Fantasy Focus: Pablo Sandoval vs Brett Lawrie Smackdown

I find fantasy baseball hard to write about because the universe of possible topics is so huge. Right now, I'm working on my draft board for my Savvy Vets fantasy team and find myself scratching my head over a situation involving our very own Panda, Pablo Sandoval. Savvy Vets plays in a 10 team keeper league H2H, 5X5, snake draft. We get to keep 3 position players and 3 pitchers. 3B is a position I will need to fill via the draft. In looking over last year's end of season rosters, it looks like there is a good chance both Sandoval and Brett Lawrie will be in the draft. My draft strategy is to make a list of the top 20-25 players available regardless of position(although position scarcity plays factors into the ranking). I follow that list for the first 2 rounds(remember, there are already 30 hitters and 30 pitchers off the board in round 1). I then segregate my draft board by position, kind of eyeball my positional needs and position scarcity and draft by those criteria taking the BPA weighted by need and availability for the rest of the draft. I usually save the last spot or two for sleepers or breakout candidates who have flown under the radar. Those first two picks tend to be hitters and I then tend to draft heavy on pitching in rounds 3-10 after I've got my 3 position keeper plus 2 BPA hitters in the draft.

Back to Sandoval vs Lawrie. I'm thinking that both of these guys might well be in my top 20 BPA list and I'm having an endless debate with myself over which one to rank higher. We all know Sandoval's story, but I'll list last year's stat line as well as his 2012 Rotochamp projection from Fangraphs:

2011: .315/. 357/.552, 23 HR, 2 SB in 466 PA.

2012 Rotochamp: .302/.356/.513, 24 HR, 84 R, 92 RBI, 2 SB in 585 PA.

As we all know, Panda missed almost 2 months with the wrist fracture and still put up those remarkable numbers last year. His MLB average slash line is .307/.356/.501 despite pretty bad numbers in 2010, so it seems reasonable that he can keep it going or even improve. I think the power numbers in the Rotochamp projection may be low as Pablo is still likely in the upward trajectory of his career and his 2011 projects to 28 HR's over 580 PA's. Not only that, but Pablo put up 633 PA in 2009 and 616 in 2010 so the 585 PA projection seems very conservative.

Brett Lawrie has been a highly rated prospect in Milwaukee's organization for several years. He was traded to Toronto for Shaun Marcum before the 2010 season and was called up last year by Toronto. Although it is a small sample size, his stat line certainly deserves attention as did Pablo's 41 game trial in 2008 did:

2011: .293/.373/.580, 9 HR, 26 R, 25 RBI, 7 SB in 171 PA.

2012 Rotochamp: .281/.366/.519, 26 HR, 80 R, 85 RBI, 25 SB in 590 PA.

Lawrie did not show that kind of power until he got to AAA Las Vegas which is a launching pad, but his body is just now maturing strengthwise and he's always been projected to have solid power. He did steal 30 bases in AA so the speed is for real.

Sandoval will start the 2012 season at age 25 while Lawrie is 22. Pablo's body habitus and conditioning will always be a concern, but he seems to be dedicated to staying in shape. Lawrie had some pics leak out onto the internet a couple of years ago showing him apparently involved in some immature activities and there was some thought that immaturity might have been in factor in Milwaukee's willingness to trade him, but he seems to have stayed out of the news since then. I would rate both players health and attitude risks to be about equal and minimal going forward. Sandoval, of course, has a longer MLB track record that has been up and down, but surprisingly much more up than down despite the bad 2010.

What it comes down to is they will give you approximately equal power numbers. Pablo will likely help you more with BA while Lawrie gives you those 25-30 steals from a position where you normally don't get very many.

Despite my Giants bias and loyalties, I have to say I'm leaning toward ranking Lawrie higher due to the SB's he gives you over Pablo's more established track record and likely higher BA.

Which of these two player do you think Savvy Vets should rank higher on draft day and would you take them in round 1 or round 2? Or would you look elsewhere in rounds 1 and 2 and try to pick up a 3B later in the draft?

Questions

It's an off day for the Giants and no minor league games tonight either. I thought I'd try something I've been toying with in my mind for awhile. Q/A's seem to be popular on other blogs. Let's try it here. Might be great or it might bomb.

I'l try to answer any baseball related question, Giants, MLB, Prospects, draft, fantasy, whatever is on your mind, baseball related of course.

Fire away. Feel free to join in the discussion at any time.

Fantasy Focus: Ranking Matt Cain Part III- It's not Matt, It's the Giants!

The great Matt Cain debate flared anew after smoldering for just a few days when Dave Cameron of fangraphs.com posted a piece with data supporting the thesis that not only does Matt Cain have some control over his HR/FB, but a large contingent of Giants pitchers from over the last 10 years have apparently been able to control theirs too! While my main goal is to help others see the greatness in Matt Cain that I see, I have to say I feel just a bit of personal vindication as I have been saying that I think the Giants have an organizational pitching philosophy that suppresses HR's for a long time.

It has been virtually dogma in the sabermetric community that over a large enough sample size, all pitchers will have approximately the same HR/FB, therefore the more flyballs you allow, the more HR's you give up. While it is true that in general flyball pitchers give up a few more HR's than GB pitchers, they don't give up as many more as you would expect from a purely random distribution. I believe the reason for this is that most HR's don't come off good pitches and are not just random flyballs that happen to carry over the fence. In fact, most HR's are hit off "mistake" pitches like hanging sinkers, hanging breaking balls or fastballs down the middle of the strike zone. These mistake pitches get crushed. They are no doubters! I know when I am at a game, I can tell almost immediately if a ball is going out of the park. It just has a different trajectory than a deep flyball that gets caught at the warning track.

If you have a really good fastball, like Matt Cain, you really don't have to worry about it getting taken deep. You can keep on pounding it in there until the batter swings and misses, or hits a harmless flyball. Just my observations based on watching a whole lot of games on TV, including replays along with commentary from Kruk, most of Matt Cain's HR's are not given up off the high fastball which produces most of his flyouts. They come off breaking balls that he hangs in the strike zone and they really get pounded.

So, while Matt Cain keeps his HR/FB rate down by pounding the fastball up in the zone, those flyballs also keep his BABIP down because they are more sure outs than groundballs that might find their way between infielders. This is why, in addition to his low HR rates, he also has ridiculously low Batting Averages Against and why he is able to keep his ERA low despite the pedestrian K/9 and BB/9.

In addition to all of the great things Matt Cain does, there is also an organization wide tendency to low HR rates that goes beyond park factors. At the same time, the Giants have tended to have high BB rates over the same period of time. Putting it all together, I believe the Giants teach their pitchers to not "give in" to hitters even if that means walking a few more. When they have a runner or two on base and get behind the hitter, instead of coming in with a pitch in the middle of the strike zone they insist on making their pitch, keeping it on the corners where the hitters can't make solid contact. If the batter walks, hey, it's only a walk! They'll get the next batter!

I can't prove any of this other than to cite my extensive observation of Giants games and listening to Kruk's explanations of things, but it appears that as analysts are delving more and more into PitchFx data, some of these observations are being confirmed by hard data!

Fantasy Focus: Ranking Matt Cain(Addendum)

The great debate about Matt Cain, his xFIP and his HR/FB ratio, exploded across the internet again yesterday with multiple articles on both sides of the issue with long threads of comments following each article. The spark was a post by Paapfly who looked at Cain's stuff and theorized that his success is based on a rising fastball that induces a lot more popups than the average fastball. xFIP enthusiasts in the sabermetric community seem to a a bit touchy about Matt Cain these days. Dave Cameron posted a study looking at several pitchers who had below average HR/FB 5 years in a row and found that they subsequently regressed close to the mean. Unfortunately, Dave did his math wrong and all but two of his examples actually maintained a HR/FB significantly below league average and the two who didn't saw their careers completely fall apart, probably due to age/injury/loss of skills. Dave later admitted way down in the comments that his math was wrong. He went back and changed the numbers in his original post but failed to acknowledge that the new numbers lead to a much different conclusion. I've already weighed in on the subject in a previous post, but I'll just add two comments here that have clarified in my mind over the last 24 hours:

1. If HR/FB is truly a random occurrence that regresses to a league mean of about 10.5%, regressions should include numbers on both sides of the mean. The pitchers Dave Cameron cited did have a rise in their HR/FB, but continued to maintain a ratio significantly below league mean which strengthens the argument those pitchers, like Matt Cain, possessed a skill which allowed them to suppress HR/FB.

2. Matt Cain's HR/FB has been > 1 SD below the league mean for 5 years in a row. In any single season, there is a 12% chance that any pitcher would fall out of 1 SD to any given side of the mean. The probability of maintaining that variance for 5 consecutive seasons is 0.12 to the 5'th power, or about 1.7/100,000. I'm pretty sure there have not been 100,000 pitchers in the entire history of baseball! Yes, Matt Cain may have been insanely lucky over the last 5 years, but it's much more likely that he possesses a skill at suppressing HR/FB.