Risers and Fallers: Volume 10
I’m excited to be back for another week of Risers & Fallers! Each week, I’ll break down a handful of players using advanced metrics, insights from my scouting background, and my DFS projection system THE BAT (available in the RotoGrinders Marketplace), which consistently beat Vegas lines last year.
I’ll examine guys whose stock is going up, guys whose stock is going down, guys who are perpetually underpriced or overpriced, guys who are worth paying a premium for, or guys who are just interesting and warrant some analysis on. If you guys have any suggestions for who you’d like to see in future articles, feel free to let me know.
Trade Deadline Risers
Yu Darvish, SP, Los Angeles Dodgers
Darvish has been good this year, but not the same elite starter we’d come to expect through his first five years in Major League Baseball. Most notably, his strikeouts are down nearly 2 K/9 while the league’s K/9 is up this season. That being said, he’s still been quite good with a 3.82 xFIP, and he’s about to get a whole lot better. It’s no secret that I love the Dodgers pitching environment, and the shift for Darvish is huge. He’ll be moving from the American League into the National League, which tends to subtract roughly half a point from a pitchers’ ERA and add half a point to his K/9. He’ll move from an extreme hitters’ environment in Arlington (with the league’s hottest temperatures) to an extreme pitchers’ park in Dodger Stadium. He’ll be going from two below-average pitch-framers in Jonathan Lucroy and Robinson Chirinos to two elite ones in Yasmani Grandal and Austin Barnes. Plus, he’ll have one of baseball’s top bullpens and top offenses supporting him.
The biggest question is how deep Darvish will be allowed to go into games. Dave Roberts is notorious for keeping his pitchers on a tight leash. Darvish being a pre-established workhorse and being a free agent at the end of the year will certainly help his case for being allowed to go deeper than other Dodgers pitchers, although the third-and-fourth-time-through-the-order penalty doesn’t discriminate, so Roberts would still have some reason to lower Darvish’s pitch count. Darvish’s baseline pitch count with the Rangers was 103, but the highest Dodgers pitcher is Clayton Kershaw at 98. For his first couple starts, I’m not going to reduce Darvish’s baseline in THE BAT much, but it’s something we’ll need to keep a close eye on. In any event, even if he’s reduced to Kershaw-level pitch counts, he should still prove to be an elite option over the season’s final months.
Jonathan Lucroy, C, Colorado Rockies
This one is pretty obvious, but any player moving to the Rockies gets a boost. Lucroy has been awful this year, but he was so good for so long that it’s unlikely he’s completely washed up. He still projects as an above-average hitter, and in Coors he’ll be an excellent punt. I’m not usually a fan of a bottom-of-the-order catchers in Coors (guys like Ryan Hanigan or Tony Wolters, or visiting catchers like Jeff Mathis or Luis Torrens). Despite the park’s boosts, these catchers just aren’t good enough hitters to have the kind of value needed to make them good plays. Lucroy, despite his struggles, absolutely has enough talent and has remained cheaply priced on DraftKings thus far. The one side-affect will be to hurt Rockies pitching, since Lucroy is a below-average pitch-framing catcher at this point in his career, while former starting backstop Tony Wolters is great.
Lucas Duda, 1B, Tampa Bay Rays
The most egregious trade of the entire deadline was the Mets basically giving up Lucas Duda for free. I tweeted out that day that Duda is a top 40 hitter and received plenty of backlash from Mets fans who have no understanding of sabermetrics or how good Duda actually is. Whether you agree with top-40 or not, Duda is a very good hitter and exactly the kind of guy the Rays like to pick up on the cheap and make look like studs. He’s basically Logan Morrison, and he’s been hitting second in the order since joining the team. The park shift is pretty much neutral, but if hitting second sticks, he could wind up being a great value on a lot of slates, especially when he goes on the road to any of the four hitters’ park in the AL East (something the NL East was largely lacking).
Tim Beckham, SS, Baltimore Orioles
Beckham is no better than a league average hitter, but he has a little pop and just got traded to a team with a much more homer-friendly park in Baltimore. He hit sixth in his Orioles debut, and there seems to be a decent chance he’ll hit at the top of the order against lefties. If that’s the case, he’ll wind up being a great punt considering that he’s always very cheap on DraftKings at a shallow position.
Trade Deadline Fallers
Sonny Gray, SP, New York Yankees
I wrote up Sonny Gray in this space a few weeks ago, noting how the days of “Sonny Gray: The Fraud” were gone and he had now become severely underrated. He’d suffered from some bad luck and some bad context, including facing an aggregate group of hitters with below-average strikeout rates, throwing to bad pitch-framers and in front of awful defenses, and pitching in a strikeout-suppressing park. At the time, I mentioned how he could wind up on the Houston Astros and how excellent a shift in context that would be. Instead, he’s the newest member of the New York Yankees. This is an excellent move for a team looking to secure a playoff spot, but it’s a bad move for Gray. Most notably, Yankee Stadium is significantly more hitter-friendly than the Coliseum in Oakland is (and the rest of the AL East, Tropicana Field aside, aren’t any better). And while Gray had been dealing with bad pitch-framers for years, he’d finally gained a good one in Bruce Maxwell. While Gary Sanchez and Austin Romine are both above-average, they are small downgrades from Maxwell. Gray will receive more offensive support, but that’s about the only positive to this shift. He’ll still be playable in the right matchups, but this is not the kind of move that had the potential to re-cement Gray as an ace.
Los Angeles Dodgers Bullpen
The Dodgers added two high-ish profile lefties to their bullpen in the hours before the trade deadline in Tony Watson and Tony Cingrani. The problem: neither is as good as the lefty they already had on their roster, Luis Avilan, who has been somewhat sparingly used this year. It seems reasonable to assume that Watson and Cingrani will be used more often than Avilan, which will actually wind up hurting the Dodgers’ bullpen. For one, Cingrani immediately becomes the weakest reliever in the whole bullpen, and it becomes worse with his mere presence. For another, both have wide platoon splits, which creates the possibility of misusage. Cingrani and Watson project significantly better against lefties, but with three lefties on the bullpen, it’s very unlikely that they won’t see significant time against right-handers as well. This is still easily a top-10 bullpen and potentially top-5, but I’m not confident these moves actually make the LA pen better.
Jeremy Hellickson, SP, Baltimore Orioles
The Orioles just loooove their flyball pitchers. Don’t ask me why. Hellickson was struggling a ton in the National League, and he doesn’t figure to get any better in the American League and Camden Yards. He’ll be a guy to target against at in home games.
Trade Deadline Neutral Shifters
Alex Avila, C, Chicago Cubs
Up until a month ago, Avila was looking like a top-three hitting catcher in baseball, boasting monster power, a wOBA over .400 for the season, and a projected wOBA around .350. Then everything fell apart. He posted a .218 wOBA in July, his hard contact rate fell from 57% to 31%, and he was dropped from second in the Tigers order to the bottom third. Given how good he was earlier in the year, if Avila is able to turn things around he’d project to be an equally-talented, left-handed version of Willson Contreras. It’s a park downgrade for sure, and it’s unlikely he winds up hitting second for the Cubs, but he could find some time in the fifth slot, perhaps. The best hope here is if Avila winds up getting cheaper thanks to the more sporadic playing time he’ll receive as a Cub. At that point, he could wind up being a great value, but for now we’re just speculating.