Ron Shandler's 2018 Baseball Forecaster: & Encyclopedia of Fanalytics

BASEBALL

FORECASTER

AND ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANALYTICS

Copyright © 2017, USA TODAY Sports Media Group LLC.

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Statistics provided by Baseball Info Solutions

Cover design by Brent Hershey

Front cover photograph by Kelley L Cox/USA TODAY Sports Images

Author photograph by Kevin Hurley

Ron Shandler’s

BASEBALL

FORECASTER

Editors

Ray Murphy

Brent Hershey

Associate Editor

Brandon Kruse

• • • • • •

Technical Wizard

Rob Rosenfeld

Design

Brent Hershey

Data and Charts

Matt Cederholm

Player Commentaries

Ryan Bloomfield

Rob Carroll

Brant Chesser

Alec Dopp

Brent Hershey

Brandon Kruse

Ray Murphy

Stephen Nickrand

Kristopher Olson

Greg Pyron

Joe Pytleski

Brian Rudd

Paul Sporer

Jock Thompson

Rod Truesdell

Research and Articles

Patrick Davitt

Ed DeCaria

Arik Florimonte

David Martin

Paul Petera

Jeff Zimmerman

Prospects

Rob Gordon

Jeremy Deloney

Tom Mulhall

Brian Walton

Injury Chart

Rick Wilton

Acknowledgments

Producing the Baseball Forecaster has been a team effort for a number of years now; the list of credits to the left is where the heavy lifting gets done. On behalf of Ron, Brent, and Ray, our most sincere thanks to each of those key contributors.

We are just as grateful to the rest of the BaseballHQ.com staff, who do the yeoman’s work in populating the website with 12 months of incredible content: Dave Adler, Andy Andres, Matt Beagle, Dan Becker, Alex Beckey, Bob Berger, Chris Blessing, Derrick Boyd, Brian Brickley, Doug Dennis, Matt Dodge, Greg Fishwick, Neil FitzGerald, Brandon Gavett, Sam Grant, Rick Green, Phil Hertz, Joe Hoffer, Ed Hubbard, Tom Kephart, Brad Kullman, Chris Lee, Bill McKnight, Harold Nichols, Frank Noto, Josh Paley, Nick Richards, Vlad Sedler, Mike Shears, Peter Sheridan, Brian Slack, Skip Snow, Matthew St-Germain, Jeffrey Tomich, Nick Trojanowski, Michael Weddell and Mike Werner.

Thank you to our behind-the-scenes troopers: our technical dynamic duo of Mike Krebs and Rob Rosenfeld.

Thank you to all our industry colleagues, a truly impressive group. They are competitors, but they are also colleagues working to grow this industry, which is never a more evident than at our annual First Pitch Arizona gathering each November.

Thank you to Chris Pirrone, Ryan Bonini, and the team at USA Today Sports Media Group.

Thank you for all the support from the folks at Triumph Books and Action Printing.

And of course, thank you, readers, for your interest in what we all have to say. Your kind words, support and (respectful) criticism move us forward on the fanalytic continuum more than you know. We are grateful for your readership.

From Brent Hershey At some point every year in Book Season, during a rare moment when I can catch a breath, I marvel at how much this tome contains. It makes me appreciate not only all the names to the left that make the current year’s Baseball Forecaster posssible, but all of those whose contributions to the 31 annuals past still live on. Ray, thanks for your flexibility and commitment to working together to uphold this tradition and still maintain some semblance of personal balance. Thanks, Ron for holding all the institutional memory of the project and continuing to give us just the right nudge when we need it. And thanks to Lorie, Dillon and Eden for the ways you bring life and energy into our family unit, no matter what the circumstances. There’s a lot of history and tradition in our space, too.

From Ray Murphy Assembling this book—with its 280 pages of content, millions of data points and (hopefully) insightful analysis thereof—over the course of about eight weeks, is a major lift. The only reason it gets done is because the team listed at left is supremely talented and just as dedicated. The fact that Ron used to produce this book as a solo project seemingly challenges the laws of physics. It remains a joy to collaborate with him each year. As for Brent, I keep waiting for him to get tired of working with me. Either it hasn’t happened yet, or he’s hiding it very well. Either way, I am grateful to share the BaseballHQ helm with an ideal partner.

Along with my fantastic wife, Jennifer, and amazing daughters, Bridget and Grace, our family has undertaken major new adventures this fall: new house, new town, new school. (Note to self: don’t ever move during Book Season.) I can’t wait to see what’s next…

From Ron Shandler For me, the annual multi-month gestation that ends with the birth of this book continues to be an immensely gratifying experience. Thanks again to Ray and Brent for shepherding this baby through its early development. Thanks to the BaseballHQ.com staff for pushing the envelope on innovative, high-quality fanalytics. Thanks to all of you for excusing the mixed metaphors.

As always, my eternal gratitude goes to the household of women who have supported me through all 32 editions. Sue, Darielle, Justina and Michele keep me grounded, sane and insane, not necessarily in that order. One day I might get a male dog with whom to watch hockey games.

By time you read this, I will have already reached my six-decade milestone. Wish me a happy birthday. I probably have another decade in me before the fingers give out, but by then we’ll all be writing telepathically anyway. All we really crave is immortality, right? Onward…

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Extremes

Encyclopedia of Fanalytics

Fundamentals

Batters

Pitchers

Prospects

Gaming

Research Abstracts

Major Leagues

Batters

Pitchers

Injuries

Prospects

Top 75 Impact Prospects for 2018

Top International Prospects

What Shohei Ohtani Means for your Fantasy League

Major League Equivalents

Leaderboards

Draft Guides

Blatant Advertisements for Other Products

Extremes

by Ron Shandler

On August 19, 2017, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Yu Darvish was placed on the 10-day disabled list, retroactive to August 17, with lower back tightness.

As an isolated event, this move was routine and unremarkable. Lower back tightness is a common malady and can typically sideline a player for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, sometimes longer.

The Dodgers would not likely miss him. Analysts suggested that Darvish had not been brought in at the July 31 trading deadline for his contributions in August and September anyway; the Dodgers already had something like a 97-game lead in the NL West. Darvish was primarily acquired for October. As such, they would manage his innings during the stretch run in order to save his arm for the post-season.* This DL stint might have been part of that management program.

Darvish was reinstated on August 27, exactly 10 days after being placed on the list.

The only reason to bring up such an outwardly innocuous event is because this was not the first time the Dodgers used the new 10-day DL to shelve a starting pitcher for right around the 10 day minimum:

Some of these stints were seemingly intended to rest the pitcher. Some of them were efforts to avoid further injury, often unsuccessfully. Regardless, the Dodgers made good use of the new rule.

In the olden days of the 15-day DL (and the 21-day DL—remember?), these players would have been forced to sit out for far longer periods before returning to action. So, we’d expect that the effect of this new, shorter disabled list would be to reduce the number of days that players sat on the DL.

That is what appears to have happened:

The number of DL days did decline 1.3%, though it’s unclear whether that was wholly the result of the shorter DL. These numbers can become muddled because, while it was easier to place a player on the DL, a player could still stay on for as long as a team saw fit. And you can see from the above that a more extreme version of the same phenomenon occurred in 2013.

However, now it seemed that anyone could join the pain party. The 11.5% increase in number of players shelved is significant. Those 55 additional players in 2017 can be directly attributed to the lower barrier of entry to the 10 day DL.

As a fantasy leaguer, you know the impact this had on our teams. For me personally, the disabled lists in my four public leagues peaked in early June with 37 hobbled players. In my mixed leagues, there were usually some reasonable replacement options but always multiple teams fighting for them. In my AL/NL-only leagues, the free agent pools were mostly devoid of any sign of human life. Frankly, the 10-day DL was a curse.

Beyond all this, the Darvish move had one other important distinction.

On the day he hit the DL, Darvish became the 159th player from the pre-season Top 300 to be disabled, demoted or designated for assignment. (All ADP data is from the National Fantasy Baseball Championship.) Prior to this year, the high water mark for Top 300 attrition was 158 players. That total was compiled during the entire 2014 season. Darvish helped break the record this year… on August 19.

By the final day of the regular season, another 16 players would be added to that list, boosting the 2017 attrition rate to a record 58%. Little did you know last March that nearly six out of every 10 players you drafted would be disabled, demoted or DFA’d by year’s end.

If there was any saving grace, it was that we did a decent job of drafting around the attrition. We count on the higher-ranked players to be more productive, more reliable and to spend more time on the field. So, we can pat ourselves on the back for this:

When the best we can be is more than half wrong, it’s small consolation.

The splintering of playing time had ripple effects throughout the game, some areas more than others.

Power up

The rise in DL days didn’t seem to have any effect on the raw power emanating from major league bats. Players might have been getting shelved more often but the replacements were no less power-enabled.

Nearly 2,000 more home runs in just three years? Seriously? Perhaps this is the smoking gun:

What has been the cause of all these balls going yard with wanton abandon? Let’s put the issue to rest, once and for all:

1. It’s not the balls, because Rob Manfred already told us it wasn’t and we are always supposed to believe people in authority.

2. It’s not the increase in uppercut swings, because baseball’s overall flyball rate only rose from 34.6% to 35.5%, and there were four seasons in the past 10 years with still higher rates.

3. It’s not performance-enhancing drugs, because the evidence is clear that MLB’s drug testing has been working. The recent suspensions of speedsters Dee Gordon and Starling Marte are proof that PEDs have no relationship to power anyway.

Our esteemed rulers want us to believe it’s just a random trend that will eventually cycle back around. But even if seams, swings and steroids are real (seriously, they are), it doesn’t matter. Here’s why…

I don’t know about you, but for me, home runs are meh events. To score a pair of runs, give me a single, force out, double-thrown-out-at-third, single, triple over a walk, home run any day of the week.

However, in an era when superhero flicks often take up half the screens in multiplexes, home runs are cool displays of brute strength. In an era driven by short attention spans and immediate gratification, home runs take less time to put runs on the board. In an era when football and basketball draw more fantasy leaguers, and daily fantasy is exploding, brute force and quick scoring are immensely popular.

And you have to admit that the 2017 post-season was incredibly exciting baseball, thanks in part to all those home runs.

More eyeballs. More viewers. More clicks. In the end, home runs are profitable for MLB. That’s all that really matters. That’s why they had their collective heads in the sand during the PED era and that’s why they are likely tickled pink at all these power pokes now. You can point your finger at any reason for the surge, but all that matters is that home runs are profitable.

So, if anyone is wondering whether there is going to be much regression, the answer is not likely. Why would it? If MLB is going to address the balls at all, it will less likely be about the barrage of bombs and more likely about the barrage of blisters.

For us fantasy leaguers, this has a huge impact on how we will be constructing our teams. In 2017, there were big sluggers who weren’t even drafted, and major power sources who languished in the free agent pool.

These 11 represented 27% of the 41 players who hit at least 30 home runs last season. In a 12-team AL/NL league, they would have been players an owner might have speculated on at the bottom of the draft. In a 15-team mixed league, only Shaw, Judge, Souza and Duda might have been deliberate picks by round 23. In a 12-team mixed league, all of these players would have been left over in the free agent pool!

If we extend the list to undrafted 20+ HR hitters, we add 23 names to the list. But some of them went really late. Here are the 20+ HR hitters who went outside the Top 400.

These 16 hitters would not have been drafted even in an 18-team mixed league (except Rosario, who would have been the final pick at No. 414).

In an off-season poll at RonShandler.com, I asked: In your primary league, in what place did the team finish that owned Aaron Judge? Almost 30% of Judge owners won their league, nearly 50% finished first or second, and two thirds finished no lower than fourth. This tracks to previous polls about surprise players having a disproportionate impact on the fantasy standings. And if that player is plucked out of the free agent pool in April, it effectively diminishes the value of all that draft prep work we do each spring.

In 2014, you might have been among a handful of owners in a 15-team league without even one 30-HR hitter. In 2017, one of my fantasy teams had five 30-HR hitters and I still finished in seventh place. In fact, there were six hitters in 2017 who had more than 20 HRs and still earned negative rotisserie value.

So stocking up on power hitters at the draft may not be enough. The rising DL list adds risk to your picks. You’ll need to dig deep, perhaps speculating on even more power in your reserves and your farm players. Odds are there is not another Aaron Judge lurking in 2018, but it might not be a bad idea to go an extra buck on the chance that a Ryan McMahon might back into at-bats in Coors Field, or that Victor Robles might stake his claim to a spot in the Washington outfield.

McMahon? Robles? No path to playing time, you say? Today, that’s one of fantasy baseball’s greatest fallacies.

Last March, I advised readers and attendees to the First Pitch conferences to go all in on Michael Conforto at his prevailing rate (which was less than $5 in most mixed leagues). At the same time, in one of my deeper leagues, I went against my better judgment and passed on Cody Bellinger because I thought, How is he going to get past Adrian Gonzalez? I’m so smart.

If there is any benefit to the rise in DL days, it’s that it constantly opens up new paths to playing time for other players. Eliminate no path to playing time from your vocabulary. And the beauty of it is that playing time speculation has become fantasy baseball’s newest undervalued commodity.

Running down

It is unclear whether the increased use of the DL has had any effect on the continuing malaise in stolen base output. Has the rise in DL days resulted in lower motivation to risk injury on the basepaths? Or are there more injuries on the basepaths (not that we can see)? More likely, the tactical question managers asked was, Why run when the next guy is going to hit a homer anyway?

But there is one extreme trend worth noting:

While steals continue to be down, that’s not the real problem, at least not from a fantasy standpoint. The critical mass of bags is shifting upward into the legs of fewer players. In 2017, only six baserunners stole 30 bases or more, the lowest number this century.

League-wide, the totals over the past three years have been pretty similar to 2003-2005, another period when power was king. But now there are only about half as many impact burners.

Here were the 30-base stealers of 2017, and few more who just missed the cut-off:

These were guys who kept you competitive in the category, or helped you win it outright. And yet, most of them were not drafted very high. Of this group, the only one who had no history of impact speed was Merrifield, and his ADP reflects that. The rest of the lower-drafted players were downgraded due to injury history, unrealized potential, age, or some combination of the three.

However, in 2017, we drafted other players for SBs. The following list contains those 30-bag burners from 2016 for whom we had high expectations, but didn’t earn back their draft slot:

There are many speedsters, like Hamilton, DeShields, Perez and Jankowski, whose ADPs are typically depressed because they are essentially one-trick ponies—providing stolen bases and little else. That decreases the draftable talent pool even more and, in turn, inflates those players who offer across-the-board skills. Supply and demand.

What often ends up happening is that there is an inclination to chase a Dee Gordon or Trea Turner early so that, once rostered, you can ignore speed for another hour. But given that anyone can get injured (or suspended)—and frequent base-stealers might be more prone—you should think twice about waiting a full hour.

For those who choose, instead, to grab up a bunch of late speed and build the category from the bottom up, there is some risk:

The trend coming into 2017 seemed to be that teams were finally realizing how damaging one-trick ponies can be. The 2017 regression might have been a blip, but there is never any reason for teams to expose players with poor on-base skills. For us, that ramps up the challenge of finding enough bags without damaging our OBP, or batting average.

Of course, these are all small samples. However, when it comes to impact speedsters, all we have are small samples. With only a handful of impact burners, and leagues with 12 or 15 teams, buying speed has become a scarcity challenge similar to saves, though with lesser risk that the top earners will go belly up.

Splintering innings

Another fallout from the increased number of DL stays is fewer pitchers reaching the 200-inning threshold.

It’s not only injuries at work here. The increase in bullpen specialization has also been feeding into this trend.

In the past, we felt confident to invest heavily in an anchor starter, a pitcher who would pretty much guarantee 200 innings. These days we still go into our drafts and think, I need to get one 200-inning, 200-strikeout ace to be my staff’s anchor. Over the past decade, how many pitchers have actually reached those dual thresholds?

The raw number of 200/200 arms has been fairly stable over the years. About two-thirds of the owners in a 15-team mixed league have been able to roster that caliber of ace pretty consistently. But the number of lesser dominant 200-inning arms has plummeted. When you buy 200 innings, you’re now also buying 200 strikeouts whether you like it or not. And that means, you really have to pay up.

Look at the earnings for the 200/200 class of 2017:

In 2017, 200/200 didn’t guarantee you a stud. But here are some honorable mentions; these pitchers struck out over 200 but fell short of 200 innings:

I’m sure that none of the owners of this sextet were complaining about their shortfall in innings. But here’s the thing…

We buy roster slots, not players. So the 50 or so innings that you had to backfill when these guys were being rested, skipped a turn or on the shelf would have gone to replacement level arms. Replacement level in a 15-team league in 2017 had a name—Rick Porcello—whose roto output earned a few cents shy of $0 last year.

Let’s observe the potential damage of filling up the innings deficiency of one of the core starters with a Porcello-caliber replacement…

… and you’ve lost $3 in value by replacing an injured player.

Of course, you might have opted to backfill those innings with something other than a replacement level starter. If you were smart, you would have grabbed one of the oft-maligned, typically-overlooked middle relievers out of the pool. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Finally, Corey Kluber. He led all of baseball with 18 wins in 2017. The last non-strike season that failed to produce even one 19-game winner was… never. Yes, you can track all the way back to 1901 and every season, except for strike years 1981 and 1994, boasted at least one 19-game winner. Until now.

If we can’t count on wins and we can’t count on innings, and the innings shortfalls are putting ERA and WHIP at risk, what can we count on? Of course, strikeouts.

The consistency in high-K pitchers from 2000 through 2007 is remarkable, which makes the surge over the past 10 years so striking (oooh, a pun!). However, it’s the pullback of 150+ K pitchers in 2017 that merits note. That is not a skills regression; it’s the impact of the DL eating into innings. Replacement arms tend to be less dominant.

So stock up wherever you can get those strikeouts—at the draft, during the season, and with your keeper league picks.

In the past, a frontline stud could single-handedly account for upward of 15% of your entire staff’s innings, making him a worthwhile investment. Now, not so much. Invest in Ks wherever you can get them and let the rest fall where it may.

Seeking relief

You won’t find it here. Eleven of the closers drafted back in March ended up on the disabled list; that’s not unusual. The overall rate of turnover—from injuries, ineffectiveness, managerial whim, acts of God, etc.—was 53%. It was the second straight year that saw a failure rate topping 50%.

The continuing fallout is that we have been investing less and less in closers each year. As recently as 2014, we’d have to pay a minimum of $10 at the draft table for any frontline closer, no matter how poor his peripherals. Last year in Tout Wars, more than a third of the potential closers were purchased at the auction for less than $10.

Here were the top 11 closers in 2017, ranked by roto earnings:

What is the significance of showing you the top 11? Well, from $12 earnings on down, you could have owned a middle reliever who would have helped you in more categories, and cost you much less back in March.

The quest for saves is expensive.

The list at the left represents the remaining relievers who recorded at least 20 saves in 2017. That is what you ended up with for all the effort you put into chasing saves. To the right is the same number of non-closing relievers. All are ranked by roto earnings.

As noted, the disparity grows if we include pitchers with at least 10 saves. Their 15$ values ranged from Addison Reed (9) to Sam Dyson (-10).

Looking at just the sampling of those above, you can see the benefit in innings, strikeouts and ERA (WHIP too, though not shown). The cost is in saves. A case could be made that you might have been able to assemble a much more profitable pitching staff by foregoing saves completely. That’s crazy, right?

However, of the 32 pitchers drafted back in March for the expectation of saves, only 20 returned positive earnings. By comparison, there were just a handful of non-closing relievers who were drafted last March, yet 40 of them earned positive value.

One more thing… That group of middle relievers holds even more potential value when you compare their earnings to starting pitchers.

Pop Quiz: How many 150+ inning starters earned less than Juan Nicasio, the $6 arm pulling up the rear of that group of 13 middle relievers above?

Answer: 36.

Yes, 36 starters with at least 150 IP earned less than $6. In fact, 22 of those pitchers were swimming in red.

Given that starting pitchers averaged only 5.5 innings per outing in 2017 (an all-time low) we need to refocus some attention—again—on undervalued middle relievers. They are not only contributing tons of good stats but also gobbling up many of those lost Wins.

These starting pitchers would have been drafted in a 15-team mixed league:

These middle relievers