Drew Smyly (SP, ATL) - 2021 Fantasy Baseball Draft Sleepers

Finding strong starting pitching that does not have a hefty price tag can be really tough. A lot of leagues are won by the team that had the most success with their later-round starting pitcher selections. Blake Snell, Shane Bieber, and Dinelson Lamet are three names of the last handful of years that went in... Read More

Edwin Rios (1B/3B, LAD) - 2021 Fantasy Baseball Draft Sleepers

If there is one thing the league does not want to see, it's the Dodgers develop another breakout power hitter, but it sure is looking like that's a very real possibility with Edwin Rios. He did more than enough in his 83 plate appearances last year to draw our attention, so let's take a deep... Read More

Examining The Most Effective Pitches in Baseball

There is just nothing better in sports than Baseball Savant. We can derive almost any insight we want from their pitch-by-pitch dataset. One challenge I wanted to take a crack at was to see if I could find which individual pitches in baseball are most effective regardless of who throws it, just looking at pitch type... Read More

Starting Pitcher Breakouts Who Will Keep Improving

Playing only 60 games in 2020 was sure to result in some wacky outcomes. The league leaders in innings were barely cracking 80 innings, less than a third of the usual. This resulted in some final pitching lines that certainly would not have remained the same had there been 100 more innings added to the... Read More

Don't Abandon the Win OR the Quality Start

This is a counter-argument to the post written here by Michael Grennell. In his piece, Michael argues that you should remove the wins and quality starts categories from your fantasy baseball league. You should read his full article before continuing, but I will summarize his arguments here first. This is just a summary and does not... Read More

Infield Busts Who'll Keep Junking it Up in 2021

One of the biggest questions out there as we head into 2021 is how much weight to put on what happened in 2020. Obviously, it was a very odd year for Major League Baseball. Players had a couple of weeks of normal Spring Training before being sent home for four months only to come back... Read More

2021 Overvalued Draft Picks - Starting Pitchers

I recently finished the grueling process of making my 2021 SP ranks one-by-one. What I did was go rotation-by-rotation and insert every pitcher into my list as I went along, taking a close look at each guy. This led to me having lots of knowledge on the player pool for the 2021 season, and having... Read More

Stat-Based Tips To Build a Strong Fantasy Baseball Roster

As we lead up to the 2021 season, fantasy baseball enthusiasts are sure to read thousands of words about players themselves: who overperformed last year and who is primed for a breakout. All of that is good stuff, and it's very helpful in starting your journey towards winning your league, but it's only half the... Read More

Blake Snell to Padres - Fantasy Impact

It would be a massive understatement to say that the San Diego Padres are in "win-now" mode. They have just shipped off their number-three prospect in Luis Patino, as well as Francisco Mejia and two other prospects to acquire lefty Blake Snell from the Tampa Bay Rays. Less than 24 hours later, they made another... Read More

Exploring Pitch Arsenal Changes

It is really hard to know what to make of the 2020 season. This is especially true in the case of starting pitchers since the league leaders topped out around 80 innings pitched. As expected, there were many pitchers that posted much better seasons than expected, and many that posted seasons much worse. Given that... Read More

Strike Zone Rate Analysis - Starting Pitchers

There are hundreds of metrics out there that describe pitchers. The richness of the available data is rivaled by no other sport. This can at times lead to information overload, leading us too far away from the core tenants of what success looks like. One group of statistics that are very simple and very helpful... Read More

MLB's Best Pitches by the Numbers

One of the most-often used algorithms in the data science world is called clustering. Clustering is defined, by Wikipedia, as: grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters) In baseball... Read More

Starting Pitcher K-BB% Fallers: Who to Worry About

In part one of this mini-series, Sam Chinitz covered K-BB% risers from 2021. You can check that post out here. This article will take a look at the pitchers that went in the wrong direction. Strikeout to walk rate is so important to be mindful of when evaluating pitchers. No matter how you slice it,... Read More

Is Hard-Hit Rate Predictive?

Over the last 10 or so years, baseball fans have seen all kinds of new statistics pop in front of their faces. Some people really like these new metrics, and some people really do not. Judging by the fact that you are reading this article, I am guessing that you fall into that first grouping.... Read More