Archive for March, 2015

Blockbuster Trades Steal Show

Saturday, March 21st, 2015


The 23rd annual DTBL Draft began a week ago Thursday. The beginning of the draft always brings plenty of intrigue. But this year, the early rounds were mostly overshadowed by a string of trades that were completed over the first few days of the draft. In total, seven trades were made in four days involving six different teams. And for the most part, these weren’t minor deals involving role players and draft pick swaps. Several of the league’s biggest stars are now on new teams. Some of these trades indicate new philosophical directions for entire franchises.  But before I get to the details of all of those trades, I don’t want the first round picks to feel left out.  So I’m going to do my usual first round recap first.  There were plenty of interesting picks made there too.

Some years there is a fairly obvious player available for the team with the first pick in the draft.  Other years, there are several strong candidates for that slot.  This year was the former.  In what should have been a surprise to nobody, the Cougars used the first pick in the draft to select White Sox slugging first baseman Jose Abreu.  The Cuban star made his MLB presence felt immediately in the MLB.  He slugged 36 homers with 107 RBI and a .317 average on his way to winning the AL Rookie of the Year award.  Not bad for a guy adapting to a new league, not to mention a new country.  Abreu is the second straight Cuban player to be picked first in the DTBL Draft, following Yasiel Puig a year ago.  The Cougars badly needed an offensive boost after finishing last in all five categories a year ago, further making Abreu the obvious choice.  Really the only slight negative about him is that he is 28 years old.  That makes him the oldest first overall pick since the expansion Naturals took Jeff Bagwell back in 2002.  Curtis Granderson was just a couple months younger when the Choppers picked him in 2009.  Nonetheless, Abreu profiles as a guy who should help the Cougars for many years to come.

After Abreu came a string of four straight young outfielders with big upside.  With the second pick, the Gators selected the most established of the four when they picked up Corey Dickerson.  The Rockies slugger hit .312 with 24 home runs in his breakout season of 2014.  Playing half his games in Coors Field makes it easy to believe those numbers could get even better with a full season of playing every day.  Next, the Darkhorses selected George Springer of the Astros who displayed his immense power by hitting 20 home runs in his rookie year in fewer than 300 at bats.  He has five tool potential if he can cut down on his strikeouts a bit.  With the fourth pick, the Moonshiners took one of the bevy of up-and-coming Cubs superstars, Jorge Soler.  Somewhat overshadowed by a couple of those other Cubs prospects, Soler is the one who has already proven his worth at the big league level putting up solid numbers after his late season promotion last year.  Finally, the Kings used the fifth pick on another outfielder with big potential, Mookie Betts.  Betts can do it all.  His only current obstacle is a crowded Red Sox outfield, but you would think they will find a way to get him in the lineup one way or another.

The Jackalope ended the string of outfielders by going with the draft’s first pitcher with pick number six.  They selected Cubs hurler Jake Arrieta, who broke out in a big way last season.  This was not a surprising selection on the heels of the trade the Jackalope made immediately prior to the pick, which I will get to in a bit. Arrieta figures to be a major part of their rebuilt rotation.  The Choppers also took a pitcher in the seventh spot, selecting Tyson Ross.  The Padres pitcher had an outstanding season a year ago, but didn’t garner a ton of attention.  That should change this year thanks to the revamped Padres lineup.

As is their custom, the Mavericks were able to pick up an extra first round selection in a deal with the Demigods.  So they had two consecutive picks late in the first round.  They used those picks to draft Yankees relief pitcher Dellin Betances and Cubs shortstop Javier Baez.  These were both high risk/reward picks.  Betances put up ridiculously strong numbers out of the bullpen last year, but his value in fantasy depends largely on whether or not he will be a closer this year.  That seems likely, but he hasn’t been officially handed the job.  He can help the Mavericks in ERA, WHIP and K’s though, even if they go a different route (especially since they picked the other leading Yankees closer candidate later, Andrew Miller).  Baez is about as big of a risk/reward pick as you can get.  On one hand, he has immense power that could blow away all other middle infielders on the board.  But on the other, he has shown no plate discipline at all at the big league level and could easily wind up in AAA.  Of course, the Mavs have plenty of other players ready to fill that spot if Baez doesn’t pan out.  Finally, the defending champion Naturals finished the first round by selecting another good, young pitcher in Carlos Carrasco.  Slightly overshadowed by Indians teammate Corey Kluber last year, Carrasco could become a Cy Young candidate himself this year if he pitches like he did in ’14.

So that first round was all well and good, but it was most certainly NOT the biggest story of the past ten days.  There were four huge trades made on the first day of the draft before Abreu was selected with the first pick.  Then three more major deals were completed before two rounds were in the books.  These trades range from championship contenders looking to solidify their rosters, to second tier teams trying to plug major holes, to major franchise overhauls.  It is difficult to pinpoint which teams will be the big winners and losers from these deals, but one thing is for sure:  the players/picks involved in these trades will play a major role in determining how teams finish this year.

The first domino to fall was the Naturals trading Zack Greinke and their fifth round pick to the Moonshiners for Wilson Ramos and a second round pick.  Star pitchers being dealt was a big theme of the week and Greinke was the first.  The Moonshiners badly needed an ace to anchor a rotation that hasn’t really had a standout performer in recent years.  Greinke held that ace title for the Moonshiners for about a day.  The Naturals needed a catcher to fill the crucial spot held by Victor Martinez last year.  They used that early second round pick to select Garrett Richards, who they will count on to replace Greinke.  This is the second time Greinke has been involved in a major March trade.  The Naturals acquired him from the Jackalope in 2011 in a deal that saw Ryan Howard go the other way.  Greinke had four tremendous seasons for the Naturals and should be a major piece of the future for the Moonshiners as well.

The next trade was something you don’t usually see in March:  a one-for-one trade of star pitchers with no other picks or pieces involved.  The Mavericks traded their first round pick from a year ago, young starting pitcher Gerrit Cole, to the Jackalope for one of the best closers in the league, Aroldis Chapman.  This was the first of many changes for the Jackalope, who felt the need to get younger, particularly in the rotation with ailing veteran Cliff Lee’s season being in jeopardy.  Meanwhile, Chapman (along with first round pick Betances) give the Mavericks an almost unfair bullpen full of fireballers.  Their rotation isn’t too shaby either.  If I had to pick one team as a lock to win one category this year, it would be the Mavericks and strikeouts.  Barring injury, they look pretty solid in the other four pitching categories too.

As it turns out, the Cole/Chapman deal was just a precursor to a couple more one-for-one deals involving superstars.  The Jackalope immediately turned around and dealt their first overall pick from a year ago, Yasiel Puig, to the Naturals for third baseman Anthony Rendon.  This would have looked like an insane trade a year ago considering the Naturals nabbed Rendon in the sixth round.  But he was quietly one of the most valuable players in the league last year and plays a much more difficult position to fill.  Of course, his switch from second to third created a bit of a problem for the Naturals who were already loaded at the corners.  Unfortunately for the Jackalope, Rendon wound up injuring his knee right around the time this deal was made, which was part of a pretty tough week of injury news for their squad.  However, Rendon’s injury isn’t considered to be too serious, but will be worth watching as the season approaches.  Meanwhile, the Naturals are happy to have Puig and hope he can bounce back from a slightly disappointing season a year ago.  He clearly has major talent and big upside at his young age.

The final pre-draft trade skewed a little older.  The Mavericks dealt slugging first baseman Edwin Encarnacion to the Darkhorses for shortstop Hanley Ramirez.  The Darkhorses acquired one of the most consistent power sources in recent years while the Mavericks picked up a power source of their own at a premium position.  This figures to be Ramirez’s last year at shortstop though since the Red Sox plan to play him in the outfield.  Only Marc knows for sure, but I’m not positive this deal would have happened had they known they would be able to pick Baez in the draft.  As it currently stands, the Mavericks have five middle infielders and dealing Encarnacion temporarily left them without a first baseman.  But that is a much easier position to fill than 2B/SS.  The Darkhorses are hoping two ex-Mavs players will help boost their power output.  They also drafted former Maverick Carlos Santana.

The start of the draft did not end the flurry of trades.  Halfway through the first round, a deal was made that somehow managed to exceed the four I just detailed in terms of star power.  The Jackalope traded arguably the second best pitcher in baseball, Felix Hernandez, along with Ian Kennedy to the Moonshiners for third baseman Josh Donaldson and a fourth round pick.  Suddenly, the Moonshiners pitching problems were a thing of the past.  The additions of Hernandez, Greinke and Kennedy is about as big of a rotation upgrade as a team can realistically make.  Despite only being 28 years old, King Felix is already 10th on the DTBL’s all-time strikeout list.  He was a workhorse for the Jackalope in his nine seasons with them, pitching at least 180 innings every season and has struck out over 200 batters in six consecutive seasons.  He will be reunited with two other former Jackalope rotation-mates with the Moonshiners:  Greinke and Jered Weaver.  This signals a huge overhaul for the Jackalope who have been slightly burned in recent years by deteriorating health of their once invincible pitching staff.  Roy Halladay and now Cliff Lee seem to have been lost without getting anything in return.  They elected to make sure the same thing didn’t happen with Hernandez.  The Jackalope rotations of about five years ago were some of the best collection of pitchers this league has ever seen.  But now all are gone, except for Lee, who may never pitch again.  Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention that the Jackalope acquired Donaldson who was the Moonshiners first round pick a year ago.  Donaldson had a huge DTBL rookie campaign and could be in for even more now that he has moved to hitter friendly Toronto.

The next trade was of the more traditional draft day variety.  The Mavericks did what they do best, acquired an extra first round pick from the Demigods in exchange for second and third round picks.  As already mentioned, the Mavericks used that extra pick to acquire Javier Baez following their own selection of Dellin Betances.  As for the Demigods who probably had as few holes to fill as any team entering this draft, they moved down and took outfielder J.D. Martinez with that pick acquired from the Mavericks.  The third round pick turned into relief pitcher Santiago Casilla.  Interestingly, that second round slot was actually a pick they had previously traded to the Mavericks in a deal last May.

Finally, the Jackalope had one more superstar to trade away.  They dealt franchise icon Albert Pujols to the Mavericks along with a third round pick for Adam Jones.  A couple years ago, trading away Pujols AND a pick for Jones would have been preposterous.  But Pujols is clearly on the downside of his career and is not the perennial MVP candidate that he was for most of his career.  He is the Jackalope franchise leader in home runs, RBI and runs, all by very comfortable margins.  He spent 13 remarkable seasons with the franchise.  So trading him away couldn’t have been easy.  The Jackalope will have a much different look in 2015 without Prince Albert and King Felix.  Adam Jones is no slouch though.  He has hit 25+ homers each of the past four years and has become one of the most consistent outfield contributors in the league.  As for the Mavericks, this deal was mostly about plugging that hole left by the departure of Encarnacion.  Although Pujols isn’t the hitter he once was, by normal standards of judging players, he’s still one of the better first basemen in the league.  If he stays healthy, he should have several more big seasons in him.

So that sums up the first round of the draft and the seven deals that have been made so far this month.  It has been a well paced draft as we currently sit at the end of the eighth round with still two full weeks before the start of the season.  Thanks to everyone for keeping it moving and good luck with the remainder of the draft.

PAR Review: 2010-2014

Monday, March 9th, 2015

With the DTBL Draft scheduled to begin later this week, teams are no doubt planning for their future.  But before we go there, I’d  like to take a moment to step back in time.  One of my projects for this winter has been to retroactively calculate PAR stats for previous seasons.  At a minimum, my goal was to complete the five most recent seasons to give me a decent sample size to analyze the numbers and provide a basis for something else I will be tackling down the road.  So that is exactly what I did.  PAR numbers have been calculated for all DTBL players dating back to the 2010 season.  Eventually, I hope to get this completed all the way back to the beginning of the league, but it will be a slow process.  But for now, I’d like to take a closer look at the five years worth of data I have compiled, draw some conclusions from the data and analyze how these numbers match up with the way league members valued players each year in the DTBL Awards votes.  This will also be a bit of a look at league trends over this five year period.

First, I don’t want to assume you all remember every last detail about the Points Above Replacement statistic I introduced last summer.  If you need a PAR primer, I highly recommend skimming through my introductory article.  In an incredibly brief summary, the purpose of PAR is to determine a player’s value in terms of the number of points he contributes to his team in the standings over a replacement level player.  In theory, a player with a 5.0 PAR means that the team earned approximately five more points in the standings than they would have if they had used a replacement level player to fill that roster spot instead.

Now it’s time to look at the results at a macro level.  To assist with this, I quickly put together a new page which contains year-by-year league-wide totals in all statistical categories, including PAR.  For now, that single table is the only thing on the page, but eventually I envision adding a lot more data and making it sort of a league almanac.  Here it is.  You may want to open that page in a new tab because I will be referencing it a bunch.  For now, you can reach the page on the league site by clicking on the “Archives” header.  I may move it elsewhere later though.

Since the idea behind the “replacement level” setting for PAR was a team full of players that would finish in last place in each category, I would expect the total PAR earned by every player in the league during the season to be approximately 450.  That’s 45 points to be gained by nine non-last place finishing teams in each of the 10 categories.  As you can see in that table I just linked, the league’s total PAR in the five years I have computed so far was very close to the expected 450 in the 2010-12 seasons, but has fallen well short each of the last two years.  But when you break it out into batting PAR and pitching PAR, the results are not very close to the expected 225 in most cases.  In most years, batters have fallen well short of the expected total while pitchers have far exceeded it.  But I think there is a very logical explanation for this, and overall, I am pleased with the results so far.  Here’s why:

As I mentioned in the initial PAR article, I decided to use a span of five years to set the replacement level baseline and determine the values needed to earn points in each category.  I did this because I didn’t want huge fluctuations in the numbers used to compute PAR from one year to the next.  So a player who puts up identical numbers in consecutive years should have more or less the same PAR.  But the downside to using a five year sample is that drastic shifts in league-wide stat totals throws the baseline out of whack.  And that’s exactly what has happened in this league for over a decade now.  Offensive numbers have been on a steady decline since the heart of the steroid era and pitching numbers have drastically improved.  Looking at that table again, you will see that with the exception of 2012, the league batting average and ERA have gone down every season since 2006.  The last two years, in particular, have seen incredible drops in offensive production.  2014 was the first season since this league expanded to 10 teams in 1998 that DTBL players failed to accumulate 1000 runs scored.  The league ERA and WHIP were at all time lows, by a fairly comfortable margin.

Because these trends have been consistently heading in one direction over the five years I’ve examined so far (really, it’s nine years since the ’10 PAR calculations include numbers dating back to ’06), the season in question was always being compared to a sample set of five years with higher offensive output and less impressive pitching stats.  Therefore, batters failing to accumulate a league-wide total of 225 PAR is to be expected.  The extent to which hitters have failed to reach 225 PAR has exceeded the amount in which pitchers have gone past that number in most seasons.  This is because pitching PAR contains two stats that have been extremely consistent from year-to-year and aren’t particularly affected by the lack of offense in recent years:  wins and saves.  So while hitters have at least four categories that have seen tumbling totals (AVG, HR, RBI, R), the effect on pitching stats has been mostly limited to three categories (ERA, WHIP, K).

Once I finally start to compute PAR in seasons that didn’t have a drastic change in league totals compared to the previous five seasons, we should start to see these numbers come much closer to the expected values.  Actually, we already have one such season in 2012.  2012 was actually a slightly better year for hitters than the previous two seasons and was right in line with the five year averages from ’08-’12.  So it is encouraging to see that the batting and pitching PAR totals were both right around 225 that year.  In conclusion from looking at the league PAR totals, the numbers may seem out of whack and pitchers are certainly earning points at a higher rate than hitters, but I do not think this negates the value of the stat.  You just need to keep these things in mind when determining how you personally value each player.

Now I’d like to take a look at the top PAR earning batters and pitchers in each of the five seasons and see how those players finished in the DTBL MVP and Cy Young votes in the corresponding season.  The reason why I think this is something worth looking at is to see how the value league members have placed on particular players has matched up with the value determined by PAR.

2014

PAR rank Batter MVP finish Pitcher CY finish
1st Mike Trout 1st Clayton Kershaw 1st
2nd Jose Altuve 4th Johnny Cueto 2nd
3rd Michael Brantley 5th Felix Hernandez 3rd
4th Giancarlo Stanton 2nd Corey Kluber 4th
5th Jose Bautista 7th Adam Wainwright 5th(t)

2014 was the first season in which voters actually had PAR numbers to reference if they were so inclined. Not surprisingly, the PAR numbers back up the voters, especially for Cy Young. Victor Martinez finished 3rd in the MVP vote despite finishing 6th in PAR, but this is mainly due to his position value. But that’s a whole different topic for another time. It appears Jose Altuve was slightly undervalued by voters, at least if PAR is to be trusted, since he was just barely behind Trout in PAR.

2013

PAR rank Batter MVP finish Pitcher CY finish
1st Miguel Cabrera 1st Clayton Kershaw 1st
2nd Chris Davis 2nd Max Scherzer 2nd
3rd Mike Trout 4th Adam Wainwright 4th
4th Paul Goldschmidt 3rd Yu Darvish 3rd
5th Adam Jones 5th Cliff Lee 6th

The ’12-’13 seasons featured hotly contested debates on Miguel Cabrera vs. Mike Trout for AL MVP. It was a little more clear cut in this league though, at least in ’13, with Cabrera having the superior fantasy stats. It’s also interesting to see how close Kershaw and Scherzer were to each other in both PAR and the Cy Young vote. The result was the same in each, with a slight edge to Kershaw. A little sad to see those 4th and 5th place names on the pitching side in light of their current arm injuries.

2012

PAR rank Batter MVP finish Pitcher CY finish
1st Mike Trout 2nd Justin Verlander 2nd
2nd Ryan Braun 3rd David Price 1st
3rd Miguel Cabrera 1st Clayton Kershaw 3rd
4th Josh Hamilton 4th Gio Gonzalez 4th
5th Andrew McCutchen 5th Matt Cain 6th(t)

Now this is where things get interesting. PAR disagrees with both the MVP and Cy Young selections from ’12. I wouldn’t classify either as egregious errors by the voters though. Cabrera and Price both helped lead the Naturals to the championship that season, so they probably earned a slight edge over Trout, Braun and Verlander in the minds of some for that reason alone. Also, the PAR differences were minimal anyway. Having said that, Trout’s 10.8 PAR is the highest single season number we’ve seen for a batter in the five years I’ve calculated so far, yet he didn’t win the MVP. I should note that Craig Kimbrel finished 5th in the Cy Young vote in both ’12 and ’13, but relief pitchers have almost no chance of finishing near the leaders in pitching PAR. Make of that what you wish.

2011

PAR rank Batter MVP finish Pitcher CY finish
1st Matt Kemp 1st Justin Verlander 1st
2nd Jacoby Ellsbury 3rd Clayton Kershaw 2nd
3rd Ryan Braun 2nd Roy Halladay 3rd
4th Curtis Granderson 4th Cliff Lee 4th
5th Jose Bautista 6th Jered Weaver 5th

This is another season where the PAR rankings closely match the award voting results. Remember when Matt Kemp was the best player in baseball? It was only four years ago! Meanwhile, Verlander was a unanimous Cy Young selection in ’11 and also accumulated the highest PAR I have calculated to date (16.3), barely edging out Kershaw’s ’14 campaign.

2010

PAR rank Batter MVP finish Pitcher CY finish
1st Carlos Gonzalez 2nd Roy Halladay 1st
2nd Albert Pujols 1st Adam Wainwright 2nd
3rd Joey Votto 4th Felix Hernandez 3rd
4th Miguel Cabrera 3rd Ubaldo Jimenez 5th
5th Carl Crawford 7th C.C. Sabathia 4th

Finally, 2010 saw Pujols edge out CarGo for the MVP award despite finishing slightly behind him in PAR. But that was an extremely tight MVP vote as well with Pujols winning despite only receiving three first place votes. Less than a point separated the two in PAR. On the pitching side, the two lists were nearly identical.

To me, all of the above points out that PAR is a pretty good representation of the value most league members have placed on players in recent years and helps indicate that no player has been clearly snubbed from a post-season award either.  I hope to do more analysis like this as I continue to compute PAR values from previous seasons.

With the draft starting this week, you may be contemplating whether or not you are going to consider PAR when making your selections.  Let me offer a little unsolicited advice and provide some guidance for you if you are going to go that route.  If you are already using a set of stat projections to assist you with your drafting process, it may be worthwhile to calculate a player’s projected PAR too.  This could be particularly useful if you are debating between two players with completely different skill sets.  However, you should also consider position scarcity and not necessarily draft the player capable of posting the highest PAR.  2014 PAR calculations for all draft eligible players can be found on the “Free Agents” page.  But I want to give you a huge heads up that these numbers are close to meaningless for players who were not active for the full season last year.  The PAR calculation assumes they played the full season, which is probably not the case for a majority of the players.  Same goes for the PAR numbers you see on the individual team pages right now.

In case you are interested in calculating 2015 projected PAR for players, I have pasted the formulas below for both batters and pitchers.  These are the numbers that were used to compute the ’14 PAR totals and will be used during this season as well.  The only difference is these formulas are assuming full season stats.  So if your projected numbers aren’t full season, the PAR is probably going to be a little low.  Anyway, you can plug this formula into Excel, and replace the stat names with the projected values you wish to use.

Batting PAR:

=((((H+1775)/(AB+6912))-0.2567)/0.0028) + ((HR-15.05)/9.67) + ((RBI-63.25)/24.48) + ((R-65.19)/24.34) + ((SB-7.68)/9.48)

Pitching PAR:

=((((ER+495.13)*9/(IP+1140.0))-3.909)/-0.095) + ((((BB+H+1469.73)/(IP+1140.0))-1.2893)/-0.0174) + ((W-7.57)/2.75) + ((SV-5.56)/9.57) + ((K-114.47)/31.91)

Of course, these formulas aren’t very useful without numbers to plug into them.  I’m not going to recommend any particular projection set though because I think it is best to leave that up to you to decide.  It wouldn’t be much fun if we were all reading from the same sheet of music.  However, I will recommend checking out FanGraphs, where they have several sets of 2015 stat projections available.

Happy drafting!