web sites such as Fangraghs.com, TheHardballtimes.com, Baseball-Reference.com, Statcorner.com, BrooksBaseball.net, are mostly free sites that you can draw a tremendous amount of data from in your study of players. Most of these also have a blog or publish articles about what their writers find in the data. When you get familiar with sites like this you are way ahead of the guys reading "Sleeper Starters By ADP". Baseball America.com, MinorLeagueBall.com (John Sickels) and Prospect361.com are my favorite sites for minor league info and scouting reports.

You also can win by having a greater understanding of the context in which players play than the other people in your leagues. I try to be in the heads of the major league GMs and the directors of player operations around MLB. I want to be the first one to understand what a move means not just for the player acquired or sent away but for all the players that will be impacted by that move. I know, I am a little crazy. Who has the time right? Technology is your friend.

Set-up an RSS reader for your baseball reading. I use Feedly - it has free and paid versions (the free version is great I promise). An RSS reader is great when you have limited time and lots of articles to potentially read. I use the reader to subscribe to one newspaper blog or writer that updates frequently and then a fan blog (I like to find the obsessive but high-functioning ones) and a minor league blog for each of the MLB teams. This is easier for some teams than others - the Mariners have a dozen great bloggers, the Rockies not so many. Reading this way I'm able to read through most of the stuff on my commute back and forth to work (most experts have day jobs) and at various moments throughout the day.

Which actual fantasy stuff do I read?

I glance at stuff on BaseballHQ.com but I spend more time in the subscriber forums than on the articles. Rotogrinders.com - these guys are putting their money on the line and you know they aren't just feeding stuff for google rankings. Scout.com has Shawn Childs and Adam Ronis and I read most of their stuff. I'll read whatever Ron Shandler and Todd Zola publish just because they are really smart guys with a logic to what they write that I really appreciate. And I buy Rotoman's Fantasy Magazine every year just because.

The 2016-17 Baseball Winter Meetings Begin

The 2016-17 MLB Winter Meetings begin tonight and with the CBA out of the way, we can only hope that this cranks up the heat in the Hot Stove and provides plenty of action to get us excited about the 2017 baseball season. I spend most of the winter pretending Fantasy Football is just as interesting as Fantasy Baseball (it is not) and visiting sports betting sites as I eagerly await the trades and free-agent signings that provide fodder for articles like this one.

The rumors are already starting of major deals close to fruition - the Dodgers are rumored to be close on re-signing starter Rich Hill to a three-year $48 million contract; the Astros (more below) have reportedly agreed with Carlos Beltran on a one-year deal for $16 million; Jon Heyman is reporting that both the Nationals and Giants have four year $60 million offers out to Mark Melancon; Derek Norris is back with the Nationals; and finally the Yankees are supposedly in the driver's seat on 34-year old slugger Edwin Encarnacion despite being in rebuild mode.

So, on the eve of the Winter Meetings lets look at a couple of the more interesting baseball transactions of the winter thus far and their fantasy ramifications.

The Eric Thames Signing

As a Chris Carter owner this was not my favorite transaction of the week. The fact that I had been attempting to trade high on Carter's 41 homers had a little something to do with it. Carter of course has been designated for assignment and is headed for free agency. Rumors have the Orioles, Yankees and Blue Jays at least mildly interested. But what do the Brewers have in Eric Thames?

Eric Thames was a solid prospect for the Toronto Blue Jays who had a decent debut season but spent the next two seasons getting sporadic major league at-bats between the Blue Jays and Mariners. He went to South Korea to play in the KBO and became a star player, an MVP in fact. He hit for massive averages, got on base a ton and hit homers like Cecil Fielder back in the day. He even stoles bases and had the KBO's only 40/40 season. And now? He is a Brewer.

Only a few hitters have managed to make their way from the KBO to MLB but surprisingly the ones that have found their skills mostly translated. Clay Davenport who I love for his statistical translation between U.S. leagues and places like Cuba and Japan has suggested that Thames is for real and should hit for average and homers (and even steal some bases) now that he is back in the states. His projected slash based on 2015 numbers suggested a slash of  .333/.389/.628 with 30 homers. I'll bet a few bucks on that projected outcome.

The Jean Segura Trade 

Given the going rate for pitching in Major League Baseball it is a bit surprising that more writers haven't dove deeper into the players accompanying Jean Segura from Arizona (though Mitch Haniger is quickly gaining a sleeper label in fantasy circles) in return for promising potential ace and controllable starter, Taijuan Walker. And just about everyone has ignored the possibilities that Ketel Marte represents.

Jean Segura had a great 2016 season with the Diamondbacks and will go down as the best acquisition made by the LaRussa/Stewart Regime. Arizona's Chase Field is a great environment for a hitter and the change of scenery probably helped a lot as injuries and personal tragedy were clearly a drag on his performance in Milwaukee. The tools for this performance have always been there and despite weaknesses in his batting eye, he makes excellent contact, has decent power and the speed to steal 30-plus bases per season. In 2016 he hit the ball harder and Chase field definitely had an impact on his performance. Moving to Seattle's Safeco Field may sap a bit of that power and batting average but I expect he will still be a strong fantasy producer with a BA closer to .270 than .300 and closer to 10 than 20 homers. That said being in the American League and a potentially strong lineup in Seattle he should score plenty of runs and have better RBI potential even in the leadoff spot.

Mitch Haniger may be priced out of sleeper range by the times most drafts start. According to Baseball America, Seattle officials are certain that Haniger will be on the major league roster to begin the 2017 season, most likely as the starting left fielder. Haniger has largely come out of nowhere after re-modeling his swing with a leg kick fashioned after players like A.J. Pollock and Jose Bautista to tap more into his natural power. Haniger already had a decent batting eye and all the tools you would want in an outfielder but had failed to impress statistically. In 2016 he exploded for 30 homers (and 12 stolen bases). He is almost universally being projected to hit for a decent average (.250 or so) and around 20 homers in a full season in the majors, that might be light.

Zac Curtis had a great minor league season but blew up a bit the majors (just like the rest of the Diamondbacks bullpen). From all reports his stuff is just average but his minor league strikeout rates are intriguing. He is not worth a draft pick but at some point he might be a useful source of lefty relief pitching with K-potential.

Taijuan Walker has almost everything you want in a pitcher. He has great stuff, solid control, good strikeouts and induces ground balls. His only real flaw is allowing homeruns. His hr/fb rate for his career is just under 14 percent. Steve Gilbert of MLB.com says Walker is working on adding a two-seam fastball to his repertoire. In theory this could boost his ground ball percentage and reduce the number of costly fly balls a bit. Its something to watch in Spring Training.

Ketel Marte is almost a light version of Segura. He has the same tools just on a slightly lower scale. He advanced through the minors very quickly rarely spending an entire season at a level and skipping levels without missing a beat despite always being among the youngest players in his respective leagues. Unlike Segura he has shown patience at the plate and the ability to draw walks, until 2016 anyway. In his first full season in the majors his walk rate was a bit disappointing despite his history and he chased more pitches than usual as well. To me this sounds like the over eagerness of a young player in the majors to impress the masses. He also suffered a variety of injuries to his hamstring, neck and ankle and dealt with mononucleosis in 2016 and had two stints on the disabled list. With a return to health in the offensively productive environment of Chase Field I expect he is a lot closer to his 2015 level of performance than the 2016 level. The Diamondbacks appear ready to let him start the season at shortstop and see what happens which bodes well. With his potential on-base skills he should be able to earn a spot near the top of the lineup and score a ton of runs and steal close to 30 bases.