Week 8: Who Has Been the King of the Stream This Year?

 

Dean and his 2^nd daughter Emma ready to take the Living Room by storm. Because, ya know, quarantine.

2020 Year to Date Power Ranks
TOTAL			HITTING			PITCHING
1	Michael	3.29	1	BJ	3.38	1	Michael	2.83
2	Dave	3.86	2	Michael	3.63	2	Dave	3.83
3	BJ	4.00	3	Dave	3.88	3	Max	4.67
4	Paul	5.07	4	Paul	4.50	4	BJ	4.83
5	Dean	5.50	5	Dean	5.38	5	Ryan	5.00
6	Arthur	5.50	6	Arthur	5.38	6	Dean	5.67
7	Ryan	5.93	7	Keith	6.00	7	Arthur	5.67
8	Max	6.64	8	Ryan	6.63	8	Paul	5.83
9	Cory	6.86	9	Cory	6.75	9	Cory	7.00
10	Keith	7.29	10	Max	8.13	10	Keith	9.00

 Brian and Josh made their move this week to validate themselves as contenders after seeming to fall out of the race a week ago. Fueled by Manny Machado, JT Realmuto, and the timely pickup of the year, Adam Duvall, team BJ is firmly in contention for the final 2 week finish.

BJ, Michael, and Dave had been in what was functionally a 3-way tie for most of the week until Sunday when Michael pulled away a bit…for now.

This week appears to have been the end to Paul's championship hopes as his offense was just never able to put anything together consistently and his pitching strategy didn’t produce the results he wanted either.

Draft Order Selection:

As the year winds down, it was pointed out that because there won’t be any formal playoffs this year, we won’t be able to have a Bourbon Street Championship and select our draft slot order based on the results. So. Seeing as this is way late for people to be planning for, we’ll try to keep the organization as simple as possible. We’ll take the people that finish 2^nd to 10^th and pick our draft slots in that order. Not wanting to reward tanking or poor performance but still wanting to take the champion to the back of the pack, this was the best idea I had. I’m open to changing this or any other system as long as it doesn’t reward tanking. Let me know if you have ideas that are easy to implement.

Topic for the week: Pitcher Streaming

Ever since we have updated our stat categories to reward good starting pitching, effective pitcher streaming has been one of the keys to winning. For those unfamiliar with the concept, pitcher streaming is where you add a pitcher for one day, using Yahoo’s designation of P (Probable) from the players add tool, use them for one day when they start, then drop them when they aren’t pitching. To be competitive in this league, one must do this regularly. We have tinkered with the rules over the years to optimize the value of streamed pitching: not wanting to reward teams that do it 15 times a week, but still reward those who want to put in some effort. In hind sight, we may have set the IP ceiling this year a bit high leading to more streaming being required than our general league population enjoys...me included.

With our rotisserie scoring system this year, Yahoo actually tracks all the players’ data accrued for all of the fantasy teams throughout the year. So I was able to pull the data for each team, pull out all the relievers and full time starting pitchers (there was some manual sifting required for this) and the results were very interesting to talk about.

Streamed Pitcher Data for the Year

	IP*	W	K	ERA	WHIP	QS	QS/IP	k/9
Arthur	229.2	9	224	5.29	1.44	14	6.08%	8.80
Dean	223.8	10	170	4.90	1.27	13	5.81%	6.84
Paul	194.8	11	165	4.79	1.33	10	5.13%	7.62
BJ	172.2	10	184	4.64	1.34	8	4.65%	9.62
Dave	150.1	12	110	4.41	1.38	11	7.33%	6.60
Michael	131.4	9	132	5.19	1.43	7	5.33%	9.04
Keith	59	2	52	9.21	1.72	0	0.00%	7.93
Max	13	1	18	2.08	1.23	1	7.69%	12.46
Ryan	0	0	0	N/A	N/A	0	0.00%	0
Cory	0	0	0	N/A	N/A	0	0.00%	0

 

Dave is the big winner from the the above table. Despite having streamed less than most of the contenders, he has the most quality starts, the best ERA, the most quality starts per inning pitched, and a very good k/9. You may note that I don’t show efficiency starts per streamed pitcher because the data wasn’t traceable to that level. For example some teams have streamed the same pitcher a number of times, so I can’t know if a 7 inning pitched total for the year is one start or two…or three. Thereefore I chose to show the QS category on a per inning basis to show some context.

When asked about what has been the key to his streaming success, Dave says that when he looks for a streaming pitcher, he is looking for the best matchup. Specifically, the pitcher on the team that has a good record going against the team with a worse record. One might find quick fault with that logic because there are offenses like in Philadelphia where they are 5^th in baseball in runs scored per game that have a sub .500 record or good teams like Cleveland that sit in 27^th in runs per game…but that is Dave’s strategy and he’s sticking to it…and it’s worked. Michael aims to find high K pitchers against bad offenses, but that hasn't worked out all that well for his ratios, so what does he know.

Keith, Max, Ryan, and Cory show a clear designation of not having gone for it this year having only thrown 72 innings pitched from streamed pitchers combined. Max has actually done very well at it, from what appears to be two streamed pitchers; Keith on the other hand could use a few more data points to water down some unlucky outings.

From this next table you can compare the year to date numbers on how this has affected the overall pitching standings.

	YTD ERA	YTD WHIP	YTD P Power Rank
Arthur	4.63	1.35	5.67
Dean	4.11	1.21	5.67
Paul	4.21	1.31	5.83
BJ	3.94	1.22	4.83
Dave	3.36	1.17	3.83
Michael	3.75	1.14	2.83
Keith	5.18	1.29	9.00
Max	2.91	1.11	4.67
Ryan	2.87	1.09	5.00
Cory	3.79	1.2	7.00

Despite Michael having only streamed 131 innings, he leads the league pitcher power rank by a significant margin. This was his pitching strategy entering the year. He wanted a solid base of quality innings without having to rely too much on the stats from the streaming pitcher class. The average YTD ERA for our fantasy teams is 3.88 including streamed pitcher data, the average streaming pitcher ERA is about a run higher at 4.87.

Another takeaway here is that Max and Ryan not having streamed isn’t killing their pitching power rank. Max ended up having drafted 2 of the biggest breakout pitchers of the year in Max Fried and Shane Bieber while Ryan has done very well in his own right with Yu Darvish, Zach Davies, and Zack Wheeler. These two managers are top two in both ERA and WHIP which carries them a long way. One may want to argue that they’re better off not streaming to be able to keep these ratios…but this would be ignoring the ground they could be gaining in W, K, and QS by streaming. Max is only 7 wins from first place in the category, by streaming perhaps half the amount that other teams are, he would have gained significant ground on the field in Wins and not risked much of his ERA. He has a half run lead on third place in ERA and a full run lead on fourth place. Similar cases can be made for the other two pitching volume categories. Having breakout pitchers isn’t a reason NOT to stream to protect ratios, it’s a reason TO stream because you have a leg up on the field to start with. For perspective, Michael’s ERA and WHIP would be 3.18/1.02 without streaming, basically tied with Max/Ryan in these categories.