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June 20, 2008

Fantasy Focus

The Case for Punting Saves

by Dalton Del Don

Strategy doesn't win fantasy baseball—picking the right players does. However, the landscape is populated with an increasingly knowledgeable breed of fantasy GMs. Most serious fantasy leaguers are evaluating and ranking players using basically the same metrics; stats like BABIP, G/F and LD% are now commonly known and dissected. With that much granular detail going into people's analysis, how can one separate themselves? By ignoring the saves category at the draft table, that's how. Here's the how and why of it:

Know Your League: The strategy of punting saves works better (or worse) on the specific league format. For instance, in a head-to-head league, it's a no-brainer to do it. As opposed to finishing with a "1" in a rotisserie league, you'd only be losing one category week to week, something that could happen anyway. It doesn't matter if you record a stellar 10 saves in a particular week if your opponent nets 11. Conversely, if your league has a maximum innings cap and uses daily transactions, ignoring saves becomes less desirable, because a relief pitcher's strikeout rate is actually a benefit. However, in the most common leagues, which are weekly transactions with nine pitcher slots, go ahead and punt saves.

Why, you ask? Not only do closers typically come at an exorbitant price tag, they're also negative producers in two of the five commonly-used pitching categories. Take strikeout totals, for example. It's irrelevant how impressive their strikeout rate is, because even Heath Bell, who led all relievers last season with 102 strikeouts, finished 86^th among strikeout leaders. To put it another way, Bell had a 9.9 K/9 mark, while Matt Morris' was 4.6, yet they finished with the same amount of strikeouts. Bell is a poor example, though, since closers never throw the 93 2/3 innings that he did last year. Francisco Rodriguez led all closers with 90 strikeouts, which was only 105^th among all pitchers. Matt Capps, an above-average closer with a strong strikeout rate, had 48 fewer strikeouts than Jeff Suppan.

That's not the only category you take a hit on, though. Closers also hurt you in the wins department. J.J. Putz had the most wins of any closer last season with six, tying him for 144^th in baseball. The top 30 closers with the most saves last season averaged 2.9 wins. Overall, there were 303 pitchers with at least three wins in the 2007 season.

Now, on the flip side, the advantages that closers often offer are that they are better in ERA and WHIP than a starter with a similar Average Draft Position (ADP), which stands to reason, since they are able to give max effort for one inning at a time. However, as Nate Silver has pointed out, "over the past decade or so, ERAs of starting pitchers have run about only about seven percent higher than relief pitcher ERAs." Even with superior ratios, it cannot be underestimated the difference between throwing 70 innings versus 200 innings. If your fantasy team deployed six starters who all tossed 200 innings and two relievers who threw 70 frames, you'd be left with 1,340 innings. Let's give them a cumulative ERA of 4.00. If you then inserted a reliever with a 3.00 ERA for another 70 innings, you'd be left with a 3.95 ERA overall. If you instead inserted a starter who posted a 3.50 ERA over 200 innings, your overall ERA would then be 3.93. So although the reliever's ERA is a full half run lower than the starter's, the extra innings actually had more effect than the superior earned run average and lowered the team ERA.