Yesterday, I noticed that the problem with grabbing cheap closers in an attempt to corner the market on saves without spending a bundle is that these guys are too erratic to trust. Spend $25-30 on two of these guys and you need to get awfully lucky to wind up with the 60+ saves you're going to need to pull of the strategy.
The alternative definitely rests elsewhere:
CIW turned Closers 2009
(games played through July 23)
| Player | IP | H/W | ER | K | W | SV | WHIP | ERA | Sal | $ | +/- | |
| J.P. Howell | 46 2/3 | 49 | 10 | 56 | 5 | 10 | 1.05 | 1.93 | $2 | $22 | 20 | |
| Scott Downs | 30 1/3 | 31 | 7 | 32 | 1 | 9 | 1.02 | 2.08 | $1 | $13 | 12 | |
| Fernando Rodney | 40 | 53 | 17 | 35 | 0 | 20 | 1.33 | 3.83 | $3 | $13 | 10 | |
| Andrew Bailey | 56 2/3 | 55 | 13 | 66 | 4 | 10 | 0.97 | 2.06 | $24 | |||
| David Aardsma | 46 1/3 | 52 | 9 | 55 | 2 | 24 | 1.12 | 1.75 | $1 | $25 | 24 | |
| Kevin Gregg | 45 2/3 | 56 | 16 | 44 | 3 | 19 | 1.23 | 3.15 | $5 | $18 | 13 | |
| Rafael Soriano | 45 2/3 | 40 | 8 | 61 | 1 | 14 | 0.88 | 1.58 | $3 | $23 | 20 | |
| Ryan Franklin | 36 | 32 | 5 | 28 | 2 | 22 | 1.18 | 3.40 | $2 | $23 | 21 | |
| average (8) | 43 1/3 | 46 | 11 | 47 | 2 | 16 | 1.31 | 3.63 | $2 | $20 | 18 |
But I'm not necessarily sure it's with these guys.
These are the eight Major League closers who weren't bought as closers in most Rotisserie leagues this spring and yet wrested the job away from their more expensive bullpen mates.
These data seem uniform with the data points in my last post about cheap closers. In the American League, there aren't many good options at $15 or under, so it would seem that the vacuum is filled by the cheapies. In the N.L., with so many under $15 options succeeding, it would make sense that there wouldn't be many success stories here.
The other problem I see with the strategy I proposed is that while Ryan Franklin at $2-3 might have been an OK play back in late March, handcuffing him to Chris Perez at $9 kind of kills the bang you're getting for your buck. Soriano and Gonzalez at $16 pulls in $37 worth of stats, but Birdwatcher is correct that you're not getting enough saves to compete.
So I give. I don't necessarily think that this strategy is a valid one. Oddly enough, I think you'd have a better chance of getting lucky with your ace pitcher and your two cheap starters than with your bullpen core. You can keep dipping into the free agent pool and hoping you find Andrew Bailey. Odds are, though, that you probably won't.
1 comment:
Thanks for the great analysis. Obviously, I agree with your conclusions, not so much because the dollar and point values come up a little short, but because of the risk management problems, simply put, the strategy is so dependent on the stud starter remaining healthy and the closers keeping their jobs. My original point, however, was that $200 would not allow you to dominate the hitting categories (where I define dominate as 55+ points in a 12 team league). If you simply take $200 and divide by 14, we are looking at about a $14 player. I am in a AL-only, 12 team league, so a $14 player gives you roughly a 70/70/22/5/.275 line. Those numbers would be good enough to finish first in R/RBI/HR but no better than middle of the pack in SB and BA, so you would be looking at about 50 hitting points. Generously assuming 36 pitching points (24 for ERA and WHIP, 10 for Saves and 2 for Wins and K's), that totals 86 points, which would probably not be enough to win any league, assuming a minimum of 90 points is required to finish first.
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