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 […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 5: Pull%

Earlier in my series on using sabermetrics for fantasy baseball, we saw that fantasy owners generally prefer batters to hit the ball into the air in order to have a chance at a home run. Yet all fly balls are not equal for this purpose. A player can maximize his power production by pulling the […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: Carlos Santana & Khris Davis

Power is what drives the average fantasy offense. Not only are homers directly counted in most formats, but every bomb comes with a run scored and at least one RBI as well. One-dimensional power guys actually have three dimensions in a standard 5x5 format. If you can handle the batting average risk, they make for […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 4: Plate Discipline

No matter how high a particular player's BABIP may be, his average will be mediocre at best if he strikes out too much. This is why fantasy owners have known for years that players like Adam Dunn, Chris Carter, and Chris Davis are potential drains on a fantasy team's batting average. Furthermore, players that whiff […]

ADP Champs or Chumps: Aaron Nola & Jon Gray

When streaming starting pitchers, there are generally two criteria to choose the best option. The first is the quality of the opposition, as a lesser offense is less likely to hurt your ratios. The second is venue, as fantasy owners look to maximize innings in Kansas City and Miami while avoiding Coors Field like the […]

Champ or Chump: DJ LeMahieu & Xander Bogaerts

The end of most drafts is filled with quality, yet flawed talent. Chris Carter could hit you 30+ bombs when he's not torpedoing your batting average, while there seems to be a never ending supply of jackrabbits who can steal a bunch of bases if they can figure out how to hit a single. The […]

Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 3: Batted Ball Distribution

Fly balls can turn into home runs. Ground balls never do. It would seem as though fantasy owners want their batters to hit nothing but flies, yet I closed the last piece by stating that this is not the case. Why would this be? Let's take a look, as my series on using sabermetrics for […]