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March 27, 2013

Tough time for NL third sackers

Maybe there's something going around, but National League third basemen seem to be getting more than their fair share of injuries of late. Fans and fantasy owners probably are a bit panicked right now as this plague spreads.
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Posted by: Greg Simons

September 25, 2012

Dee Gordon, invisible man

I've been reading Bill Chuck's Billy-Ball.com for years, and he and I exchange e-mails about his posts from time to time. On Monday, Bill had a post that caught my eye for an odd reason, and I felt obliged to comment.

Bill was citing the number of players with 20-plus stolen bases thus far in the 2012 season. Having just watched Sunday night's Dodgers-Reds tilt that included Dee Gordon throwing balls everywhere except to the first baseman's glove, Gordon was on my mind. (I have Gordon on a fantasy team, too, so I've been following him and his one-category contributions all season long.)

I couldn't help but notice that the speedy Gordon wasn't listed among those with at least 20 swipes, so I mentioned this to Bill. He responded that he had done a search at Baseball-Reference.com, and we all know the power and wonder that is B-Ref, so the lack of Gordon on the list was surprising.

I could think of only one explanation for this omission, which I shared with Bill: "Maybe B-Ref looks at his overall game, realizes he does NOTHING good except stealing bases and makes the value judgment to disregard him as a baseball player. It doesn't sound logical, but it's the best reason I can think of."

Bill found the glitch and re-posted the list, but I couldn't stop thinking about Gordon and his future. With the acquisition of Hanley Ramirez, the Dodgers found a shortstop for the remainder of 2012. However, 2013 could be a different story, with Ramirez possibly shifting to third base once again and opening up short for Gordon.

The question is, can Gordon do enough to justify the starting role? Yes, he has terrific speed. In about one-third of a season last year, Gordon swiped 24 bags, and this year he has pilfered 31 bases in about a half-season of games. But what else does he bring to the table?

Last year, he raised expectations with a .304 batting average in 224 at-bats. Sure, his slugging percentage was an unimpressive .362, as was his .325 on-base percentage, but if Gordon could hit .300, he would at least appear to be providing value. This season? How about a .228/.281/.281 triple-slash line? Gordon's stick has gone flaccid.

Defense? Well, if you watched Sunday's performance, you got a glimpse of why people question whether Gordon can remain a shortstop.

So you have a weak-hitting, poor-fielding speedster. The mid-1970s Oakland A's took a player like this, Herb Washington, and made him a pinch-runner. Incredibly, Washington appeared in 92 games in 1974 but had zero (yes, zero!) plate appearances. (He returned in 1975 for a mere 13 games, also without ever standing at the dish.)

Dee Gordon is almost certainly a better player than Herb Washington, but he needs to make some significant improvements at the plate and in the field if he wants to stick in the big leagues for any length of time.
Posted by: Greg Simons

February 02, 2012

THT Forecasts - 2012 fantasy price guides

In addition to the Oliver database, reports, projections, and watch lists, THT Forecasts also has a fantasy price guide that you can customize with your league specifications (although note that not all stat categories you can imagine are present yet; we'll work on that!).

Also, the fantasy price guides are updated as the season progresses and new data are added to the Oliver database, thus changing the projections for the remainder of the season to assist you with waiver wire pick-ups, trades, etc.. You can then return to your price guide at the end of the season to evaluate players and see what they should have been worth before the season started (thus best to transfer and save your pre-season fantasy price guide for comparison).

Note that the fantasy price guide lists players according to their dollar values for an auction draft, but the rankings can still be applied to a snake draft. For a league that uses a points structure, you can switch to the customizable reports, download and open them with your favorite spreadsheet, and then include your stat-cat modifiers to calculate point totals for the players.

Finally, using Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball's default league auction and roto settings, here are the top projected offensive players:

Pos   Players      2012 Value
C     Mike Napoli     $34
1B    Albert Pujols   $55
2B    Dan Uggla       $30
3B    Jose Bautista   $40
SS    Troy Tulowitzki $32
OF    Matt Kemp       $57
OF    Mike Stanton    $47
OF    Ryan Braun      $44
Util  Miguel Cabrera  $52
Util  Joey Votto      $46

THT Forecasts is available for the 2012 season, with Brian Cartwright's Oliver database providing over 9000 projections for major and minor leaguers. Visit Forecasts today to learn more and sign up for only $14.95!
Posted by: Greg Tamer

July 26, 2011

1,000,000,000 seconds of fantasy baseball (7/26/11)

At some point today, it’ll be 1,000,000,000 seconds since baseball experienced one of its biggest and most unlikely transformations.

All those ticks of the clock ago, Dan Okrent drew up the rules for Rotisserie Baseball, beginning the fantasy sports craze. Started as something small among a group of friends, fantasy baseball—and fantasy sports as a whole—has transformed into a mutli-million (multi-billion?) dollar annual industry, completing reworking how people follow the game. Old local allegiances can be replaced by overriding concern for how your players are doing.

It’s so all-pervasive now that it’s like breathing the air. It’s all around and you can’t imagine sports without it. That said, it’s also the creature of modern media communications. In order to have fantasy sports, you need to be able to follow your players on a daily basis, and that means follow all teams. That was tough to do back in the day.

As a kid growing up in the 1980s, the local paper gave box scores and some info, but only on Sunday would they give you season’s stats for all around the league, and that was highly fragmentary. The first revolution was USA Today, a national paper with much a much wider number of season stats made available.

The real breakthrough, of course, was the intern. Now we all have access to players’ seasonal numbers, often updated to the second. Dan Okrent’s billion second moment greatly predates the internet, but Rotisserie and similar leagues have become much larger as a result. It’s so big that Okrent once said he could create a number of inventions, win a shelf-full of awards, and further humanity in numerous ways, but when he dies the first line of his obituary will still say “invented Rotisserie baseball.”

Aside from that, many other events celebrate benchmarks today, whether it is traditional anniversaries or “day-versaries” (which are events occurring X-thousand days ago). Here they are, with the better ones in bold if you just want to skim:

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Posted by: Chris Jaffe

June 06, 2011

Quiz results: Pujols’ OPS

Maybe Albert Pujols read the pop quiz post Friday, voted for "Over 1050" and set out to make that a reality. Whatever the reason, he pumped his 2011 OPS up from .746 heading into Friday's game to .826 following Sunday's 10th-inning, game-ending, series-sweeping home run.

Yes, that's an 80-point gain in a mere three contests. That's what going 6-for-11 with three walks, a hit-by-pitch, four homers, one double, seven RBI and seven runs scored over the weekend will do for a player's numbers.

Additionally, his OPS+ climbed from 109 to 132.

Had this quiz been posted today instead of Friday, there's little doubt the voting would have been different. Heck, I cast a vote for "850-950," but based on this outburst, I'd change to "950-1050" if I had to do it again.

But timing is everything, so here is what The Hardball Times' readers had to say on the matter:

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Posted by: Greg Simons


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