The Saber's Edge: Early Season Rules for Owners

Baseball's regular season is to start in about a week. It has been way too long since Sal Perez popped out to Pablo Sandoval to end the World Series. Meaningful games will finally mean fantasy teams will start accumulating stats. The following is a primer on some of my early season rules and items to check on. The early part of the season is a great time to get a jump on the rest of the competition.

Rules

1. In almost all cases, ignore all early season results from pitchers and hitters.

I may wait a month to start digging into why a player is struggling. Owners have spent considerable time researching the players they picked. Why jump ship now? Every player can have a bad week or month. Few stats can stabilize immediately. Strikeouts and walks for batters are some of the first stats to stabilize, and it takes 120 batters before strikeout and walk rates become reliable. Don't give up on a player with just a small sample of early season data.

2. Follow Rule No. 1 except when the player is playing hurt.

At FanGraphs, I follow injuries and have found that players who rush back before they are 100 percent healthy struggle on the field. Keep track of players who were iffy in spring even if they didn't start the season on the DL. They are the ones who convinced management nothing is wrong and will likely underproduce.

I found the three keys to determine if an injury is still affecting a hitter: power, speed and contact rate. For pitchers, the keys are velocity and pitches in the strike zone (Zone%). These players will either continue to have subpar performances or will eventually go on the DL.

How an owner deals with an injured player depends on the player's talent. If the player was a late-round pick, and similar players are available on the waiver wire, an owner might want to make a move now. If the player is a high-level talent, the owner will just have to ride out the injury. The player's 90 percent production level is probably better than any available player. Miguel Cabrera is an example of such a player who had a known injury in 2014 and produced sub-optimally. He ended up as a top-10 hitter.

An injury can just linger and linger during a season. With any injury situation, be ready to move on from the player.

3. Follow rule No. 1 except when the pitcher has lost velocity.

Velocity changes are the one stat to get a reading on early. I wrote about this subject last year and came up with the following five rules to follow:

• Fastball velocity changes can be taken seriously with a minuscule sample size.

• All pitchers will lose velocity. Be concerned if a pitcher sees a decline of more than 1.0 mph.

• A 1.0 mph drop in velocity means a 1.1 percent drop in K% for starters and a 1.9 percent decline for relievers.

• A 1.0 mph drop in velocity means a 0.28 point increase in ERA for starters and 0.45 increase for relievers.

• When looking at velocity changes, make sure to check if the pitcher is moving from one role to another. Also, make sure his fastball pitch mix hasn't changed.
 
Over the offseason, I have one more rule to add:

• If a pitcher loses more than 1 mph in fastball velocity, they have a higher chance of losing another 1 mph than gaining the 1 mph back.

Even though it is somewhat time consuming, I would use FanGraphs or BrooksBaseball and check each of your pitcher's velocity. Find out which pitchers will likely a drop in production.

4. Get a jump start on pitching innings and starts if the league has a limit.

April and May are the two worst months for offensive production. Teams who have a limited number of starts or innings should look at getting an early jump in the cold weather. Batted balls don't travel as far in the cold, so hits, especially home runs, are suppressed. On average, 0.8 more runs per nine innings are scored in a game when the temperature over 90 degrees than when the temperature is under 65 degrees. Also, I like to use up innings and starts right away because at the end of the season teams may shut down a starter for a start or two. Going into September, I only expect to get half my normal starts.

To Do's

1. Watch the waiver wire.

I have found owners are either too patient or impatient when it comes to dropping a player. Early season drops can end up being some of the biggest bargains. An owner will need a shortstop and with no room on the roster, he will drop a good player at another position. Besides trying to fill team needs, owners will drop a player after he initially struggles. If the player is not hurt or the pitcher hasn't seen a drop in velocity (Rules No. 2 and No. 3 above), jump in and pick up the player. Get ready to bargain shop.

2. In a deep league, check each team's 25-man rosters, concentrating on pitchers.

In shallow leagues, not every player is even close to being in play. In deeper leagues, sometimes every player on a 25-man roster, especially the starters, are a roster consideration. I am in a 20-team league with 40 roster spots. It is insane how picked over the waiver wire is now. Robbie Grossman is probably the best hitter available on the waiver wire. Also, the MLB starting rotations will hopefully be set soon. Take a good look at the available players and create a watch list for players you may need to pick up later.

3. In shallow leagues, look at initial lineups.

Three keys exist for me when looking at lineups. First, notice the players in the top five hitting spots. For each spot a player moves down in the batting order, he will have on average 18 fewer plate appearances over the course of a season. These top spots get the extra plate appearances and the added bonus of being in the run and RBI spots. Usually, all the RBI guys are owned because they are good and/or hit a bunch of home runs. The runs-creating spots (Nos. 1 and 2 in the order) usually have some availability. The Twins' Jordan Schafer will start in center field and might leadoff, but we don't know for sure. Check Opening Day lineups to be sure.

The second key is to check if certain players are in platoons. Some teams are more inclined to use a platoon. I find platoons useful in leagues with daily lineups because the hitter will get the advantage. In weekly league, it sucks losing the plate appearances.

The final check is finding the eighth hitter for NL teams and cutting their projected stolen bases numbers by a third. Teams aren't going to take the chance of getting a runner thrown out with the pitcher hitting. Also, the pitcher will probably just be trying to bunt the runner over a base so why try to steal?

4. Fill up your DL slots.

In some leagues, this is a non-factor since teams might have a couple or no DL slots. In other leagues, this is huge. I am in an AL-only keeper league with five DL slots. I picked up Marcus Stroman with the hope of moving him to the DL, then picked up another DL player to stash (e.g. Kris Medlen) and filled up all the slots. I expect to drop some of these players as my original team gets hurt, but I bet Stroman will be a nice asset later in the season for a team out of contention.

With all the excitement of a new season, enjoy some games on the television. During commercial breaks, search the internet on the above topics. You can probably get quite a bit of the preceding done during each of those couple minutes over the course of a game. Teams have been trying to figure out which hands they are going to play. Next week they will start showing their intentions and see if any advantages can be gained. Finally, good luck for your upcoming fantasy season.