Tag Archives: Stephen Strasburg

Dynasty Dynamics: Stephen Strasburg, Dylan Bundy, Jean Segura and Others

by The Dynasty Guru

There’s nothing like a week of high-profile starting pitcher injury concerns to make you re-think how you go after pitching in fantasy leagues. And no, I’m not talking about Chad Billingsley having Tommy John surgery, which was just about the most unsurprising news blurb I’ve seen in a long time. However, when you start seeing the names of Stephen Strasburg and Dylan Bundy thrown around with elbow/forearm issues, things get a little more real. But before we start freaking out and doing something we’ll potentially regret, let’s take a look at each player individually to see how this is potentially affecting their value.

Stephen Strasburg

The fear with Strasburg isn’t necessarily going to go the way of Mark Prior, but that he will have too many injuries to reach the lofty potential we’ve all anointed him with. And I say we, as I’m certainly guilty of this too–after all, he was the #2 starting pitcher in my off-season dynasty rankings (next to Clayton Kershaw). And while I still feel pretty confident about the ranking, I don’t feel great about it. But let’s be honest, there’s a reason to feel not so great about anyone you could slide into that spot (unless you want to dig down a little bit for someone like Adam Wainwright). Verlander has his velocity issues, which are worrying some. Price and Hamels have have pretty bad starts to the season. King Felix has the specter of the elbow injury. The list goes on.

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The Top 225 Dynasty League Starting Pitchers, Part 1 (#1-50)

by The Dynasty Guru

There are nearly a million ways to construct a starting staff for your dynasty league team. However, I cannot stress how important it is (especially for starting pitchers) to know your league’s scoring system inside and out. The rankings you’ll find below are for a standard 5×5 rotisserie league, but more and more leagues are switching over to a points format, which makes pitcher valuations a little trickier. Does your scoring system value overvalue or undervalue strikeouts? Does it give a lot of weight to wins, losses and quality starts, or not? How important is it for a starter to accumulate 225+ innings? The easiest way for you to determine where you can take advantage of your scoring system is by looking at previous season totals and comparing them to standard 5×5 end of season valuations (like the ESPN Player Rater). No matter how sharp the guys in your league are, there’s always room for arbitrage.

There is a lot of great information out there, when it comes to individual starting pitcher analysis, but nothing more comprehensive than Paul Sporer’s Starting Pitching Guide. If you don’t know what it’s about, check out the link here. And if you do, and haven’t ordered it yet (like I have), you’re starting out at a disadvantage. He’s running a 33% discount off the regular price, which you can get if you order it before my dynasty league rankings are complete on February 14th.

And now your top 50 dynasty league starters, with commentary:

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The Dynasty Guru’s Crystal Ball: 2017′s 5×5 Category Leaders

by The Dynasty Guru

This is a fun exercise I’ve wanted to do for a while now. Right now, Opening Day 2017 is four and a half years away, but there’s absolutely no reason I can’t start speculating about who will lead the standard 5×5 rotisserie categories that season. Who knows if the 5×5 format we use now will still be the most commonplace scoring system that far into the future anyway? Maybe a standard ESPN league will be using OBP and QS instead of AVG and W. For the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume that the categories are remaining the same.

Now, this isn’t an all-prospect list – although there are some prospects on here. And if you think I’m understating the impact of prospects in this exercise, here’s a fun fact for you. If we did this exercise after the 2007 season, looking at the 2012 category leaders, guess how many of the categories would be led by players who had not played a game in the majors at the time? The answer is 5 out of 10. And if you expand out to the top-3 in each category (including ties), you get 13 out of 33, which is 39%. Of those 13 top-3 category finishes, 7 were from players that debuted in 2008, 2 were from players that debuted in 2009, 2 were from players that debuted in 2010 and 2 were from Mike Trout, who was a junior in high school when the 2007 season ended. In fact, Trout and Buster Posey were the only two players who finished in the top-3 of any 5×5 fantasy category in 2012 to be drafted AFTER the 2007 season.

Anyway, that’s enough of an introduction – let’s go to the Future Dynasty Guru for the breakdown of what happened in 2017:

Batting Average: Miguel Cabrera (.341)

It feels like Miguel Cabrera’s been around forever, but he only turned 33 on Opening Day 2017. While his power has started to wind down (this was his first season with under 30 HR in over a decade), Cabrera continues to maintain a high batting average. The two main reasons for this are: 1) he’s still a fantastic hitter to all fields and 2) by the laws of physics, it’s been impossible for him to get any slower than he was back in 2012. Runners up: Oscar Taveras (.334), Starlin Castro (.328)

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