The Spring Signal, February 13th
New Tools to Reveal, and Drafters React to Injuries
It’s a beautiful world. My kids were watching a movie last night. And in that time frame, I had an idea for a new page on the web app, and I completely finished it. Less than 90 minutes from conception to birth.
It’s a transactions tracker. And it’s live on the web app right now.
There’s a ton of data in there. And I even found this new way called parquet to really reduce the size of the data file. The CSV I had was 35 megabytes, the parquet file is three! So that’s pretty huge and will help the web app run even faster. It really opens up some options. I’ve run into some issues where I wanted to do some stuff on the app, but the data files were too big for it to work.
The most obvious way this becomes useful is tracking a player’s IL movements. To do that, type in a player name and a date range, and select that IL ONLY slider:
That gives you a table down below:
So you’ll see the history of IL movements there. And you get the dates so you can see how long the player was on the IL.
You could also just search for all IL movements from the last few days to catch up on the news:
You can pick a team and just see everything that’s going on. You can export it all to CSV. I’ll be using it a lot.
The web app is going to be a true game-changer here. We had it last year, but I was just getting familiar with how that all worked, so it was limited in what it was doing. Get your paid subscriptions in now before prices go up so you have access to that web app all year.
Tracking ADP
We’ve had a few drafts since all of that injury news rolled in. So it’s worth seeing where the money is going now.
Corbin Carroll
Broken hamate bone, will probably miss a week or two at the beginning of the season.
You can get Carroll in the second round now. The max pick so far is #19. I’m not sure he’ll continue to fall past that. Carroll can be a fantasy stud without hitting a ton of homers, he’s done that before. Even if he does lose some of that power for a few months, that could mean more singles, which means more steals. So he doesn’t need the homers as much as other first-rounders. I’d be pretty happy to get him in the middle of the second round.
In auctions, he was going for $39-$41, and he went for $33 in the most recent auction. That takes him out of tier one and moves him to tier two, below Julio Rodriguez and around the names like Fernando Tatis and Jackson Chourio.
Francisco Lindor
Lindor steals plenty of bags as well, but he’s a little bit more reliant on homers for his fantasy value, since he’s never shown us that 50-steals ability. He’s slipping from the mid-second to the early-third.
That lines up perfectly with where I moved Lindor in the rankings. He’s right around Zach Neto and Trea Turner now, while before he was a step above those two.
There’s a bit of a cliff after those first six. I like Abrams and plenty of other guys behind, but you can’t say they’re elite options at the shortstop position.
Overall, I’m pretty inclined to take the discounts on this hamate bone stuff. We’ve seen some guys return with less power, but we’ve seen other guys who didn’t have a problem at all and they came back as the same hitter. And we’re talking about ten games or so missed max since these surgeries are already done. There’s a real chance that Carroll and Lindor are both in the Opening Day lineup.
Jackson Holliday
This one seems weirder because they’ve already said he’ll miss time. Hunter covered the news here already. The injury was to his throwing hand. Throwing baseballs isn’t that important for non-pitchers in the fantasy game. But I’m pretty sure second basemen are still going to be required to do a lot of throwing in the field this year.
Additionally, Holliday is nowhere near the levels of Lindor and Carroll. We don’t know if he’s any good for fantasy from the beginning. So even if he returns to what he would have been without the injury, we don’t know that if that’s a great thing or not.
He didn’t have a ton of power in the first place. So any potential losses to that would make him very tough to roster in fantasy leagues, and it would probably send him down the Orioles lineup to the bottom four or so.
He’s down there with guys like Brandon Lowe and Luis Garcia Jr. now.
That seems about right. You’d have to say he has a bit more upside than the guys around him. I’d still be fine with paying that new price, but there was real downside with him before this.
Spencer Schwellenbach
I guess somebody missed the memo in that February 12th draft where he went #91. Probably an auto-draft situation. I myself accidentally auto’d Will Vest the other day, so I know how it feels, man.
I think you’ll see Schwelly continuing to go past pick 500 and for like $1-$2 in auctions. It sounds more and more like he’ll need surgery and miss the entire year.
Anthony Santander
Same story as Schwellenbach. He went at ADP 662 last time. We’re thinking he might be out for the year as well. Unlike Schwellenbach, he’s not definitely good, either. So an August return might not be worth much at all. Just forget about those two guys.