Hitting for the Cycle #18
A Sunday Review - May 22, 2022
A Sunday review on a Monday morning?
Better late than never…we keep going.
📖 What I’m Reading:
What You Need To Know - Michael Simione
Every Monday to Friday Mr. SPStreamer himself, Michael Simione, brings you what you need to know from the day prior to be mindful in evaluating your fantasy baseball teams. The article are quick comments on yesterday’s top exit velocity readings for hitters and swings and misses for pitchers as well as Michael’s thoughts on 3-4 players. I start every weekday morning with this article along with the morning coffee. Both of those help me get sorted for the day ahead. The only weird thing about the article is that before I open it I always hear Alanis Morissette sing “You Oughta Know.” Insert shrug emoji.
🎧 What I’m Hearing:
On The Wire Podcast Episode 59 - Stay on Track with Darik Buchar
On The Wire hosts Adam Howe and Kevin Hasting bring on the NFBC’s “Swiss Army Knife” Darik Buchar. This is an episode from a couple weeks ago, but around the 24 minute mark of the podcast, Adam and Kevin ask Darik to go into depth on the available tools that the NFBC has on their platform especially pertaining to FAAB. It’s both a good introduction and review on how NFBC players can leverage those tools offered on the site to their advantage. Here is the NFBC YouTube tutorial clip that Darik references on the podcast describing the NFBC FAAB tools.
📊 Metric of the Week:
Expected Fielding Independent Pitching (“xFIP”)
xFIP is the more predictive sibling of FIP in explaining where a pitcher’s future ERA will land. FIP measures a pitcher's ERA based on skills that a pitcher can control: strikeouts, walks and home runs allowed. Difference between FIP and xFIP is the home run component of the calculation. FIP uses actual home runs allowed in its calculation where xFIP utilizes a projected league average rate of home runs to fly balls for each pitcher. xFIP is focused on a pitcher’s ability to have more control over the fly balls they allow than actual home runs. Over the course of an entire season, it is generally expected that a pitcher's ERA will regress towards his current xFIP. So, one way to utilize the metric is to see if there is a wide variance between a pitcher’s current ERA and xFIP.
You can see the current list of pitchers by sorted by xFIP on Fangraphs HERE.
💬 Quote of the Week:
“Once you can accept failure, you can have fun and success.”
-Rickey Henderson