(*) MASTER NOTES: Climbing out of a hole

Last week on Baseball HQ Radio, Patrick Davitt and I were talking about how to rehab a struggling fantasy team, and how much effort we would put into it before declaring the team a lost cause. I made the point that a lot depends on the nature of the problem, especially in mixed leagues.

If you have a broken pitching staff and trashed your ratios early in the season, it's a long haul to try and dig out of that hole. But the good news is that in mixed leagues, there is a steady stream of new starting pitchers entering the player pool, and tools like our SP Report Tool and Callups Reports are very helpful in identifying both the short- and long-term targets from within those emerging options. So, while rehabbing a pitching staff can be a long grind, at least there are players and tools that you can deploy in that battle.

If, on the other hand, it's a lack of offensive production that is killing your team, that can be an almost-unrecoverable problem in a mixed league. Counting stats add up so quickly that category deficits can quickly become insurmountable. And a lack of helpful hitters in the free agent pool limits your ability to upgrade your roster that way.

Unfortunately, this "lack of offensive production" is exactly the problem that is ruining my NFBC team this year: as of this writing, my team has 15.5 of a possible 75 points on offense. It's an "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong" situation, at least as far as the hitters are concerned.

The "good" news is that the pitching staff is picking up the slack: it has 62.5 out of a possible 75 pitching points. No doubt, it will be a challenge to maintain that kind of elite pitching standing for the rest of the year. But if that standing does hold, it lowers the ceiling of how much of a hitting turnaround we need to engineer. Turning a 15-point offense into a 50-point offense is probably too big a mountain to climb. But climbing back to having a very average 40-point offense might be more attainable, and the resulting 100 point total might be enough for a money finish.

How to approach the turnaround?

Step 1: Identify the root causes

In our case, there is little mystery about how we found ourselves in this position:

• Carlos Gonzalez and Joey Votto were our first two draft picks; both have spent time on the DL and neither has performed up to anything nearing expectations when healthy.
• We invested heavily in catchers: drafting Carlos Santana and Brian McCann in rounds 5 and 6. Both have been big disappoints.
• 7th-round pick Everth Cabrera was supposed to be our stolen-base cornerstone. His 30-SB pace isn't bad, but is well short of the 50+ we were counting on.
• None of our end-game dart throws hit the target in a big way, so we haven't gotten much unexpected over-performance to cancel out the above disappointments. Instead, we got more injuries and disappointments in the back of the draft: Nick Swisher, Chase Headley, David Freese to name a few.

The nature of these problems didn't leave a lot of decisions to be made. The NFBC is a no-trading format, so turning some of our pitching strength into hitter upgrades isn't an option. Given the top draft picks invested here, there is little choice but to hang with this group of slow starters and wait for them to snap back into form.

Step 2: Stop the bleeding

The first rule of getting out of a hole: stop digging. Even though we couldn't give up on these supposed-premium talents who were giving disappointing performances, we had to patch the roster anyway. Dealing with the DL stints and patching around the edges of the roster has yielded a few helpful additions: we added Seth Smith and Lonnie Chisenhall in April, Michael Saunders in May, and Matt Joyce more recently. Chisenhall has been a gem, and the others have still at least provided incremental backfill, which is a necessary part of the recovery process.

Most league hosting sites offer some method of viewing your team's stats across various time slices, which can be a helpful way to measure your team's trend or direction in the various categories. In a deficit situation like this, the key is to stop the hemorrhaging as soon as possible, before the category gaps get completely unrecoverable.

This team had an early problem with batting average that served as a boat anchor on the rest of the counting stats. To track progress toward fixing that problem, I've been using a 4-week rolling average of BA as a quick indicator:

      4Wk AB    4WkBA
====  ======    =====
Wk5     1181    .235
Wk6     1162    .236
Wk7     1203    .238
Wk8     1206    .249
Wk9     1165    .259
Wk10    1158    .257
Wk11    1061    .267
Wk12    1061    .263

Obviously, that's a solid trend line for BA. The recent dip in weekly AB was a blow; where we got caught by early-week injuries where we didn't have position-eligible subs available on the bench. The recent BAs are in line with the better teams in the league (only four of 15 teams have a BA over .265), so sustaining a mid-.260s BA going forward would likely drive enough cascading gains in runs, RBI, and possibly even HR to get us back into the pack in those categories.

Step 3: Use the whole calendar

Even if this offense has truly been stabilized, it will take a while to work off the damage. The good news is, there is a lot of season left. Most MLB teams will have conveniently played just over 80 games by the end of June, which serves as a much better halfway marker than the All-Star Break a couple of weeks later. Still, the break itself makes for a nice milestone as well: my goal between now and then is to hopefully sustain these recent BA levels, max out on ABs, and at the break hope to find that we have crept back into the lower ends of the main packs around those hitting categories. If so, then we'll still have two-plus months on the far side of the break to try and elbow our way up through those packs, which is where we will hopefully be able to gobble up those 20-25 points we need to get back to having an average offense. Hopefully, a stretch of good health and our top draft picks producing like top draft picks should produce will be able to drive that surge.

(Oh, and we need to maintain those elite pitching numbers. Can't forget about that.)

You're probably thinking that this projected rebound isn't that likely. And maybe you're right. But in my mind, as long as you can see a path to executing this kind of a turnaround, you have to follow it.

 

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