Week 22: And DOWN the Stretch They Come

 

Paul took a 150-mile ride through the Poconos last week where he and his crew took a picture at the Eastern Continental Divide. This blogger did not know this was a thing. 

• Dave has not quite yet locked up the Power Ranks crown for this year, but he's getting close
• Robert made a nice jump up here and is snatching the title of "Bourbon Street Championship Favorite" away from Keith who looked poised to win his own title during his Spoiler Era.
• Speaking of Spoiler Era...

• Max spoiled Paul's return home from his bike trip. It is likely more accurate to say that the bottom fell out of Paul's season as 2.70 EWW is the second lowest number for the whole season only ahead of Cory's 2.39 from week 12. Paul's season isn't technically finished, but he'll need a resurgence this week and a lot of help from above, in more ways than one.
• Dave had his worst week of the year. While on paper this sounds fine with his playoff spot assured, it is never comforting to have a few down weeks heading into the tournament...and I would know.
• Robert begged in the Dean fantasy football league draft yesterday never to see the YTD Wins Over Expected list again this year (yes, Expected Weeks Wins even comes up in football circles)....but...if it had been posted here, you would see that really none of the playoff contenders have any schedule luck to complain about this year. Paul has been very fortunate, Robert has been very unfortunate, the rest of us are about who EWW thinks we are.
• What a week it was for the playoff contenders. Michael and Kevin had a championship knockout match that Michael had to have the best week in the league this week to survive. Dean came through with a clutch win against Cory who was unable to follow through on his enormous week 21. Arthur survived his week against a strong Keith team with some weekend heroics to really improve his playoff odds. Keith actually had the higher EWW than Arthur but Arthur won basically all the close categories while Keith's large wins in ERA and WHIP show up better in EWW than on the Matchup Scoreboard.
• Kevin, Arthur, Michael, and Dean are all within 3 standings games with one week left. Michael and Dean play each other. Barring some wild stuff, the winner of that matchup is in, the loser is out. Max plays Arthur and what a story it would be for Max to knock a third playoff contender down. Unfortunately, Max was eliminated from playoff contention this week, though. Paul is still alive and plays Kevin this week with Paul needing a blowout. Paul is 11.5 games behind Kevin and 10 games behind Arthur, likely needing to jump over one of them to make the playoffs.
• Buckle up

In between fretting over the matchup with Kevin last week, Michael had some time to follow up on one of the predictive blogs from earlier this year. This blog was going to be titled, "So, Was Larry Bird Out there?" until the standings unfolded the way they did. Let's talk about it.

On June 15th, a question was posed on the blog: are there actually any good free agents out there? The blog was skeptical, but it laid out a few tools that could be used to find the diamonds in the rough.

The blog predicted that 60 players would have at least value greater than $10 the rest of the year that had, to that point, accumulated less than $0 so far and were outside of the top 200 preseason ranks (loosely defined as the free agent pool). What has happened has been relatively worse:

Instead of 60, we've had 16, ok, so it was a tough year to find talent after June 14th on the free agent wire. Who were the best gets?

You can see there was some real value to be had here, but its not a long list. I looked at the names that had earned more than $10 to see if any of us have realized much of this value. 

• Paul added Durbin well into Durbin's surge but has still gotten some value from him.
• Kyle Karros gave Michael a boost for awhile before falling off
• Ty France and Jake Bennett have been great for Arthur
• Steven Kwan, after being cast aside by Dean, has been a boon to Michael
• Esmerlyn Valdez, a name I literally didn't know before this morning, has been incredible for Kevin
• Kyle Leahy was one of the...checks notes....eight...moves by Max this year, but he's been a respite from a tough summer.
• Brandon Pfaadt has been a great find for Robert
• Absent from the chart above because Dave added him between when I'd pulled the list of free agents vs the list of prospective adds: Trevor Rogers has been one of the best pitchers over the last two months.

It's worth observing that the more active managers have had more hits here in free agency

"ok but what about your list, commish? how did they do?" Good question. In that blog back in June, I used some advanced metrics to try to find some players that were most likely to have a second half surge. How many did I get right?

The results run the spectrum, so it's hard for me to claim "Yahtzee!" here.  Among the 58 names (some players from the June 14 list haven't played) published though, 8 of them were among the top 17 free agents available. What if we had just taken the best players available as our list to watch?

Lot of names overlapping here with advanced-metrics oriented names. The average return of the top 20 advanced metrics names was $8.85 whereas the list of the top YTD free agents at the time was $10.86. Edge to 'best player available.'

So what did we learn here? Stay active in free agency and good things will happen to you. Who you pick matters, but your process for who you pick may not matter as much as the act of keeping your roster fresh; because lots of players will put up good numbers for any numbers of reasons: advanced metrics predicting it, the player is on the verge of an otherwise unpredictable breakout, or dozens of other things.