Investing & Maybe Fantasy Baseball

If you like what you’re reading then you will like my 2015 Fantasy Baseball Guide! Last year’s fantasy guide was more than 150,000 words and had 440 player profiles (of hitters and pitchers). My approach to player evaluation is to ask questions about what the player has done in the past and what he may do in the future. I certainly provide a narrative on how I feel a player will perform, but I also ask a lot of open ended questions that I hope will get you thinking about the information I’ve provided.

As of mid-January Tanner Roark is not expected to begin the year in the Major League rotation. This player capsule assumes he will be. Even if he does not begin the year in the rotation he’ll mostl likely spend some time in the rotation because pitchers do get hurt and a lot can happen from January 22^nd until Opening Day; a trade perhaps?

When looking at Roark’s 2014 numbers it’s easy to say he’s going to regress when his strand rate was very high (79.3%), the BABIP is really low (.270), he doesn’t strike batters out and he didn’t’t generate a lot of ground balls. I do agree he’s going to regress and last year will probably be the best fantasy season he will have in career, but he still has value as a streaming option in 10-team mixed leagues.

First, let’s look at the strikeout rate. Before the month of August he had a slightly below average strikeout rate (19%), but it was still much higher than his season total would indicate. The image below shows his strikeout and walk rates by month last year.

If Roark is going to be a successful real life and fantasy starting pitcher it’s going to come down to what kind of pitcher is he? Is he the pitcher who will generate ground balls 50% of the time in 2013 or 40% last year. The main reason why the ground ball rate was lower was due to the performance of the curveball and slider (image below from BrooksBaseball.net).

Since the ground ball rates were so low something must have happened to those two pitches? Maybe he left the pitches higher in the zone? The table below shows the percentage of times the curveball and slider were thrown down in the zone and the ground ball rate of those pitches down in the zone.

After looking at the table it looks like he was extremely unlucky with the ground ball rate last year. Therefore, I expect the ground ball rate to positively regress in 2015. If he’s ground baller he’s should be able to have an ERA less than 3.50 and a sub-1.20 WHIP with a lot of wins.

If you like what you’re reading then you will like my 2015 Fantasy Baseball Guide! Last year’s fantasy guide was more than 150,000 words and had 440 player profiles (of hitters and pitchers). My approach to player evaluation is to ask questions about what the player has done in the past and what he may do in the future. I certainly provide a narrative on how I feel a player will perform, but I also ask a lot of open ended questions that I hope will get you thinking about the information I’ve provided.

After missing a little less than two seasons Drew Hutchison was finally healthy and made 32 starts. In late April I wrote, “After watching his start three starts I’m a believer that his raw stuff is good enough that he could be a 200 K pitcher if given the opportunity to start 31-33 games.” He ended up having 32 starts and pitched 184 innings. Coincidently he struck out 184 batters so if he pitched a few more innings my projection would have come true.

In that same piece I concluded my evaluation of Hutchison that he would finish the year with, “At the end of the year he’ll be somewhere near a 3.80 ERA, 1.25 WHIP with 180 strikeouts.” Obviously I was incorrect about the ERA, but he had a 3.85 FIP and 3.82 xFIP so I was definitely on the right track.

The one thing he should try to work on is trying to limit the fly balls. Last year his fly ball rate was 45%, which is high considering the home ballpark is a bam box. If he can lower the fly ball rate to even 40% he’ll have an opportunity to have an ERA in the sub-3.80s. There’s another sign of optimism as his strikeout rate increased month-over-month while the walk rate decreased slightly as the season progressed (image below).

If Hutchison played in a bigger market and in a better pitchers ballpark there would be more talk about him as a potential breakout candidate. He’ll likely be drafted in the 60-70 among starting pitchers (or even later), but he is one of the best candidates to substantially improve in 2015.

My 2015 projection for Hutchison is 200 IP, 3.79 ERA, 1.24 WHIP, 200 Ks and 13 wins.

If you like what you’re reading then you will like my 2015 Fantasy Baseball Guide! Last year’s fantasy guide was more than 150,000 words and had 440 player profiles (of hitters and pitchers). My approach to player evaluation is to ask questions about what the player has done in the past and what he may do in the future. I certainly provide a narrative on how I feel a player will perform, but I also ask a lot of open ended questions that I hope will get you thinking about the information I’ve provided.

Before evaluating Justin Verlander’s 2014 season it’s important to remember he had core-muscle repair surgery after the 2013 season began. Therefore, it’s possible he was never 100% last year. This offseason he gets to train and condition himself without any restrictions.

There’s been a lot of hubbub about Verlander’s diminished velocity, but the numbers don’t bear that out. The image below shows his slugging and wOBA against the fastball since 2008.

The first thing you’ll notice is he’s on a bad trend since 2011, but batters were squaring him up at the same rate from 2008 and 2010 and his numbers weren’t as bad as 2014s. Okay, maybe 2008s were, but the average of those seasons were much better than 2014s numbers.

One of the big problems I saw with Verlander was fastball command. The image below shows the percentage of fastballs that were thrown for strikes since 2008. The first thing I noticed was he’s been throwing far less strikes with the fastball and in fact it was nearly at the same level as his 2008 season, which he coincidently had a 4.84 ERA and 1.40 WHIP (those numbers do not look all that different than his 2014 numbers).

Another troubling trend is the overall performance of his secondary pitches (table below). The poor performance could be due to the lack of fastball command, but he lacked command in 2008 and his secondary offerings still missed a lot of bats.

Bad fastball command can put hitters in good hitters counts which means they can sit on the fastball and not chance the curveball down in the dirt. Doug Thorburn wrote that Verlander’s biggest problem has been finding mechanical consistency with his delivery. The numbers don’t look promising, but he’s still in a small class of pitchers who could literally finish the year as the number one rated fantasy pitcher.

My 2015 projection for Verlander is 200 IP, 3.74 ERA, 1.32 WHIP, 175 strikeouts and 14 wins.