Stream Team (5/25/08)
Many fantasy baseball team owners engage in the practice of streaming - i.e. - identifying and placing players in their lineups who have favorable match-ups for the next scoring period rather than going with the same lineup each week. While streaming can be used for hitters, it is used most often with starting pitchers, especially with those who have two starts scheduled during the upcoming week.
Some owners are content to go enter the season with a staff of mediocre starting pitchers; these owners make a decision to spend most of their auction dollars or early-round draft picks on hitters. For these owners streaming their starting pitchers is a deliberate strategy. However, many owners are forced to stream, either due to injuries or the trade of a pitcher out of the AL or NL in an “only” league.
Either way, owners who stream at least one of their starting pitching spots are seeking to optimize the production from that spot. How should you go about doing this? Obviously, the underlying ability of the available pitchers is one key criterion, but depending on how deep your league is, there often isn’t much to choose from on the free agent list/waiver wire.
The second criterion, which doesn’t get as much attention as it should, and typically varies much more than the ability of the available starting pitchers, is the underlying ability of a pitcher’s upcoming opponents. Owners often make quick, qualitative stabs in this direction (e.g. - “Great! This pitcher has two starts this week, and they’re against Kansas City and Seattle!”), but rarely do owners actually seek to quantify their intuition.
One method to rank teams’ offenses involves identifying key offensive categories, such as Runs Scored (R), Home Runs (HR), Stolen Bases (SB), On Base Percentage (OBP), and Strikeouts (K), then seeing how the 30 teams compare in each of these categories and in aggregate. The Sherpa Points system involves assigning each team a score between 0 and 1.00 in each category, then summing across categories to get an overall score. I prefer to weight the categories evenly, but you could easily modify this method to give the categories varying weights.
The calculations are straightforward for the “counting categories” such as HR, R, and SB: the team with the highest total in each category receives a score of 1.00; a team with 75% of the leading team’s total would receive a score of .75, a team with 50% of the leading team’s total would receive a score of .50, etc. For counting categories such as Ks (where lower scores are better) or average-based categories such as OBP, a proxy statistic must be used. I realize that there is a fair amount of overlap among the 5 categories I’ve chosen, but I have not made any adjustments to correct for these correlations.
I performed the year-to-date rankings based on this system for the 30 teams through the games of Saturday, 5/24/08. If you’re trying to find the best teams to stream a starting pitcher against, you want the teams with the lowest total scores. Here are the results of my study (ranked from most favorable team to pitch against to least favorable):
- Washington Nationals 3.10
- San Diego Padres 3.18
- Kansas City Royals 3.19
- Cleveland Indians 3.35
- Oakland A’s 3.49
- New York Yankees 3.53
- Baltimore Orioles 3.58
- Pittsburgh Pirates 3.59
- Chicago White Sox 3.60
- Toronto Blue Jays 3.61
- San Francisco Giants 3.63
- Minnesota Twins 3.66
- Atlanta Braves 3.68
- Arizona Diamondbacks 3.69
- Detroit Tigers 3.74
- Seattle Mariners 3.76
- St. Louis Cardinals 3.77
- Florida Marlins 3.82
- Colorado Rockies 3.83
- Milwaukee Brewers 3.85
- Los Angeles Dodgers 3.86
- Cincinnati Reds 3.92
- New York Mets 3.92
- Los Angeles Angels 3.96
- Tampa Bay Rays 4.05
- Texas Rangers 4.23
- Chicago Cubs 4.24
- Philadelphia Phillies 4.32
- Boston Red Sox 4.43
- Houston Astros 4.46
There are a number of surprises on this list, but generally, it can serve as a fairly informative guide if you’re looking to select a starting pitcher to stream for the coming week or two. The results can be used to guide your decisions in points-based leagues as well as roto-style leagues.
I’ll update this analysis several times during the course of the season, and as promised in my previous post, during the coming week I will begin forecasting remainder of season stats for a number of players off to surprisingly good/bad starts.
Enjoy your holiday weekend!
The Sherpa
Tags: Arizona Diamondbacks, Atlanta Braves, Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies, Detroit Tigers, Florida Marlins, Houston Astros, Kansas City Royals, Los Angeles Angels, Los Angeles Dodgers, Milwaukee Brewers, Minnesota Twins, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Oakland A's, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, Seattle Mariners, St. Louis Cardinals, Tampa Bay Rays, Texas Rangers, The Sherpa, Toronto Blue Jays, Washington Nationals