One final tune up post before the MLB season gets underway on Sun. Once the season starts I plan on updating results (good and bad) and sharing my thoughts and experiences about the daily grind as much as possible, however I will be extremely busy so no promises. I'll do my best though and I'll stick with it as long as it doesn't prove to be a major distraction, and I don't think it will be. If anything I think this will probably help me stay focused.
So I had planned to share some of my bullpen research among other things in this post but Fangraphs posted a couple good articles this week with an in-depth write up for each team's pen and a handy chart:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2016-...pitchers-1-15/
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2016-...itchers-16-30/
I recommend reading the articles for DFS, full season, or even just to learn more about the league, if you're interested in that. As for the chart: Projected WAR alone isn't the ideal way to measure a bull pen, but it's close enough so long as you understand other factors that could cause a better, higher WAR pen to give up more runs than a lesser, lower WAR pen. Namely park factors.
Team Defense I'm sure there's a lot of sharps out there who don't even consider team D. At some point you're wandering out past the weeds and into meaningless noise, well I don't think Defense is that at all. I read an article a few months back about the best D (KC) saving 99 runs compared to the worst D (I think Cle or ChW). Extreme example but goes to show how important of a factor it can be. KC projects to be by far the best D again this season. Not a lot of sexy SP options in KC, maybe Ventura, so it's not really actionable from that angle. But between this D, a solid pen, and a park that suppresses HR's in a big way you've got to give any hitter heading there a pretty big downgrade from the standard projection.
Here's all 30 teams listed from best to worst by FG depth charts:
1 KC 43.3
2 CIN 23.5
3 TOR 22.5
4 TB 22.4
5 BOS 21.3
6 BAL 20.9
7 CLE 20.7
8 LAA 19.6
9 ARI 18.2
10 SF 16.6
11 NYY 12.9
12 MIA 12
13 LAD 10.3
14 CHC 8.9
15 COL 5.7
16 PIT 5.6
17STL 3.7
18 MIN 3.4
19 HOU 3.3
20 SEA 1.6
21 TEX -2.6
22 WAS -5.5
23 NYM -6.3
24 DET -7.1
25 Mil -10.7
26 ATL -11.5
27 CHW -11.6
28 PHI -11.6
29 OAK -12.4
30 SD -20.6
Opening Day Weather I took a quick look on Wed for the first time and everything looked 100% with the exception of Cle which looked slightly iffy. Well forecasts can and will change from hour to hour (reminding me how dumb it is to be checking this far out) and they've changed a lot from Wed afternoon to Thur night.
I'll be keeping an eye on Cincinnati all weekend as I'll have a lot of Reds exposure:
Pretty ugly looking in Cleveland:
If this NYY forecast looks like this on Sun night I'd just write the game off:
That's it for now, I'll be back Sun when there's some actual baseball (thank god)