Fantasy Baseball Recommended Reading Week 8

Keeping up to date on baseball news and following fantasy baseball analysts on Twitter, one comes across many (many) articles about this hobby. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list or a best of, but here are a select few I want to share as fantasy baseball recommended reading week 8.

Let’s Freak Out About Vladimir Guerrero, Jr.
Craig Edwards, Fangraphs

If you are the least bit worried about Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and even if you are not but are keen to soak up analysis on Vlad Jr. (I am in this camp), then check out Craig’s article dispelling fear on the slow start. He does a nice job presenting stats of former top prospects, sans the player names, and then reveal them later. A most interesting tidbit is sorting the bottom stats table by walk rate to identify prospects that really excelled versus the ones that mostly did okay.

Leading Off Podcast
Dan Harris, FantasyPros

While I decided to call this column (for now), recommended reading, I may have to steal a phrase from friend and fantasy football analyst Matt Waldman who writes a column, “Reads, Listens, Views“. That is probably going to be more appropriate. I am not a huge podcast listener given I don’t commute, but there are some darn good ones out there. I am listening to more of them lately. A very good, compact daily update in case you missed the prior day’s baseball games is Dan Harris’ Leading Off Podcast. It runs about 15 minutes of recap with a fantasy slant, insightful player analysis and family-friendly dry humor that is right in my wheelhouse.

Four plate-discipline standouts with breakout potential
Ariel Cohen, CBS Sports

This one is from April but I only noticed it last week in my Twitter timeline. Regardless of how we feel today about the four hitters in question, the key takeaway is Ariel’s interesting new metric for measuring plate discipline, the Maddux Plate Discipline Index (mPDI). The original article explaining mPDI is at FanGraphs. The second key takeaway is seeing how he analyzes stats to help identify players who exceeded or underperformed and could be due for a correction. This isn’t the first such article I’ve read from Ariel with that takeaway. He clearly has a very keen analytical mind. Learning from that can benefit our own long-term fantasy baseball success.