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.

Marcus Semien comes over to the A’s via the Jeff Samardzija trade in December. Semien is penciled in as the starting shortstop for the A’s for 2015 and probably the next 2-3 years (I’ve seen Daniel Roberston play I wouldn’t be shocked if he moves to second base).

The scouting reports (here and here) suggest he’s not going to hit a lot of home runs, but he hit 23 in 2013 (15 came at Double-A) and 21 in 2014 (15 came at Triple-A). In 300 ABs in the majors he has a 9.6% HR/FB rate. During that time he has hit 83 fly balls. Suppose he got 500 Abs he would roughly hit 138-139 fly balls. If he maintains that rate he would hit 12 home runs. Obviously I’m not projecting 12 home runs because he’s moving from a great hitters park to one of the best pitcher’s park and of the eight home runs he hit in the majors, only two were hit on the road.

Since Semien doesn’t have any loud tools he’s going to have more real life value than fantasy value. He doesn’t hit for a lot of power and doesn’t have a lot of speed. If you’re in a deep mixed league he is usable in the MI slot as a warm body who will get at-bats every day. I’m projecting 500 ABs with 8 home runs, 8 stolen bases, 55 RBI, 60 runs with a .245 batting average.

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.

There’s a lot of buzz about how the new dimensions at the Mets home ballpark is going to help increase Curtis Granderson’s home run totals in 2015. The new dimensions are being made primarily in right center (image below):

Based on that information if looks like this should help increase the home runs for Granderson, but most of his home runs the past three seasons were hit to right and a little bit to right-center field (image below courtesy of FanGraphs).

The question is will the power come back next year? From 2010-13 (when he played for the Yankees) he had a 14.7% HR/FB rate on the road compared to 20.6% at home. Last year he had a 6.2% rate at home compared to 13.5% on the road. So, last year he showed the same power as before, which implies the power is still there. The question how much do you think the alterations to the home ballpark will affect him. Last year he hit 113 fly balls and seven home runs. Suppose his HR/FB rate jumps to 10% then he would’ve hit 10-11, which isn’t that much more. Maybe he hits 25 next year, but I don’t see anymore than that.

One thing I didn’t expect to see in 2014 was his strikeout rate decreasing nearly seven percentage points along with the SwStr% decreasing four percentage points, which implies he’s approach at the plate has improved. The question is if the strikeout rate decreased so much why wasn’t there any improvement in the batting average? It turns out he got extremely unlucky on fly balls. The image below shows his batting average on fly balls since 2008 (I excluded the 2013 season because of a small sample size).

Last year was his lowest batting average on fly balls with .270; from 2008-10 the batting average was .298 so there should be some positive regression next year. I’m projecting Granderson to hit .238 (in 530 ABs) with 23 home runs, eight stolen bases and 70 runs and RBI.

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 three seasons of at least 22 home runs J.J. Hardy only hit 9 and not surprisingly had the lowest HR/FB of his career (5.6%). Offensive fluctuations have been apart of his game his entire career so it wasn’t totally unusual for the power to disappear. The big question is will the power come back in 2015?

First, he played the fewest number of games since 2011 because he missed a few games here and there with a few nagging injuries (mostly lower back), but never landed on the DL. Back injuries are troubling especially for a shortstop. Also, once someone starts to have back problems very rarely do they completely go away.

What’s strange about his batting average was it was relatively the same as the past years, but he achieved last year’s batting average with a much higher BABIP. Last year he hit a career low .188 on fly balls and a career best .333 on ground balls. It looks as though both numbers should regress back to his career norms so the batting average should be in the .260s.

In regards to the power, it should positively regress, but I think 22 is the ceiling rather than the floor. Creating arbitrary beginning and end points is never fully reliable, but it can provide a glimpse into what happened. From June 1 to the end of the season he had 9 home runs with a 8.7 HR/FB rate, which is close to the same rates he posted the past two seasons. Also, he hit 28 doubles, which is nearly identical to the number of doubles he hit the past three seasons.

I also believe there was also a human element to his low power numbers because I’m sure it must have been an anchor in his mind and probably snowballed which contributed to the delay of his first home run. It’s important to remember these players are human beings and this isn’t Strat-O-Matic.

My projection for Hardy is a .264 batting average with 16 home runs, 70 runs and RBIs (in 540 ABs).