(*) FANALYTICS: Four Weeks In
Apr 27 2013
We're four weeks into the season, and our greatest enemy is the statistics in front of our face.
Coco Crisp is on pace for 30 HRs. Justin Upton is on pace for more than 50. Torii Hunter and Chris Davis are poised to challenge Ted Williams' batting average mark. Justin Masterson is on pace to win 25 games. A.J. Burnett is on pace to strike out 250 batters. And Bob Gibson's ERA record? On course to break it are Clay Buchholz, Ross Detwiler, Matt Harvey and Paul Maholm.
Okay, that's all clearly far-fetched. Nobody is taking any of that seriously, right? But here are a few more:
Gio González, Matt Cain, David Price and Cole Hamels all have ERAs in the vicinity of 6.00. Fernando Rodney has just a handful of saves and an ERA well over 4.00. Victor Martínez, Giancarlo Stanton, Edwin Encarnación and Ichiro Suzuki are all batting well below the Mendoza Line. Stanton and Matt Kemp have combined for less than one sixth the HR output of... John Buck.
And man, what happened to Brandon Belt? He had such a great March!
For these players, fantasy leaguers are worried. What if their struggles are for real?
What if they're not? After all, these players have a track record of better performance.
By now, you've all heard the mantra of "Exercise Excruciating Patience." And after four weeks, we still need to do this for most players. But perhaps not all.
Struggling pitchers right now are less likely to rebound than struggling hitters. Well, that's actually a bit deceptive. Since pitchers work from a smaller base of playing time, it takes longer to accumulate enough innings to offset a bad start. A bad batting average can be turned around in 30 at-bats over one week. Turning around a bad ERA in 30 innings can take a full month.
And teams can exhibit that same lack of patience. Jake Arrieta was demoted on Monday with a 6.63 ERA over 19 innings. However, if you add in just a few outings like his April 16 start against Tampa and suddenly his ERA is down to the mid-4s.
Clearly, you have to jump on new closers. Not that their early performance has any bearing whatsoever on their performance over the rest of the year. With them, it's all about the role and the fickle decision-making process of field managers. Last year, Matt Thornton lost the closer's role early but pitched superbly the rest of the year.
And as for those great March performers? Jason Collette wrote a piece at Baseball Prospectus this week that puts those March performances in perspective. There were 18 players that had a particularly hot spring; eight of them have followed up with a hot April, 10 of them have struggled. There were 11 players that had a particularly cold spring; four of them have followed up with a cold April, seven of them have been hot. So there's nothing there.
In general, those who are patient are rewarded more often then those who act too early. If you decide to bail on a player early, you must ask yourself one question... is the player you will be picking up more TALENTED than the one you will be giving up? If you're not replacing your early struggler with at least equal value, then sit tight.
One rule that I've employed in some leagues I'm in is to bar access to the free agent pool until May 15, except in the case of injury replacements. It forces you to exercise excruciating patience. It places the importance and primacy of Draft Day where it belongs. And it allows the dust to clear on many of the early anomalies. Perfect? No. But it helps provide at least some needed perspective at this time of year.
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