In a couple of notes and blog entries this spring I’ve referenced my affinity for using Middle Relievers, so in this entry I wanted to explain the references a bit more clearly. As you can see by the title of this entry we’re going to work some magic with numbers and turn a cheap SP into a legitimate Fantasy Ace with a little help from the red-headed step-child of fantasy baseball: the middle relievers. But before we work our magic with middle relievers let’s talk a little bit about the difference between pitching and hitting in fantasy leagues for general strategy purposes. This should help paint a clearer picture of how middle relievers can add value to your pitching staff.
By now, you’ve probably heard the mantra “Build through hitting” when it comes to drafting your fantasy baseball team. It’s an engrained strategy that’s written and talked about each spring and one that comes with a tremendous amount of supporting evidence. Evidence such as the difference in the volatility between pitching and hitting as well as the fact that hitters can impact up to five categories in traditional rotisserie leagues, while pitchers can only impact up to four categories are often cited. These are usually the primary and secondary reasons hitting is on the whole more valued than pitching. But one of the more important concepts and unheralded differences between pitching and hitting is the makeup of the categories: Counting vs. Ratio. Understanding the differences in composition between these two types of categories is essential to understanding how to manage them.
A “Counting” category is a category that is built on accumulation. Statistics achieved in this category cannot be taken away. The category, by nature, is only additive. As a result, performance can only move these categories upward. Examples of Counting categories include: Runs, RBI’s, HR’s, SB’s, Strikeouts, Saves, and Wins. A “Ratio” category on the other hand is a category that is built upon the interaction of a set of statistics. These interactions include both negative and positive performances and as a result the statistics accumulated in this category can move either up or down. Examples of Ratio categories include: Batting Average, ERA, and WHIP. Since these two category types are measured differently, it only makes sense that they should be attacked differently.
In a Counting category, the goal is a simple one: Accumulation. The more statistics you can acquire in that category, the better. Poor performance doesn’t affect these categories at all, so anyone can help! If the number of opportunities to acquire statistics was unlimited, you’d want to garner as many attempts at acquiring these statistics as possible, because there is only one way to attack the category, through accumulation!
In a Ratio category, the goal is a bit more complex. A ratio consists of a numerator and a denominator and both portions of the ratio can be managed. Using WHIP as an example: the ratio for WHIP is (Walks + Hits)/Innings Pitched. In the case of WHIP as a category, the lower the WHIP your team can achieve the better the result in the overall standings. So your positive contributions are Innings Pitched, while your negative contributions are Walks + Hits. The overall goal is to acquire the most Innings Pitched with the least amount of Walks + Hits. Thus, you can achieve this goal by either adding more Innings Pitched or by limiting the Walks + Hits. There is more than one way to attack the category!
Alright, so we’ve established the conceptual difference between Counting and Ratio categories and how they’re constructed. Now, let’s take a look at the difference in the construction of the traditional categories we use in fantasy baseball. In a traditional 5x5 league, four of the five hitting categories (SB’s, R’s, RBI’s, HR’s) are Counting categories, while just three of the five pitching categories are Counting categories (W’s, K’s, Saves). Since Saves represents one of the three Counting categories and Saves, for the most part, are accumulated through an entirely different skill set than the other Counting categories (Wins and Strikeouts), the pitching categories really break down more like this: 2 “Ratio” categories, 2 “Counting” categories, and 1 “Specialist” category. Ultimately the breakdown shows a distinct difference between the way hitting and pitching is valued in fantasy baseball. With 80% of your hitting standings made up of Counting categories, your goal is to build a team that will accumulate as many statistics as possible. Conversely since pitching has only two true Counting categories and two Ratio categories, pitching can be managed.
This is where the divide between elite hitting and elite starting pitching is driven further by category composition. We’ve always talked about the difference between an elite hitter being a five category player, at best, and an elite pitcher being a four category player, at best; but the gap is really wider! While an elite starting pitcher’s contributions can impact up to four categories, their contributions to the Ratio categories (ERA and WHIP) have the potential to be negated by other pitchers. Conversely, elite hitters’ contributions are for the most part made towards the four Counting categories, and thus cannot be negated. As a result, elite starting pitchers’ performance only guarantees positive contributions in two of the five categories, while elite hitters’ performance can guarantee positive contributions in up to four of the five categories. I believe this is one of the most unheralded reasons why Elite Hitting and a strategy of “Building through Hitting” are such strong principles in fantasy baseball. The accumulation of hitting stats is a necessity, whereas the accumulation of tremendous pitching stats is simply a luxury, because in the end pitching can be managed!
So, how exactly do we manage pitching? Well, I’m glad you asked! This is where the Middle Relievers step in!
Middle Relievers don’t seem to have a spot in traditional fantasy baseball. They don’t get Saves, and they don’t pitch often enough to be valued in Wins or Strikeouts and as a result they often go unnoticed in fantasy leagues sitting on the waiver wire all year long. But every year when you sort through the season-end rankings you’ll see Middle Relievers. As an example, sorting through Yahoo’s 5x5 2007 rankings a total of 5 relief pitchers finished in the Top 150 players overall without recording more than 5 saves. I point out that minimal number of Saves each of these relievers are contributing to point out that we’re not just focusing on Relievers that move into Closing roles over the course of the season, although this is an added benefit (if you own Middle Relievers you’re more likely to fall into some saves). So, if they’re not contributing in Saves and likely not pitching enough to make a significant dent in Wins or Strikeouts how on earth are these guys contributing to a fantasy baseball squad?
This is where we get back to the idea of managing a pitching staff and taking advantage of the Ratio categories. Let’s go back to the original title of this article and see how we can “manage” to turn Shaun Marcum into C.C. Sabathia through the use of middle relievers.
Last year C.C. Sabathia finished with the following numbers: 241 Innings, 3.21 ERA, 1.14 WHIP, 19 Wins, and 209 K’s. As a result, Sabathia finished tied as the 2nd best starting pitcher in Rotisserie, contributing a $35 value to his owners.
On the other hand Shaun Marcum finished with 159 innings, 4.13 ERA, 1.25 WHIP, 12 Wins, and 122 K’s. As a result, Marcum was a middle of the rotation fantasy starter in mixed leagues and spent much of the season sitting on waivers.
So how can we turn a Shaun Marcum into a C.C. Sabathia? This is where the use of Middle Relievers can really smooth out a pitching staff. Let’s add in one of the top middle relievers last year on top of Shaun Marcum and take a look at the impact, for this example we’ll use Pat Neshek.
Adding Neshek’s 70 1/3 innings, 2.94 ERA, 1.00 WHIP, 7 W’s, and 74 K’s on top of Marcum’s numbers and you end up with the following line: 229 2/3 innings, 3.77 ERA, 1.17 WHIP, 19 Wins, and 196 K’s.
The Marcum + Neshek combination ends up with the same amount of Wins (19), 13 less K’s, and a slightly higher WHIP (0.03) and ERA (0.56) over the course of the season than your AL Cy Young Winner C.C. Sabathia!
While a Middle Reliever may not pitch as much as starters they do pitch enough to make a difference. The combination of low WHIP, low ERA, and high K Rates that the best middle relievers provide can do wonders for your pitching staff. Ultimately the middle relievers’ production smoothes out your average starters performance and enhances the total staff performance.
So, there you have it, with a little help from a middle reliever we’ve turned Shaun Marcum, middling fantasy starter, into something a lot closer to a fantasy ace. Ultimately, this is just an example of one middle reliever enhancing one starter, but the strategy is one that can be used for the entire staff. There are a couple of keys to utilizing the strategy effectively:
1) Avoid below average starting pitching! Keep your innings pitched lower
- This gets back to the ability to manage the numerator and the denominator in the Ratio categories. Starting pitchers will throw the bulk of your innings and as a result will have the most impact on both your WHIP and your ERA. So, if you have below-average starting pitching you are just piling up bad innings and making it more difficult to smooth out with middle relievers.
2) Focus your draft on superior hitting
- The reason you need superior hitting for this strategy to work most effectively is because it’s going to be difficult to lead your league in Wins and Strikeouts. So you need to have a dominant lineup finishing atop your hitting standings in almost every category. Luckily this should be easier since you can focus solely on hitting early in the draft
3) Utilize Bench Spots with Middle Relievers
- This is another reason you need great hitting, because you’re not going to worry about carrying high upside hitters on your bench. The bench spots need to be used for extra middle relievers. The more good middle relievers you have the more innings you can utilize them for and the more you’ll be able to compete in the Counting categories.
All three of these rules are essential to having success with a Middle Reliever strategy because they enable an owner to maximize the advantages the different types of categories inherently allow. With the understanding that any owner can effectively manage their pitching staff through the use of Middle Relievers, owners can more confidently invest heavily in elite hitting, a more predictable and valuable commodity.
Ryan
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
Just curious as to how many MR you should have vs. starters. Say your roster holds 9 pitchers, should you have 4 starters 4 MR and 1 Closer?
Drew Dinkmeyer
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
Good question Ryan. The number of middle relievers really depends on the league characteristics, more specifically the roster requirements (# of Bench Spots), Daily/Weekly Lineup Settings, and Your league's innings Minimum or Maximum. It also depends on the type of pitchers available. The idea of the article is to avoid average or below average pitching and instead rely on Middle Relievers to supplement your above average SP's. So if I still had SP's that i thought could produce above average stats, i'd continue to build around them. I'd never advise drafting a MR over an above average SP, so please keep that in mind. I also wouldn't necessarily advocate a MR over a closer either, it just so happens that this draft strategy is very hitting focused so I'm often left scouring the bottom of the barrell for saves.
Getting back to your question though, ideally I like to have a ratio of about 1.25 Starters to 1 Relief Pitcher (either closer or Middle). So if you had 9 roster spots i'd prefer to have 5 starters and 4 relievers. If the league had a 900 Innings minimum and a 1350 innings maximum, i could count on about 160 innings from my 5 starters (total 800) and lets say 60 innings from my 4 relievers (for another 240 innings) and i'd end up with about 1040 innings in total. Those are conservative estimates but that would likely put me towards the bottom 1/3rd of the league in innings. More liekly, if my pitchers pitched slightly more (say 170 for SP and 70 for RP), i'd get up to 1130 and be in the middle of the pack. This is the goal, to essentially be middle of the pack in the Pitching Counting Categories and to be in the upper tier in all hitting categories and pitching ratio categories. Does that help?
Steve
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
I agree that utilizing MR's is a great strategy in Rotisserie leagues, but I think it may be a little less useful in H2H leagues.
Over the course of an entire season a good MR's stats will definitely help your overall statistic totals.
But in a fairly shallow weekly Head to Head league where the other guy is throwing 9 SP's at you, it's going to be hard to compete in W's and K's. Plus you are taking a week's snapshot of MR stats. A MR may have a bad outing and pile up multiple runs to your ERA in one inning.
Just some thoughts...
Drew Dinkmeyer
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
Steve-
The strategy is definitely suited towards Rotisserie leagues but can also be quite useful in H2H leagues. While you note in H2H leagues you'll often be exposed to Streamers or guys that are starting a bunch of pitchers each week and it becomes difficult to compete in W's and K'. In those cases it is going to be difficult to compete in both W's and K's, however a reliever based strategy can secure WHIP, ERA, and potentially Saves winning you 3 of the 5 pitching categories and then if you have a loaded lineup you can depend on that for another 3 of the 5 hitting categories, hopefully leaving you with 6 categories out of the 10.
Now, of course if you're referring to points based leagues as opposed to category-based leagues this entire strategy is null and void because pitching becomes accumulation based and Middle Relievers don't factor in as well in accumulation based scoring systems.
Sully
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
Drew..first off..I think this is exactly the type of article I want to see here. Excellent! Now couple of questions for you.
1) How can I use the software to really identify/delineate between the above and below average SPs?
2) And how can I use the software to do the same to identify the best Middle Relievers to make this strategy work?
And just a side note that is somewhat related to this. When using the draft software and setting your scoring goals...I've notice that the color bars aren't right in regards to WHIP and ERA due to what you say in your article..they are ratios. If I set a WHIP of 1.20 it should be green if you are below that not red. At the end of a mock draft I've noticed that if I exceeded my WHIP it showed as Green where it should be red! Same for ERA.
Sully
tim tehan
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
The middle reliever makes sense but the down side of the strategy (if you have limited pitching slots as our league does) is that you are using two slots to equal one really excellent starter. If you do those twice (two pair) you will undoubtedly trail in the counting categories in pitching (like k's and wins). The new mock draft module has presented an interesting opportunity to "try out" various strategies of my own and what I have discovered in approximately 15-20 mock drafts is that a strategy of accumulating as many Tier 1 (I believe there are only 6 of these) and Tier 2 starters (Santana, Peavy Haren etc) always adds up to at least a predicted first place finish. Of course, injuries and actual performance near "predicted" levels based on the algorithims will impact the actual results but the startegy seems to work against the ADP presumed by the model.
Mark
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
Who are the middle relievers you are suggesting? If you say there are only 5 or so... it might be a coup to draft 2 of them.
Drew Dinkmeyer
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
Hey all! Thanks for all the feedback and the questions. I've been travelling early this week so I wanted to hit a bunch of the questions that have been posted here since I last visited, so here goes:
Sully to your questions:
The software ranks middle relievers just like any other position we have, but for this strategy there's a combination you want to focus on which is HIGH K, Low WHIP, High innings pitchers.
It seems obvious but that's the type of player you're targeting. When i'm looking for middle relievers late in the draft, i'm usually sorting by those three categories and filtering through. Some of the obvious names are guys like Rafael Betancourt, Pat Neshek, Jonathan Broxton.
to Tim Tehan's remarks:
I tried to stress that league type can have an impact in the effectiveness of this strategy and how important it was to be able to utilize your bench spots with Middle Relievers to make up for the fact you're often using 2 pitchers for 1 roster spot, as you point out. The strategy can still be effective in leagues with fewer bench spots but you have to be willing to finish middle of the pack in W's and K's. It's imperative to be "willing" to have that happen and to invest heavily in hitting.
The idea is to build leads with dominant hitting and then you can always trade for pitching later, all the while you should have built a solid foundation in the ratio categories through the use of middle relievers.
But to your point, absolutely league type and roster characteristics play a role in the effectiveness of this strategy
To Mark's Question:
First let me clarify, there aren't "just" 5 middle relievers you can target. There just happened to be 5 that finished in the Top 125 of player rankings last year in traditional 5x5 scoring. A lot of middle relievers can help you, the ones that will be most beneficial are ones with High K Rates, low WHIPs, and high IP numbers. With that said, here are some of the names i typically target (in no particular order):
Pat Neshek
Jonathan Broxton
Rafael Betancourt
Heath Bell
Fernando Rodney
Bob Howry
Brian Fuentes
Jon Rauch
Carlos Marmol
The benefit is each of these guys could be 1 injury away from saves as well, so while speculating on cheap Middle Relievers you're also speculating on future saves
Michael Dreyfus
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
I was wondering what you think of a strategy for H2H where I might punt Wins & K's. One that leads me to draft no SP's, but I grab 2 top closers earlier (Paps & Putz ideally) then go hitting throughout. I would fill my roster with some top MR's late (Betancourt, Neshek, Broxton) and leave the SP's off the roster.
Since top closers (i.e. not Borowski or Jones types) usually have very good WHIP and ERA, to package them with top MR's, couldn't I win the WHIP, ERA, and often times, Saves every week in a H2H battle?
This wouldn't work in Rotisserie, because you don't want to just take a 1 pt for a year in 2 categories, but for H2H, it might make the difference and I can still focus my draft on top hitters (with the exception of the two high picks for top closers). I would consider the top closer candidates for my strategy as (Papelbon, Putz, Nathan, Rivera, Saito, Wagner) and to a lesser extent, but still usable (Cordero (cin), F-Rod, Hoffman, Corpas, Ryan, Sherrill). I may be missing some, but guys like Borowski and T Jones who get 30+ saves while carrying a very high WHIP/ERA would undermind my strategy.
Thoughts? By the Way, great blog and a strategy I plan to implement in one of my upcoming rotisserie drafts.
Drew Dinkmeyer
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
Michael,
Thanks for the comments! I've seen this strategy implemented many times in one of my most competitive leagues and I think its one that if chosen needs to be executed perfectly.
Here's a couple downfalls to operating a strategy like this:
1) Innings minimums
if your league doesn't have an innings minimum each week, or does but has a low number like 7 innings, this isn't a big deal, but many leagues i've played in use innings minimums of say 20 innings a week which force you to use at least one starter. If that's the case then the strategy would be difficult to execute
2) Susceptible to blow-ups
Because you're using all relievers, you can be negatively impacted by a big blow up (think if someone gives up 4 or 5 runs in an inning) and can find yourself struggling in both WHIP and ERA against your competition.
3) Your competition knows what its facing
Because your competition sees a staff stacked with Relievers they know each week what they're up against. In daily transaction leagues this allows owners to pick and choose their starts and try to protect their own WHIP and ERA. So if they have a stud SP like a Peavy or a Johan they can start him once and then rely on their relievers to compete with yours for saves, whip, and era, while having an immediate edge in K's and W's. The strategy just pigeon-holes your team and doesn't allow flexibility as the season progresses
4) You must dominate Saves
Under this strategy you really need to win Saves, Whip, and ERA the vast majority of the time. So getting just 2 closers, even if their top tier, may not be enough to win Saves every week. You might need 3 or 4 and the more of those you're drafting in the middle of the draft the more you're missing out on building the dominant offense talked about earlier
5) H2H Standings
This one is a subtlety but one i think is really important. This one depends on whether the H2H standings are counted with each week representing one game, or each category representing one game each week. For example in some of the Yahoo-style leagues where you're playing h2h with another opponent, you're essentially playing a 10 game (or however many categories there are) matchup with the other team. A strategy largely based on winning hitting categories and then taking WHIP, ERA, and Saves is likely to win the overall matchup more often (in this case we're aiming for 6-4, 3 hitting and 3 pitching), but is less likely to blow owners out with 10-0, 9-1, or 8-2 wins because we're basically conceding two categories every week. The strategy also leaves you vulnerable to getting blown out if your relievers don't pitch well 1 week, since you're giving up 2 counting categories immediately you could very quickly lose the other 3 with a bad week from relievers and all of the sudden you're down 5-0 heading into the hitting.
This difference makes it more difficult to finish higher in the regular season because you're basically conceding 2 losses each week in your overall record. Now if it's a league that each week represents 1 win or loss on your record, the reliever strategy is much more palatable.
So, in conclusion, i think the strategy is one that CAN work and its ont that i've seen work before, but its the one that comes with a lot of added risk because the margin for error is thin.
It's not a bad strategy to try out and it's one I often evolve closer to in the H2H leagues i participate in as the playoffs approach, but it's one that I wouldn't advise trying to go the whole year with or draft with it in mind. Part of the beauty of using Middle Relievers is that they're plentiful since most other owners don't pay attention to them, so i'd rather draft SP with some upside, knowing later in the year i'll likely be able to find Middle Relievers as opposed to going in with a set strategy of drafting all middle relievers and all closers.
JT
Mar 13, 08 at 09:01 PM
I love this strategy and have used it for years (winning 4 of past 5 years in my main league), primarily with MRP who have SP eligibility. With that in mind, who are some of this year's MRP with 10 game SP eligibility (based on 07) who should be targeted?