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Using Sabermetrics For Fantasy Baseball Part 15 - 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,... Read More
Everyone wants to be the guy to say they hopped on the bandwagon of the next up-and-comer before he comes up and breaks out. This often causes younger players to be overvalued, particularly in single-season leagues where some youngsters may not even see meaningful playing time. Identifying the rookies that will actually get playing time,... Read More
The latter part of an auction draft is arguably the most fun part. All of the obvious players to own are long gone, and now owners must go searching through the coal to find the one diamond that will make the difference for their team. Owners were patting themselves on the back after finding $1... Read More
Previously, 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 influence... Read More
Spin rate has become one of the most recognizable Statcast metrics, with supporters of a given pitcher highlighting his spin rates to make their case. Unfortunately, the baseball world has done a lousy job conveying what spin rate really means. The result has been a ton of owners who know that spin rate exists, but... Read More
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. Pitch Info is a publicly available pitch tracking system that provides a lot of different data... Read More
Ottoneu is a format that only the fantasy baseball obsessed know about. For years I’ve been eyeing an Ottoneu league but was hesitant to take the plunge; the massive rosters, complex scoring system and year-round commitment were overwhelming, to say the least. But this year I’m ready to make the leap, having signed on with... Read More
Best ball leagues are one of the latest variations of fantasy baseball that are quickly growing in popularity. Draft day is the only day of the year where owners will have control over their roster. There is no waiver wire and there are no trades. Owners won't even set daily lineups, as they will instead... Read More
When discussing fantasy baseball, an often neglected but entertaining format is the points league. These exist in both season-long cumulative and weekly head-to-head leagues. While existential debates about scoring categories and their true depiction of player worth are endless, points leagues arguably get closest to the objective of sabermetrics. Points leagues attempt to define a... Read More
The league average batted ball distribution in 2017 was 20.3% liners, 44.2% grounders and 35.5% flies. We have previously seen 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 (.130 BABIP in 2017) consistently have lower BABIPs than worm... Read More
It's finally March, which can only mean two things: Spring Training and fantasy drafts. All the effort spent on rankings and draft prep finally come to fruition. Once your draft is completed, you then get to spend every day of the rest of the season analyzing player performances, scouring waiver wires and setting the best... Read More
On Thursday, February 15th, we brought together an illustrious group of industry experts to take part in the RotoBaller Friends and Family mock draft. We'll be playing this out as a best ball league. Our participants represented sites like: Creative Sports (Lawr Michaels) Fangraphs (Alex Chamberlain) GuruElite (Ray Flowers) Fantasy Alarm (Howard Bender) CBS (Heath... Read More
If you have ever selected a streamable pitcher based on home park or benched an otherwise must-start arm at Coors Field, you already know how much a stadium can impact a player's bottom line. Ballpark Factors quantify the influence each stadium has, allowing you to make the most of your fantasy team's real life schedule.... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
If you missed last week’s column on the most profitable hitters of the last five years, you can find it here. That post explains the methodology behind this work, and acknowledges the considerable help I received from colleagues throughout the process. Today I'm here to take a look at the pitchers - players who have... Read More
To this point, this series has focused exclusively on trying to predict and validate home runs 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... Read More
Earlier in this series, 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 ball in the air. Today we'll... Read More
As you may have heard me mention on Twitter or the fantasy baseball subreddit, I recently acquired the last five seasons’ worth of average draft positon (ADP) data for NFBC and all three of the major fantasy platforms (Yahoo, ESPN, and CBS). I am terrible at Excel, so it’s taken a lot of trial and... Read More
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 and Chris Davis are potential drains on a fantasy team's batting average. Furthermore, players that whiff a lot... Read More
Steals are an important statistic in fantasy baseball. They represent 10% of scoring categories in 5x5 leagues and earn an equivalent value or more to singles, runs and RBI in points leagues. Comparing runs and stolen bases, the fantasy significance of a steal is certainly overvalued versus its real baseball relevance. The Run Expectancy table... Read More
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 this is not the case. Why would this be? The answer, of course, comes down to batted ball distribution and the manner in which batters make contact. In... Read More
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 and HR/FB figures.... Read More
“Kill the win” entered the baseball lexicon years ago. It originally referred to the disproportionate attention a pitcher victory got from the casual fan, and it was one of the major arguments advanced during the rise of analytics. The phrase has been adopted by fantasy owners as well, as more and more leagues ditch –... Read More
Using BABIP to predict a player's batting average is great. Average is a category in many league formats, and every hit is an opportunity to steal a base or score a run. But most owners find the long ball sexier. Every HR comes with a guaranteed run scored and at least one RBI. Many owners... Read More
Here at RotoBaller, 12 of our expert writers recently took part in an early mock draft for the 2018 fantasy baseball season. We've already shared those draft results, including our big board from RT Sports, accompanied by a series of articles analyzing each round. Here's the complete list of recaps, in case you missed it: Round 1... Read More
Hello fellow RotoBallers! Sabermetrics have become an integral tool for fantasy baseball draft prep, but a concise resource for understanding the basics can be difficult to find. This series attempts to define and explain all of the metrics fantasy owners may find useful, citing examples of how to use them in the process. Twenty degrees... Read More
From the middle rounds, we segue into the tail-end of our early bird mock draft. The 12-team draft was done by RotoBaller’s MLB writers with order as follows: Chris Zolli, Harris Yudin, Troy Klauder, Kevin Luchansky, Pierre Camus, Max Petrie, Nick Mariano, Max Brill, Connor McEleney, Kyle Bishop, Mario Hernandez, and Andrew Le. As mentioned... Read More
Spring training is getting closer and the RotoBaller MLB team opened up our first bags of peanuts and cracker jacks with a 12-team mock draft last week. For consideration, this 23-round mock draft was a traditional 5x5 league consisting of nine pitcher spots and the rest starting offensive slots (including two catchers). The lack of... Read More
