(*) MASTER NOTES: May Day health check

Ron Shandler has long said that May 15 is the date that early-season stats become "real." Individual player stats become legitimate at different rates, of course, but in terms of overall fantasy team performance, May 15 is the line where what your team has done in aggregate has to be taken seriously.

Of course, May 15 is still two weeks away. It's only May 2, and with the late start to the 2015 season, we aren't even four full weeks in yet. So, while I like to take a team health check on May Day, the conclusions reached are going to be rather tenuous.

For my subject team, let's look at my NFBC Main Event entry. I have a few other teams that I've written about here this spring, from Tout Wars and LABR, but my sense is that the NFBC team is particularly interesting.

First, some background on our draft: this is a 15-team mixed league, 5x5 scoring (BA, not OBP). The draft approach was to go very heavy on hitting: my co-manager Win Murray is very comfortable managing his pitching staff from the waiver wire throughout the year, so we wanted to load up on offense early. We followed that approach even more forcefully than I expected to entering the draft: of our first eight picks, seven were hitters and the 8th was a closer. Our first SP taken was Masahiro Tanaka in Rd. 9. (Yeah... ooof.)

Based on that description alone, you would think that this team would start out hot on offense, and struggle with pitching early as we churned the waiver wire in search of this year's Jake deGrom. Well, you'd be wrong.

The pitching staff is leading the league in ERA and WHIP, is 2nd in strikeouts and mid-pack in wins. Saves are a problem, as we lost a closer in Joaquín Benoit, and our two remaining closers (David Robertson and Addison Reed) have combined for four saves.

With that kind of success from a low-cost pitching staff, this team should be rolling. But the heavy investment in early hitters has not paid off. And when you look at the names of those seven players:

• Adam Jones: a worthy first-round pick so far.
• Edwin Encarnación: 4 HR but a .190 BA to date.
• José Reyes: not productive, then DL'd.
• Carlos Gonzalez: another healthy disappointment: 2 HR, .200 BA.
• Anthony Rendon: hasn't played yet
• Devin Mesoraco: injured but not DL'd, he's 2-for-22.
• Jason Heyward: healthy disappointment #3: 2 HR, .228 BA.

Seven early picks, only one (Jones) meeting expectations. Well, to be fair, we didn't expect to have Rendon for April, so I guess he has met expectations too. But the net result is only 13.5 points out of a possible 75 hitting points; a result far out of line with our investment in hitters.

Even if I take the leap of faith that our duct-tape and baling-wire pitching staff can hold up, we're going to need this offense to turn around. So, let's pull apart the offense and see how much our draft-day expectations should be changed based on this poor start. To do this, we'll utilize the MACK Engine at BaseballHQ to isolate the lineup's current skills and compare them to rest-of-season projections:

TIME            bb%   ct%    PX   xBA   h%   OPS    BA   SB
============    ===   ===   ===   ===   ==   ===   ===   ==
year-to-date     6%   78%    92   259   28   659   237    6
proj balance     8%   80%   112   276   30   765   259   87 

This is my favorite feature of the MACK tool: the ability to spit out team-wide BPI. It's not unexpected that the projected balances show team-wide improvement: our projections engine is set up to not put too much stock in early-season sample sizes, so this result is somewhat baked into the exercise. Still, to see things like a 22-pt gap between current BA and xBA, and a full 100 points of OPS improvement expected from this lineup, even without acquiring reinforcements, is reassuring.

Still, some of the problems are real: the SB situation is dire, driven by the Reyes injury and the lack of contribution from end-gamer Emilio Bonifácio (who has since been cut). And we mentioned the Saves situation above: that will need to be addressed.

Realistically, to compete for the league title, this team will need the offense to snap back in line with its projected performance, and it will need a good solution to either the Saves or SB problem.

That type of information is exactly what I wanted from this exercise: for a team that's littered with problems right now, sometimes the biggest problem is figuring out where to start the repairs. Getting an idea of which ones are more likely to be solved on their own, and which ones I need to actively manage my way around, is useful information... even this early in the year.

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