Champ or Chump: Trevor Cahill & Dallas Keuchel

This has been a rotten year to invest heavily in starting pitching. Perhaps your ace is on the DL, like Madison Bumgarner or Noah Syndergaard. Maybe they are just underperforming, like Matt Harvey or Julio Teheran. Either way, you're probably looking for a reliable arm, or three. Trevor Cahill is far from the sexiest name, […]

Champ or Chump: Jay Bruce & Ryan Zimmerman

Fantasy baseball owners tend to roster two types of players. The first type is the flavor of the moment, whoever is hot lately or has scouts drooling over their potential. The second type is the boring veteran whose track record is so consistent he has to be valued highly. This approach frequently leaves the players […]

Champ or Chump: Joey Gallo & Aaron Judge

The old saying "Chicks dig the long ball" applies to fantasy baseball owners as well. Billy Hamilton is frequently criticized for offering nothing outside of steals, yet similar players who provide nothing but bombs are not only rostered, but taken inside the top 100. Hamilton goes high too, but at least two owners in every […]

Champ or Chump: Trey Mancini & Taylor Motter

Every year, fantasy owners scour minor league rosters in an effort to find the next breakout star that no one is talking about. We always think that anyone with the slightest chance of mattering in fantasy is on our radar. Then, April rolls around and somebody we have never heard of does something extraordinary. Left […]

Champ or Chump: Charlie Morton & Jason Vargas

We're getting to a point in the season when it is tempting to trust a player's numbers, but barring some major change, preseason projections are still a better indicator of future performance. The two names below were selected for entirely different reasons. Charlie Morton was seen as a sleeper based on 2016 success in an […]

Champ or Chump: Robert Gsellman & Luis Severino

It is Sunday again, meaning that fantasy owners in leagues with weekly lineup changes are scouring the waiver wire for arms scheduled to make two starts. This is a fine strategy, as the extra work can give you a boost in counting stats such as wins and strikeouts. It can also blow up in your […]

Champ or Chump: Eric Thames & Francisco Lindor

Fantasy championships are never won in April, but it still feels good to be at the top of the standings. Eventually things will stabilize, making it more challenging to make a significant jump in a short period of time. When that happens, you definitely want to be in the hunt instead of an also-ran. Chances […]

Champ or Chump: Kendall Graveman & Amir Garrett

It is so easy to overreact to a small sample. Kendall Graveman is 2-0 with a 2.00 ERA this year, and fantasy owners are falling all over themselves to acquire his services. Why? Amir Garrett is also 2-0, inspiring the fantasy world to collectively ask, "Who is that?". It is time to take a closer […]

Champ or Chump - Brandon Kintzler & Yasiel Puig

Regular readers may notice that "ADP" is no longer in the title. The first week of the season has come and gone, so if you still have not completed your fantasy draft, it is looking likely that you are not playing fantasy baseball this year. That said, I liked the idea of ADP conveying how […]

ADP Champs or Chumps - Chris Devenski & Andrew Toles

The 2017 season is still far too short of a sample size to conclude anything using numbers, but the human element of player deployment is beginning to come into focus. If a player's role differs drastically from what we thought it would be during draft season, his value could explode. Getting these guys on your […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: Yasmani Grandal & Rougned Odor

Isn't it amazing? We spend the entire offseason hatching grand plans about how we are going to dominate our leagues. No detail is left unexplored. When Opening Day comes around, we are mentally prepared to treat it as the first step in our inevitable march toward fantasy immortality. Then, a few games are played and […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 13: Barrels For Pitchers

Last time, we looked at Barrels, a stat combining exit velocity and launch angle to measure how often a batter makes quality hard contact. As much as batters want to hit a Barrel every time, pitchers want to avoid them at all costs. Yet there is some evidence that pitchers do not have the same […]

ADP Champs or Chumps - Albert Pujols & Miguel Cabrera

I know what you're thinking. "ADP Champs or Chumps? The season has already started!" That may be true, but there are some leagues that wait until the first week of the season to conduct their drafts. Personally I think that this is a terrible idea, as values become more linear when you know Opening Day […]

Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball Part 12 - Barrels for Batters

If you've watched a baseball broadcast in the so-called Statcast Era, you have undoubtedly noticed the broadcasters commenting on a batted ball's exit velocity, or EV. Many have taken to using stats like Hard% and Soft% to forecast how a player should be performing, expecting larger Hard% rates to produce larger BABIP figures. There is […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 11 - Minor League Stats

Once you've grown accustomed to having advanced tools to help make fantasy decisions, it can feel disorientating to be without them. Prospects are increasingly becoming a focal point in both real and fantasy baseball, but the minors simply do not have all of the data available for MLB players. For example, advanced plate discipline stats, […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: Johnny Cueto & Noah Syndergaard

Every fantasy owner has certain guys that they can never seem to stay away from, no matter how many seasons they are disappointed. The inverse is also true, making it perennially challenging to trust a player you do not believe in. This latter point is true of Johnny Cueto and myself. His fantasy stats have […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 10: PITCHf/x

One of the most fundamental questions in fantasy sports is if a player's current performance is sustainable. More than any other sport, baseball has a slew of statistical measures that can be dissected numerous ways to analyze player performance. PITCHf/x is a publicly available pitch tracking system that provides a lot of different data to […]

ADP Champs or Chumps - Ender Inciarte & Kevin Kiermaier

If you play in a deeper league, you will quickly discover that your goal in the draft is different. Standard formats do not ask you to worry about playing time for anyone except your sleepers, as there are plenty of starting players in MLB to fill every slot in the fantasy league. Try an NL-only […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 9: Pitcher Batted Ball Distribution

The league average batted ball distribution in 2016 was 20.7% liners, 44.7% grounders and 34.6% flies. Last time, we took a brief look at how pitchers may specialize in either grounders or fly balls. Fly ball pitchers have a BABIP advantage over their ground ball-inducing counterparts, since fly balls (.127 BABIP in 2016) consistently have […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: Keon Broxton & Trea Turner

If fantasy owners share a collective weakness, it's recency bias. How many times are we going to draft a guy based on what he did last season, or even the last month of last season, without any regard to what that player did before? Mike Trout was great out of the box, but there are […]

ADP Champs or Chumps - Carlos Correa and George Springer

Every fantasy owner has a blind spot or team(s) that they do not know as much about as they should. Bad teams on the West Coast are likely examples for owners based on the East Coast, as the games are on so late that the weaker teams are just not worth staying up for. This […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 8: BABIP For Pitchers

While FIP is a useful tool to predict a pitcher's future ERA performance, fantasy owners should remember that ERA, not FIP, is what really matters in most formats. This means that we are interested in the "luck" that separates the two statistics. While some of this luck is unpredictable, we can and should predict some […]

Rick Lucks's 10 Bold Predictions For 2017

Our series of bold predictions continues with my piece. I felt that I was a little bolder than most of my colleagues last season, including the only recommendation I saw for Steven Wright's breakout campaign. I also touted Drew Storen as a top reliever for fantasy purposes. That one didn't work out so well. This […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: Stephen Strasburg & Justin Verlander

While it has become fashionable to roster breakout pitchers in fantasy circles, you generally still need an ace to keep you afloat while you are searching for the next Kyle Hendricks. You do not know when, or even if, your guys will pan out, so there is a lot of pressure to draft the right ace […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: Nick Castellanos & Alex Bregman

A fair amount of fantasy analysis consists of figuring out what to do with younger players. It is relatively easy to project veterans with established track records, and most owners know to avoid inexplicable flukes like Sandy Leon's 2016 campaign. Interpreting whether younger guys will improve, remain consistent, or move backwards is often where fantasy […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 7: FIP & xFIP

The first advanced pitching stat most fantasy owners encounter is FIP. FIP stands for Fielding Independent Pitching, and attempts to measure a pitcher's actual skill instead of the effects of luck or his supporting cast. According to the DIPS theory that the metric is based upon, pitchers control only Ks, BBs (and HBP) and home […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: Andrew Benintendi & Charlie Blackmon

The outfield can be a bountiful place for fantasy production. Speed demons, power bats, batting average studs, and even five category contributors are all available. Sometimes, this versatility fools owners into thinking that the position is deeper than it actually is. If you play in a shallow mixed league, there are plenty of outfielders to […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: J.T. Realmuto & Gary Sanchez

Position scarcity has been a fantasy consideration since the game was invented. If you could get first baseman numbers from a shortstop, that shortstop was worth way more due to the relative lack of production at the position. With the rise of offensive middle infielders and the corresponding decline in great corner options, scarcity is […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 6: Lineup Slot & Counting Stats

To this point, this series has focused exclusively on trying to predict and validate HRs and batting average. There is a reason for this--modern sabermetrics tend to reject the idea of a "clutch RBI guy" and therefore do not bother inventing predictive metrics for it. Runs and RBI are team dependent stats, and are unhelpful […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: Anthony Rendon & Jake Lamb

Today's topic is 26-year-old NL third baseman. I know that is ridiculously specific, and it did not become the theme until I realized that both featured players fit the criteria. Anthony Rendon has been a fantasy darling since his debut, but his health and production have frequently left owners wanting more. Jake Lamb was a […]