First Week Insights and some more on Closers

Bobby Parnell, Casey Janssen, Jim Henderson, Nate Jones. What they all have in common? During spring trainings all four were supposed to serve of the closer in their respective teams. Couple of days after the season started, they all lost that role, at least temporarily. Parnell, Jones & Janssen got hurt; Henderson lost the job after one outing.

Apparently, here is another proof for the “Don’t pay for saves” approach, but is it really?

Another thing that all four pitchers have in common is that none of them is what we call a “Top Tier” closer. (It is true that Aroldis Chapman who is certainly a top tier closer, also got hurt and lost his job, but that happened during spring trainings and if you waited with your draft like I suggested in a previous post, you were ready with an alternative.)

For me, what happened with those four pitchers is another proof that investing in top tier closers is not a waste. When you draft someone like Kimbrel, Holland or Rosenthal, you get a top number of saves. You also get a sense of security that they are going to hold to their position. Anyone can get injured, especially a pitcher, but with a top tier closer you don’t have to worry that your closer will lose his role due to performance issues.

As long as we’re talking pitching injuries we can’t avoid mentioning the two top pitchers in baseball Clayton Kershaw and Yu Darvish who both went on the DL the first week of the season. Darvish came back on Sunday, but Kershaw is probably going to miss the rest of April. And that’s kids why we don’t take pitchers on the first round of the draft.

Any attempt to analyze players performance after a weak is bound to suffer from the Small Sample Size syndrome.  I’m sure no one who played fantasy baseball more than couple of days expects Emilio Bonifacio to be a top 10 player when the season ends, or that Cliff Lee will still have 6.00 era come October.

But, how about José Fernández? His below one era may climb before the season is over but his whip may not rise much more and his strike rate may also stick. Or Giancarlo Stanton? Again, his batting average won’t stay .360 but his home runs & rbi rate can continue. In short how can we make the distinction between a hot start and a breakout season?   Obviously there isn’t one end all answer but one type of players that has a better chance is young, healthy, non rookie players.  Players like Stanton, Belt, Goldschmidt they all have enough experience in the big league; they all showed signs of talent and are still young enough to have their peak in front of them.

On my last post I talked about Catchers and why some people will not draft them early (or pay big sums in an auction). The John Marzano Listeners League is 12 teams two Catchers league. If you wait too much on catchers you’ll end up with very poor production players. My strategy was to take one top catcher and then wait for the very late rounds to take the other one. My first catcher in the beginning of the 7^th round was Brian McCann (third catcher off the board), who I liked in Atlanta and love as a Yankee. I wanted either Joe Mauer or Carlos Santana, mainly because they’ll have the benefit of catcher eligibility while playing other positions, but both of them were taken earlier.  My second catcher was Jarrod Saltalamacchia, the last pick of the 23^rd round. He won’t help with average, but I think he’ll be a cheap source of power in a position that usually lack power and in the 23^rd round the price is really low.