Free Agent Fantasy Team Update: Kevin Gregg's Success as a Cub

This week's Free Agent Fantasy Team Update contains a lot of roster moves:

Rick Ankiel was DFA'd and then released by Mets, so he is released from my team. I had missed that Dewayne Wise was on the DL, so I moved him to the inactive part of my roster. John Lannan will be back with the the Phillies to start on Monday, so I am putting him back on the big league roster. Shawn Camp was activated from the DL as well, so he moves to the active part of my roster. Thomas Neal was recalled by the Yankees, so he also moves from the minors/inactive part of the roster to the MLB part of the roster. Assuming that he is making league minimum, he is now owed $284,000. Chien Wang was also signed by Blue Jays, so I signed him to big league roster. He will also be owed 284,000 dollars. This puts my payroll at about 100.5 million dollars for the season. This also puts my big league roster at a full 24. It also means I had 2 spots open for my minor league/inactive team, so I signed J.C. Romero and Clay Rapada relievers who signed MiLB contracts in the past couple of weeks. Apparently Travis Ishikawa has exercised his opt-out clause, but that will probably take a couple of days to play itself out, so I am going to keep him on the inactive part of the roster as there was no update at the time of publishing. Now, let's see how my team is doing:

Since about 70 games have been played this season:

12.4 fWAR, 32.98 wins and 37.02 losses

13 rWAR, 33.58 wins and 36.42 losses

10.5 WARP, 32.9 wins and 37.1 losses

.4 WAA, 35.4 wins and 34.6 losses

So the three WARs have congregated to about as close as they have been all year. WAA continues to be the one that rates my team the highest, and I am only above .500 according to that measure.

Since all the roster moves made the post long, I just wanted to take a quick look at why Kevin Gregg may be having more success. My guess was location (as his 2013 stuff is nothing special), so here is his average locations from 2012 and 2013:

 He is keeping the ball lower on average this year, which could really play a role in his success so far. Let's break it down by pitch (MLBAM tags). 2012:

 

2013:

The fastball is clearly more arm side, rather than in the middle of the plate, while his sinker is more glove side. He is also locating the slider and splitter lower in the zone, which, along with moving to the NL Central from the AL East, is probably playing a big role in his success so far with the Cubs.

Free Agent Fantasy Team: Jeff Keppinger's Horrible 2013

This week's Free Agent Fantasy Team update actually contains a few roster moves. First, I signed Rick Ankiel to the big league team with the Mets. I am assuming that it is for league minimum prorated over the rest of the year. For now, we will assume he is owed 367,500 dollars. This brings my payroll up to 99.9785 million for the season, meaning I have about 8.02 million dollars for the rest of the season. I also had to move David Ross to the minors/inactive part of the team as he is on the 7 day concussion DL. To make room, I released Mitch Maier, who has played all of 8 games in the minors this year. Here is the numbers for my team:

Since most teams have played 42 games so far:

7.2 fWAR, 19.548 wins, 22.452 losses

9.7 rWAR, 22.048 wins, 19.952 losses

7.3 WARP, 20.74 wins, 21.26 losses

2.1 WAA, 23.1 wins, 18.9 losses

Again, WAA likes my team the best, but we are over .500 by two metrics now, with Fangraphs liking the team the least again.

Jeff Keppinger has been the most frustrating player on the team (if you don't count Ryan Madson's ever evolving injury situation), getting a 3 year contract after a good season with the Rays and hitting .188/.190/.208 through a month and a half. Keppinger finally drew his first walk this year earlier this week, which even for his contact happy ways is amazing.

This graph shows where pitchers are pitching him on average by count:

 Here are the pitches Keppinger is swinging at:

There are some definite chases, but most of the pitches are obviously in the strike zone.

Here are the pitches he is taking:

Even when he is taking, the pitchers are filling up the strike zone. Even with no strikes, as we saw in the first chart, pitchers are basically throwing it right down the middle. It is not like he is just chasing wildly and not seeing strikes.
Since pitchers are throwing him so much strikes, you wonder if bat speed is a problem (after all, he isn't making them pay), so here are the locations and results on fastballs over 95 MPH:

Most of them are thrown for strikes and thrown away from him. He has put quite a bit in play, but they are almost all for outs. It is contact, but contact that is not paying off. According to Baseball Heat Maps, he isn't hitting the ball as far:

2012: 173.864 feet on average
2013: 162.152 feet on average

Of course, there is a catch/no-catch bias in these numbers, so if he is having a large amount of balls just hit right at people, then it is going to show up in batted ball distance.

Here is Keppinger's spray chart (Texas Leaguers) at this point last year:

So far this year:

While he was hitting the ball harder last year according to the batted ball distance, his spray chart, if you ignore hits versus outs, looks better this year. Other than a pair of pulled homers, he was not hitting the ball very hard at all. He is driving the ball to center much better this year, it just isn't turning into hits. It is really hard to imagine his final line looking pretty at the end of the year, but he should "regress", and start hitting better than he has results wise. I think the best approach here is to be patient and give him more time (certainly the White Sox aren't going to already give up on a 3 year contract).

Free Agent Watch: Dontrelle Willis

During last off-season, the Reds signed Dontrelle Willis to a minor league contract. When brought up to the Majors, he gave the Reds a -.1 pitching WAR, and a 2.29 PE. For comparison, Madison Bumgardner had a -1.43 PE, Chad Billingsly had a .94, and Wade Davis had a 3.31 PE. As Willis was my example in calculating Throwing Rating, his TR was 8.81. For comparison, Bumgardner had a 13.05, Billingsly with a 8.88, and Davis a 7.52. This is not horrible or anything, but it is increasingly clear that Willis has lost whatever made him so great with the Marlins those years. However, he has some value elsewhere. He actually had a .7 WAR as a hitter (giving him a .6 WAR overall). He did this in just 34 Plate Appearances, that is .02 WAR per PA. Albert Pujols has a .008 WAR per Plate Appearance this season (in 2010 he had a .011 WAR per Plate Appearance), and Josh Hamilton had a .006 WAR per Plate Appearance (in 2010 it was .013, this is only using Offensive-WAR). Willis has a career 4.3 WAR in 447 PA, giving him a .0096 WAR per plate appearance. So the real question becomes: why doesn't Willis become an outfielder? It is probably impossible using fielding statistics to see his ability to field at outfield, one would just need a sample size of him out there. However, this is something that has been done before, and it has worked. The biggest example is Rick Ankiel. Ankiel had a .007 WAR per Plate Appearance before making the switch to the outfield. In 2011 with the Nationals, he put a 2.1 WAR season together. If we use that metric, then Willis would put up a 2.88 WAR season. He is a better hitter than Ankiel was when he was a pitcher. So far, Willis is a .244/.287/.665 hitter, but one would think that these would improve as he focused on being a batter. According to Baseball Reference, his 162 game average (he has had plate appearances in 244 games) would be 316 PA. If given full time playing time, he would get at least twice as many. This would give him (using his averages) 12 HRs, 56 RBIs, 60 R, .79 PPG, and a 3.55 PAPP. Again, one would think these would improve, and if they do, he could be a very solid 4th outfielder. Of course, Willis will have to choose this route, but I think it would be the best route for him, and he could be very valuable to a team.