Michael Waldo - Page 3

Andrew Benintendi (BOS) - Andrew Benintendi took it upon himself to make sure the Red Sox wouldn't fall below .500, going 3-for-4 on the afternoon. Benintendi started the day with a first inning double to put Boston on the...

A Closer Look is back! After a weeklong respite, your friendly neighborhood closer column is back refreshed and ready to lead you into baseball's second half. Memorial Day week was relatively quiet on the closer front, so the closer landscape...

Yoan Moncada (CHW) -Yoan Moncada hit his 12thhome run of the season, but added 2 more strikeouts to bring his season total to 74, the 5thhighest total in the American League. Despite the gaudy total, Moncada has significantly cut down...

How many of you are staring at a big fat "1" in the saves category on your rotisserie league's standings page? Whether punting closers was your deliberate strategy or you were bitten by the injury bug (sorry Hunter Strickland owners),...

Yasiel Puig (CIN) - Yasiel Puig injured his shoulder on Sunday and he remained out of the Reds lineup on Wednesday. Puig has had a disappointing start to his Reds career, but his batted ball luck seems to indicate he's...

The art of the handcuff. Teaching the strategy behind identifying handcuffs in fantasy baseball used to be an easy task. Find the pitcher with the best skills in the bullpen, roster him, and wait for the current closer to falter....

Who are the best bullpens in baseball? Who are the worst? As fantasy owners, should we even care? While this is a column that focuses heavily on closers and saves, bullpen quality is one of the most important aspects of...

Tommy Pham (TB) - Tommy Pham walked two more times on Wednesday, giving him a perfect 1.0 batting EYE. Entering Wednesday, only 8 qualified hitters had a batting EYE of 1.0 or better. Pham has always had great plate discipline,...

What makes a good reliever? Is it his mental makeup, his approach to the game or is the most important aspect his talent? Maybe you'll take the side that it's all the above. There's really no right answer, the best...

Matt Strahm (SD) - The Atlanta Braves fans were "Strahming their pain with their fingers" on Thursday as Matt Strahm picked up his win of the season after posting a line of 6IP, 2ER, 0BB and 6 strikeouts. He also...

Happy Sunday Everyone! On today's SiriusXM show, myself and Lou Blasi will start dissecting Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) for hitters and look at the players who have seen the biggest changes versus their career levels so far...

Happy Saturday Everyone! On today's SiriusXM show, myself and Lou Blasi will start dissecting left on-base percentage (LOB%) and the pitchers who are over-achieving and under-achieving so far in 2019. If you're unfamiliar with LOB%, check out the column I...

Closer. Have any of you every looked up the definition of a closer on the MLB.com website? If not, here it is: "A closer is often considered the best relief pitcher that a club has in its bullpen. Closers are...

Pablo Lopez (MIA) - Pablo Lopez flashed the brilliance in his start on Tuesday night that made him one of the most trendy late-round speculative picks of the draft season. Lopez had a no-hitter going into the 6th inning, but...

Much of the talk in the early going of the 2019 season has been around the rise in power and the struggles of the starting pitchers, elite or otherwise. We know from a leaguewide perspective, pitching ERA is up significantly,...

Yoan Moncada (2B) - One of the biggest profit centers from the draft season through the first three weeks of the season is undoubtedly Yoan Moncada. Moncada's 2018 underlying metrics were eerily similar to Javy Baez, but due to a...

Happy Saturday Everyone! On today's SiriusXM show, myself and Lou Blasi will start dissecting the first statistic that has met enough prerequisites to become reliable: strikeout rate (K%)! Based on research from some very smart people (see here), we have...

In most years, slow news weeks for closers is usually seen as a good thing. Unfortunately, in years where there are more bullpens in committee than concrete closers, slow news weeks are both frustrating and unsettling. As far as 2019,...

Mike Trout (LAA) - Mike Trout was not in the lineup for the Angels on Wednesday night against Milwaukee and there's some skepticism whether or not his strained groin will improve enough in time for him to be in the...

We've spent a lot of time this pre-season parsing hard hit rate and all of its various components. One of the most fascinating aspects of this metric is almost certainly how each type of batted ball can be hit hard,...

The closing situations are an absolute mess across most of baseball, as many of the situations that were in flux during the off-season remain in flux one week into the year. It's foolhardy to cast a general philosophy for all...

Corey Kluber (CLE) - Corey Kluber was rocked by the White Sox on Wednesday and chased from the game in the 4th inning. Kluber wasn't sharp in this one, giving up three runs in the 1st inning, a run in...

For the last several seasons, I've published an article deep diving into HR/FB rate for offensive players and have developed a living model to help me decipher which players have "earned" their HR/FB rates and which players have either over...

Baseball is back and you know what that means.....ALL ABOARD THE CLOSER CAROUSEL! This year we didn't even manage to get through one day without at least one team throwing us a curveball as Taylor Rogers nabbed the first save...

Happy Opening Day! For the second consecutive season, I'm thrilled to welcome you on this special day. Just like last year, I'm treating everyone to a different format for the normal National League player notes. Don't fret, you'll still have...

Homeruns are to flyballs as cake is to flour, unless, of course, you're a starting pitcher. In that case, homeruns are to flyballs as burnt toast is to flour. Home runs ruin ERAs, fantasy teams and even careers. For years,...

Yesterday marked the first NFBC Main Event drafts of the 2019 season. If you're unfamiliar, the Main Event is a high stakes 15-team, 5x5 rotisserie league that has both a league prize and an overall prize. There are 540 participants...

Hard hit rate (hard %) measures the percentage of batted balls that are hit "hard". That's a straightforward definition, but what exactly does it mean? For context, it's important to understand a brief history of the metric. Hard hit rate...

Cubs: Willson Contreras: 2019 bounceback candidate or 2017 abberation? Who is the real Willson Contreras? Is it the 2017 version that managed to hit .276/.356/.499 with 21 homeruns in just 428 at-bats, or the 2018 version that hit .249/.339/.390 with...

Growing up, every little leaguer was taught by their coach to "put the barrel on the ball". When it happened, the coach might have exclaimed "way to barrel it up, Michael!" That's why when Statcast unveiled a slew of new...

Kris Bryant's Shoulder and the Erosion of his Power from the Inside Third of the Plate Everyone knows Kris Bryant suffered through a disappointing 2018 season. But if I were to ask most people in Chicago whether they thought Kris...

Contact percentage, like many of the plate discipline statistics, is like the Shohei Ohtani of sabermetrics - it plays both sides! While contact percentage is a useful statistic for measuring a pitcher's effectiveness, it's also an excellent way to measure...

Strand rate, or left on base percentage (LOB%), measures the percentage of baserunners a pitcher leaves on base over the course of an entire season. At its core, strand rate is simply a measure of the number of runners that...

The Spring Training games have begun and we're already knee deep in the fantasy baseball draft season! This is my sixth season covering relievers for Fantistics and writing A Closer Look. The game of baseball has transformed during that time...

Chicago Cubs: Kyle Schwarber: Just Another Prospect Bust? The year was 2016, the month was November and the Cubs were just mere days away from celebrating their first championship in 108 years. Kyle Schwarber had just gone from tearing his...

The biggest story of the 2018 baseball season, at least in advanced analytic circles, was what in the world was going on with hard hit percentage? After years of climbing home run totals with relatively flat hard hit percentage movement,...