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mindthump · 7 years ago

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Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook data abuse shouldn’t get credit for Trump http://ift.tt/2FWHEd4

‘I think Cambridge Analytica is a better marketing company than a targeting company’

Over the weekend, reports from The New York Times and The Observer confirmed that voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica had amassed data on over 50 million Facebook users. This information had been collected legitimately by an academic researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, who passed it on to the profiling firm. (This is why Facebook insists what happened wasn’t a “data breach” — it was, instead, the company’s fault. Facebook didn’t closely supervise how its data was being used.)

Cambridge Analytica gathered this information to develop “psychographic” profiling tools, which it claimed could tailor political ads to users’ personality traits. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles,” whistleblower Christopher Wylie told The Observer. “And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

It’s a great quote. But this weekend’s reports suggest these methods might not have actually been used in the 2016 US election. (In March 2017, a New York Times article said psychographics weren’t used; recent articles offer a somewhat more muddled picture.) Still, is it even possible to target a person’s inner demons using Facebook data? How afraid should we be of sophisticated psy-ops being deployed at scale — thanks to both the data we willingly give to Facebook, and Facebook’s apparent inability to protect the people who use it? We asked Facebook how many other researchers had access to this data and if Facebook was reviewing those projects to see if misuse occurred elsewhere. Facebook hasn’t responded.

Taken altogether, it seems like Facebook was taken in by a shady firm that misused data and lied about it. When Facebook found out, it did nothing. And making matters worse, we can’t even point at Cambridge Analytica’s deception as the reason Trump was elected: a closer look at their methods suggests they might not even work.

“Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool.”

This isn’t the first time Facebook’s protections for its users have been called into question. In January 2012, experimenters were allowed to manipulate what about 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged in. The study was meant to assess “emotional contagion” — the idea that if you were shown sad things, you’d become sadder, and if you were shown happy things, you’d become happier. The study, published in 2014, almost immediately kicked up a fuss — though it had been legal, it might not have been ethical. Lost in the noise was something very interesting to the discussion around psychographics: the psychological effect was very small.

Small is not the same as “no effect.” About 340,000 extra people voted in the 2010 US elections thanks to a Facebook message, according to a study in Nature in 2012. But that’s because the message used the power of real-life social networks to get them to go; an “I voted” message showing the names of up to six friends who voted got more people to the polls. People who saw this message were 0.3 percent more likely to seek information about their local polling place than those who just saw an informational message about voting. They were about 0.4 percent more likely to get to the polls, too. This only worked, the study found, if close friends had clicked “I voted.” This wasn’t an effect of advertising or psychological profiling, though. It was just peer pressure.

Misuse of data is bad, but some coverage of Cambridge Analytica suggests that knowing what someone liked on Facebook is enough leverage to transform elections. Even Wylie seems to think so, calling his work “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool.” That is almost certainly overstating Cambridge Analytica’s power. Gathering Facebook data to predict personality and then using that to craft a message that would sway an election is a very tricky process, says Eitan Hersh, a professor of political science at Tufts University and author of Hacking the Electorate. To understand why, it helps to know a little about the backstory of two ideas: microtargeting and psychographics.

Microtargeting means analyzing data to predict the behavior, interests, and opinions held by specific groups of people — and then serving them the messages they’re most likely to respond to. The Obama campaign used this technique in different ways in both the 2008 and 2012 elections, mining data from publicly available voters’ files as well as social media like Facebook, according to Mother Jones. Though many people say that microtargeting played a major role in Obama’s re-election in 2012 — and it is possible — it’s not proven, says Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, a legal researcher at the Free University of Brussels. The campaign did get a lot of attention for the way it used the new social media outlets to target voters, though.

One way to target voters, in particular, is relevant to Cambridge Analytica: collecting information to predict people’s personality and psychology — known as psychographics — and then using that information to try to influence behavior. Most commonly, psychographics focuses on predicting attributes measured by the Big Five personality scale: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion (or introversion), agreeableness, and neuroticism. And it’s mostly used to sell products. Traditional demographic-based targeting will show a cleaning-products ad to, say, white middle-aged women who stay at home. That’s the population most likely to buy their sponge. Psychographic-based targeting, on the other hand, will show a home alarm ad to people who are neurotic because these folks are more likely to be worried about safety.

“I think Cambridge Analytica is a better marketing company than a targeting company.”

This works — to an extent. In a paper published last year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers used psychographic targeting on 3.5 million Facebook users. Facebook didn’t explicitly give companies personality information, but it did let advertisers target users based on their Likes, says study co-author Sandra Matz, a business professor at Columbia Business School who studies big data and marketing. (Likes are anonymized by default, so a company can target, for instance, 34-year-old white women in California who like ‘Yosemite National Park,’ but won’t know who they are.) Previous research shows that there’s a decent correlation between Facebook Likes and Big Five personality traits, adds Matz, and so her team chose to target Likes that correlated with high extraversion (“making people laugh”) and high introversion (“computers”).

Then, they created ads that either aligned with or contradicted someone’s personality profile. For example, the beauty ad for extroverts told them to “dance like no one is watching (but they totally are)” and showed a woman at a crowded party. The ad for introverts showed a woman with a makeup brush and read “beauty doesn’t have to shout.” Ads that matched a personality profile got 40 percent more clicks and 50 percent more purchases than ads that didn’t match.

This is the type of research that inspired Cambridge Analytica. (One of the co-authors of that study is Michal Kosinski, who pioneered a lot of the research that the firm draws upon.) The founders were also influenced by a 2013 paper, also by Kosinski, that showed that Facebook Likes could predict sexual orientation, ethnicity, personality, IQ, and more. The research, based on over 58,000 participants, found that Facebook Likes could correctly predict whether a man was gay or straight 88 percent of the time and whether someone was a Democrat or a Republican 85 percent of the time. Some results are striking: Liking “Hello Kitty” on Facebook suggests that the user is more likely to be a Democrat, of African-American origin, and predominantly Christian, the study says.

The paper concluded that predicting personality traits based on their Facebook Likes could be used “to improve numerous products and services,” like insurance advertising. It also warned against using this kind of online data without people’s consent because it could end up deterring people from using digital technology altogether. The authors write: “It is our hope, however, that the trust and goodwill among parties interacting in the digital environment can be maintained by providing users with transparency and control over their information, leading to an individually controlled balance between the promises and perils of the Digital Age.”

Now, companies like Cambridge Analytica want to use psychographics and microtargeting to influence political decisions instead of consumer ones. Take the example of gun rights, says Tom Dobber, a doctoral candidate studying political microtargeting at the University of Amsterdam. Extroverts might respond well to a pro-gun ad that talks about hunting as a family tradition and an adventure. But neurotic people might prefer a message emphasizing that the Second Amendment will protect us. “You say the same thing but with two very different messages,” he says.

Even if Cambridge Analytica did affect Donald Trump’s election in 2016, everything we know about political microtargeting suggests that their role was insignificant. “We don’t really know much about the effects of microtargeting, let alone targeting on the basis of someone’s psyche,” says Dobber. “I think Cambridge Analytica is a better marketing company than a targeting company.”

“It doesn’t give people enough credit”

There’s good reason to believe Dobber, and that reason comes from Cambridge Analytica’s previous client. Before the company worked for Donald Trump, it worked with Ted Cruz during the Republican primary in 2016. Former Cruz aide Rick Tyler told The New York Times that the psychographic models proved unreliable. According to The Times’ reporting, “more than half the Oklahoma voters whom Cambridge had identified as Cruz supporters actually favored other candidates.” Cruz’s campaign quit using Cambridge Analytica after a primary in South Carolina, The Times reported.

So why are the effects of microtargeting so limited?

First, using digital data to decide who to target can easily go wrong. Often, this extra information doesn’t tell you anything you couldn’t get from a public voter database, and it becomes less useful over time as people’s preferences change. Plus, messages that work for one campaign might not work for another. Microtargeting might be more effective in settings with less information, like a state legislative race, says Hersh from Tufts, but there’s a lot of information being shared in an American presidential election. “The idea that some additional piece of information in this overwhelming wave of data going into people’s head is going to trick them — it doesn’t give people enough credit,” he says.

The 2013 paper that inspired Cambridge Analytica isn’t wrong, says Dobber. “It is not rocket science to infer someone’s political preferences on the basis of someone’s likes if those people have actually liked a lot of pages,” Dobber tells The Verge in an email. But it’s a huge leap to say that being able to infer some things from Facebook means swaying voter behavior.

Personality traits are correlated with political values, but the correlation is generally weak, says Hersh. Being conservative is weakly correlated with preferring authoritarianism, but plenty of liberals like authoritarianism, too. That means it’s easy to mistarget messages, and that can be very alienating, he says. For example, one model predicting whether someone is Hispanic based on factors like last name and location was only correct about two-thirds of the time — and Hersh’s research suggests that the people who wrongly received the ads intended for Latinos really don’t like them.

Second, a lot of this data doesn’t give us anything that we don’t already know. Hersh uses a simple case: Who owns a boat? Someone who accesses that data will learn that boat owners are likely to be Republican. “That’s a totally useless data point,” he says. “If I have the demographic data — if I know that there is a white man in a Republican town near Virginia Beach who’s rich — I already know they’re Republican regardless of the boat. Boat ownership doesn’t provide any more information.”

In fact, Hersh spent a week trying to create a microtargeting model to find people who were interested in climate change and, he says, “you can’t do better than party affiliation.” If you don’t have access to that information, it’s very hard to figure out who’s interested. If you do, nothing else matters.

Another problem is that the predictive power of these Facebook Likes weakens over time. Many people forget about their “Likes” and may not feel so enthusiastic about them five years later, even if they didn’t bother to click “Unlike,” Dobber says. Plus, the signal that “liking” something sends may change. For example, says Matz from Columbia, a few years ago, “liking” Game of Thrones might have meant that you were an introvert who watched TV instead of going out. Now that the show is so popular, liking it might mean that you’re an extrovert. Liking Bernie Sanders five years ago is different from liking him right before the 2016 election, Dobber says.

Plus, as Matz points out, even if people take the same personality questionnaire, they rarely answer the same way twice. Self-reported information is often unreliable, and we generally have very little insight into our own personalities. That might further account for why microtargeting runs into so many obstacles.

Finally, the insights might not hold because what will persuade people depends so much on context. What might work for the Obama campaign might not have worked when Clinton was the messenger, and what works in the summer might not work in the fall. Information from campaigns shows that if you have data about individuals, it’s a waste of effort to try persuading people, says Hersh. It’s so much easier to mobilize likely voters than it is to change people’s minds.

Psychographics and microtargeting might sway consumer behavior — do you buy Crest or Colgate? — but politics are a core part of many people’s identity. It’s so hard to persuade people anyway that a cleverly tweaked message is unlikely to have a big effect.

There’s a long history of personality tests being used for political purposes, says Merve Emre, a McGill University literature professor and author of The Personality Brokers, a forthcoming book on the history of personality testing. “People are agog at the politicization of personality or the use of it in these really political ways, but a lot of personality testing began for explicitly political purposes,” she says. The Big Five personality test originally began as a series of experiments on Air Force officers to figure out the ideal personality factors that made someone competent. (Of course, there was no follow-up, so we have no idea if it worked even a little.)

“People are right that Google and Facebook do have a lot of data and there are nuances where they can use this data to be manipulative.”

The Myers-Briggs test was developed by two women at a consulting firm and the first institution to use it was the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. The OSS used it during World War II, in addition to other personality tests, to show how to match secret agents to covert operations. And immediately after WWII, psychologists developed the F-scale to figure out who might have fascist leanings. “Cambridge Analytica doing this with Facebook is more sophisticated than what we’ve seen before, but the impulse behind it — to try to figure out people’s political leanings through personality — is by no means new,” says Emre.

And personality testing, at least originally, was less than rigorous, Emre adds. Early versions of the Myers-Briggs, for example, had separate scoresheets for men and women based on the idea that women were supposed to be more naturally emotional.

But while the problems with personality testing go way back, psychographics and microtargeting changing the election is not the concerning part of the Cambridge Analytica story. The abuse of data is. “People are right that Google and Facebook do have a lot of data and there are nuances where they can use this data to be manipulative,” says Hersh. “The thing I’m calling BS on is this story that requires all these connections to work between the personality and the data and the political values and the messaging.”

It’s possible that in the future, microtargeting will become more accurate, realizing people’s current fears. As we give more and more of our data to social media companies and as the tools for sifting through those huge troves of data get better, measuring personality and targeting specific political messages might become easier. The positive and negative implications amount to the same thing: manipulation, encouraging people to vote or to stay home. Unless governments in the US and Europe start regulating this type of activity and imposing stricter privacy rules, political microtargeting is likely to increase, says Dobber, the doctoral candidate from Amsterdam.

But for now, there are plenty of substantive critiques of big tech companies and how they handle our data. Leaks of data can make us vulnerable, and not just to political campaigns. The thing to fear is not a few shadowy data brokers targeting your “inner demons.” It’s how little Facebook appears to be doing to protect our privacy.

We have emailed Facebook for comment and will update when it responds.

James Vincent contributed to this report.

#IFTTT #Feedly #hmmm #good to know

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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BUT THEY MAY NOT CONSCIOUSLY REALIZE IT IS AN ATTEMPT TO GUESS YOUR VALUE TO THE USER LIKE SOFTWARE, THIS TECHNIQUE STARTS TO HAVE ASPECTS OF A PRACTICAL JOKE

I began with, that it doesn't even seem like the most important ingredient in a startup is the feeling that what you're doing isn't working. It depends on investors, because until you're profitable that's who you have to work hard to make something users want.1 The reason Yahoo didn't care about targeting. They may feel they have nothing to invest. Making a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Several of the fractal buds that have exploded since ancient times involve inventing and discovering new things. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition. I'm increasingly convinced this type of mail. They won't necessarily buy them outright. Spams tend to have a hacker-centric. When you're excluded, you can no longer claim to have invented a new language, but only to have designed a new dialect of Lisp;-Though useful to present-day programmers, it's strange to describe Lisp in terms of its variation from the random expedients other languages adopted.

I bought was back-ordered, and a party reminder from Evite.2 His body switches to an emergency source of energy that's faster than regular aerobic respiration. Partly because you can figure out some hack that will at least conceal the problem. Think about it. Third, Pantel and Lin stemmed the tokens, whereas I only use the 15 most significant. Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks. But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing how attentive they could be to their users is that they've been diverging.3

It would be ironic if, as hackers fear, recent measures intended to protect national security and intellectual property turned out to be. I don't mean to suggest we should never do this—just that we should ignore cases where someone knows what to do in most situations, while a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren't the ones that put users first. In that respect they're more like the small man sad, said Confucius. For example, the token dalco occurs 3 times in my spam corpus and never in my legitimate corpus. So by this point you've been riding on a subway line for twenty years, and the useful half is the payload. As long as you keep morphing your idea.4 How can the richest country in the world between them and the truth: money.

Over time, the powers that be were cooperating to develop the official next generation operating system, Multics. I'll take services over goods any day. I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, the control they place on the App Store does not give me the drive to develop applications now is to launch fast is not so much the money itself as what comes with it. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. Your unconscious won't even let you think of as having one founder? Think about it. If the only spams left were unsolicited offers of contract programming services from Bulgaria, we could all probably move on to working on something else.5 We have created, for the first time, with misgivings. They treat iPhone apps the way they have to choose between them.

Look at the individual, not where they went to college with a lot of kids grow up feeling it's part of their identity to be honest and industrious.6 Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Matz, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and my father for reading drafts of this. What they want is the development team and the software they've built so far. When startups die, the official cause of death in a startup is too hard for one person. I got back I didn't discard so much as one that, if I don't find that I'm eager to learn it. The latest laws make this a crime. There are plenty of undergrads with enough technical skill to write good software, and undergrads are not especially prone to waste money. I don't like the look of Java: It has been so energetically hyped. Someone arguing against the tone of something he disagrees with may believe he's really saying something.

They want to believe they're living in a comfortable, safe world as much as a box of it. But this model doesn't work for software. Not counting these, I've had a few different colleges to choose between the two, but it may at least be relevant to the case.7 And users don't care where you went to.8 Peter Mayle wrote one called Why Are We Getting a Divorce? That was a big problem for me when I had no money. But you may have noticed I didn't mention anything about having the right business model. And it seems great for 10 year olds. But that's not the route to intelligence. Or more precisely, their CEO is. It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally.

Notes

In practice it's more like determination is proportionate to wd m-k w-d n, where there were no strong central governments. At the moment it's created indeed, from hour to hour that the government.

So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes.

Ironically, one variant of compound bug where one bug, the growth is genuine. The problem with most of the biggest discoveries in any case, not like soccer; you have to do it is less than 500, because they are building, they were regarded as 'just' even after the Physics in the sense of the fatal pinch where your idea is that it's doubly important for societies to remember and pass on the person. In fact the less powerful language by writing library functions.

Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. This form of bad customs as well, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. Icio. These points don't apply to the average NBA player's salary at the 30-foot table Kate Courteau designed for us.

Donald Hall said young would-be startup founders and one is now very slow, but economically that's how both publishers and audiences treat it.

Y Combinator is we can't figure out yet whether you'll succeed. There is usually a stupid move, but one way, be forthright with investors. Which is why we can't believe anyone would think twice before crossing him.

Cell phone handset makers are satisfied to sell, or much energy would be better for explaining software than English. Ian Hogarth suggests a way to be like a conversation reaches a certain level of incivility, the same. Probably the reason this works is that you're not allowed to discriminate on any basis you want to help SCO sue them. I see a lot easier now for a sufficiently identifiable style, you have two choices, choose the harder.

But it's easy for small children, we're going to visit 20 different communities regularly. The reason Y Combinator. Teenagers don't tell 5 year olds the truth about the meaning of the 20th century. Throw in the cover.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Sarah Harlin, Robert Morris, Ross Boucher, Jackie McDonough, Dan Giffin, and Geoff Ralston for the lulz.

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viraljournalist · 5 years ago

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Nats' Turner hits for another cycle against Rockies

New Post has been published on https://viraljournalist.com/nats-turner-hits-for-another-cycle-against-rockies/

Nats' Turner hits for another cycle against Rockies

WASHINGTON — The Colorado Rockies bring out the best in Trea Turner.

On Tuesday, the Washington Nationals shortstop hit for the cycle during an 11-1 win over Colorado, marking the second time in Turner’s career that he has accomplished the feat against the Rockies. According to Elias Sports Bureau research, he’s the third player in MLB history to hit for the cycle multiple times against one team. Fred Clarke of the Pittsburgh Pirates had two cycles against the Cincinnati Reds (1901, 1903), and Christian Yelich did it twice last year, also against Cincinnati.

“It’s almost more funny than anything that I got lucky enough to get all the right hits,” Turner said. “I think it’s kind of a lucky stat, just because you’ve got to put the ball in the right place at the right time. And I ended up doing that.”

Speed? Check. Power? Yup. The ability to go 4-for-whatever? That, too. There’s an obscure MLB record Trea Turner was born to break. Eddie Matz »

Turner led off the bottom of the first with a solo home run to center field against Colorado starter Peter Lambert. In the second inning, he hit a grounder off Lambert for a single. Facing Lambert again in the fifth, Turner hit a liner down the right-field line that glanced off Charlie Blackmon’s glove and rolled into the corner for a triple. After grounding into an inning-ending double play against lefty reliever Sam Howard in the sixth, Turner came up in the seventh against righty Jairo Diaz and laced an RBI double to the gap in right-center field. In doing so, he became the 26th player in major league history to hit for multiple cycles in his career.

“I think any time you can put your name next to somebody else who has done something pretty substantial in this sport, I think it’s a compliment,” said Turner, a 26-year-old speedster who is one cycle shy of matching the four players tied for the record of three career cycles: John Reilly, Babe Herman, Bob Meusal and Adrian Beltre. “It’s a hard game, and to get four hits in one game is hard to do. To have four different ones is, I think, a little bit of luck. But also, at the same time, a little humbling to be with those guys.”

“It’s a feat that doesn’t happen often,” Nats manager Davey Martinez said. “To be able to do it twice — that, to me, is a testament to how good a player Trea really is.”

Turner is the fourth player to complete the cycle this season, joining the Indians’ Jake Bauers, the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani and the Twins’ Jorge Polanco. His previous cycle came on April 25, 2017, at Coors Field. In 18 career games against Colorado, he is batting .386 with 16 extra-base hits.

Of the 10 cycles the Rockies have allowed in their history, Turner’s is the first to be accomplished away from Coors Field.

Earlier this season, Turner missed six weeks due to a fractured right index finger that he suffered as the result of a hit-by-pitch. In 60 games with Washington this season, he’s hitting .286 with eight home runs and 20 stolen bases.

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placetobenation · 6 years ago

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Welcome to the May 2019 edition of the MLB Power Rankings, Nation! With baseball season in full swing, and more to come, let’s take a peek at how the season is moving forward thus far.

While many of the expected teams have been right on, a few surprises and disappointments have emerged. But, one the best things about this sport is that momentum is a team’s best friend, and fortunes can turn around quickly.

With that said, let’s dive in!

All stats and records as of Saturday, May 4, 2019.

At 6-0 with a 1.47 ERA, Tyler Glasnow is a huge reason the Rays claim our top spot, the best record in the American League, and a team ERA under 3.00.

Tampa Bay Rays (21-12). With Glasnow pitching like an ace, and Charlie Morton (2.52, 11.0 K/9) not far behind, the Rays are great traditional pitching to back up the “opener” strategy, along with strong defense, and great early offense from rookies Austin Meadows, Brandon Lowe, as well as Tommy Pham and Yandy Diaz.

Los Angeles Dodgers (22-13). Despite AJ Pollock hitting the injured list, this team is so loaded, it won’t miss him. Cody Bellinger is an early MVP favorite (.415/.489/.847) while Joc Pederson (10 homers) and Alex Verdugo (.346/.376/.605) are transforming into beasts as well. Oh, and that Kershaw guy is back (2.77 ERA, 27 Ks in 26 innings).

Houston Astros (19-14). The 2017 champs still look really strong; leading the bigs in OPS+ (121) while sitting fifth in team ERA (3.57). Alex Bregman is a star (154 OPS+), while Carlos Correa also looks healthy (.892 OPS, 10 doubles). On the mound, Justin Verlander (10.8 K/9) and Gerrit Cole (13.5 K/9) keep dominating.

St. Louis Cardinals (20-13). A strong bullpen fronted by Jordan Hicks (2.13 ERA), John Gant (0.86), and John Brebbia (0.93), along with good offense up-and-down the lineup—Marcell Ozuna has 10 home runs, Paul Goldschmidt has nine, and Paul DeJong is carrying a 152 OPS+—has the Redbirds on top of baseball’s most intriguing division.

Minnesota Twins (20-11). The pitching is not that grand (4.14 team mark), but the offense—56 homers, 66 doubles, a team 115 OPS+—has the Twinkies driving the AL Central. With Cleveland’s injury woes and penny-pinching, it may not matter if the Twins come down to Earth a bit.

On an offense-first Twins team, righty Jose Berrios (2.91 ERA, 46 Ks in 46 innings) has emerged as the strikeout ace this team needs.

6. Philadelphia Phillies (18-14). While the $330-million man, Bryce Harper gets on base (.380 OBP) and plays a progressively worse right field, his signing did help the Phils realign their overall defense for the better. But he’s nowhere to be found on the team’s Baseball Reference WAR leaderboard top ten. Hmm…maybe huge contracts aren’t the be-all, end-all of constructing a winner. Enjoy your record contract, overachiever. You “earned” it.

7. New York Yankees (18-14). Despite running a veritable M*A*S*H unit, this team is still second in the AL East. It’s a damn scary thought when/if everyone gets healthy…

8. Arizona Diamondbacks (20-13). Christian Walker (13 doubles, 7 homers, 152 OPS+) looks like a nice successor to Goldschmidt, while Ketel Marte (126 OPS+) has become a nice utilityman, and the pitching—Zack Greinke, Luke Weaver, and Robbie Ray in particular—has been exceptional.

The things you can’t un-see…

9. Chicago Cubs (18-12). This could be the streakiest team in the top ten. Overcoming a 1-6 start to sit in second place is pretty good. Of course, a few guys are playing over their heads right now (174 OPS+ from Willson Contreras, 138 from Jason Heyward), but the hope is that Javier Baez (157) and Anthony Rizzo (135) keep it up, while Kris Bryan (108, but just 45 total bases) and Yu Darvish (5.79 ERA) figure themselves out soon.

10. San Diego Padres (18-16). Shortstop Fernando Tatis, Jr. looks legit (145 OPS+, .360 OBP) and Manny Machado has been good-not-great (8 homers, .790 OPS). The rest of the offense has ranged from useful to putrid. Young pitchers Chris Paddack (1.91 ERA), Matt Strahm (3.03) have been good, as so has the bullpen overall. But, what happens when those young arms hit innings limits? While the Padres are improving, don’t count on them being this high next month.

11. Atlanta Braves (17-16). A lot of scuttlebutt and rabble was made about Ozzie Albies’ crazy team-friendly contract, but let’s be honest, the kid saw a chance to set his family up for generations to come and he took it. Good for him. A lot of people talk about “fair market value” and “leaving money on the table” and “earnings for future players”. Fuck that noise. Players earning the MINIMUM still earn six figures—yes, I have issues with that in a different sense, too—and most are able to live a much better retirement than anyone reading this can even dream about. The kid took the money and he’s happy. Good. Oh, also, Ronald Acuna, Jr. is fantastic.

12. Milwaukee Brewers (19-16). Christian Yelich is currently with a 222 OPS+ and just screaming for an MVP repeat. Meanwhile, the Brew Crew’s pitching is really, really bad (4.87, 24th in MLB). I don’t think they would solve everything, but Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel are still out there…

13. Cleveland Indians (18-13) A Mickey-Mouse, Little-League level offense (team OPS+ of 71 — wow!) and pitching injuries to Carlos Carrasco and Corey Kluber, plus a bad bullpen and a worrisome start for Jose Ramirez (.188/.278/.282). It makes me wonder what’s worse: Rooting for a team that you KNOW will be bad or watching a team that COULD/SHOULD be good be bad.

Full disclosure: Chris Sale is one of my least-favorite players. I can’t stand his red-ass way of going about things. That being said, he seems to be turning a corner after a brutal start to the season. I still think the Sox will ultimately regret his 5-year contract, though.

14. Boston Red Sox (16-18). An ugly, ugly start to the year for the defending champs put a lot of players under the microscope. The team still has concerns—black hole offense from Eduardo Nunez, Jackie Bradley, Jr, and most of the bench; bad pitching from Rick Porcello and Eduardo Nunez; and a bullpen that was, of course, “built” by Dave Dombrowski. Chris Sale seems to be righting his ship, but it’s lucky the Sox didn’t get totally buried by this start.

15. New York Mets (16-17). After Jacob deGrom’s transcendent 2018 campaign, some regression was expected (3.82 ERA, 13.4 K/9). He and Steven Matz (3.86 ERA) have been fine, but the rest of the rotation has been a dumpster fire. As for the offense, there are some nice pieces there, but it seems inconsistent and without a real threat behind rookie Pete Alonso (.289/.374/.620 with 10 homers).

Editor’s Note: I can continue writing comments for 15 teams and push the boundaries of insanity (see above) or I can rank them and then enjoy my Sunday evening.

16. Cincinnati Reds (14-19).

17. Pittsburgh Pirates (15-15).

18. Toronto Blue Jays (15-18).

19. Seattle Mariners (18-17).

20. Oakland A’s (15-20).

21. Colorado Rockies (15-19).

22. Texas Rangers (15-16).

23. Washington Nationals (14-18).

24. Chicago White Sox (14-17).

25. San Francisco Giants (14-19).

26. Los Angeles Angels (15-18).

27. Detroit Tigers (14-16).

28. Baltimore Orioles (12-22).

29. Kansas City Royals (12-22).

30. Miami Marlins (9-23).

#IFTTT #Place to Be Nation

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buddyrabrahams · 6 years ago

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MLB teams that could surprise in 2019

It’s pretty clear which teams can expect to be near the top of the standings in Major League Baseball and which can expect to be near the bottom. That leaves a mess of teams in the middle that may or may not be good enough to contend, but at least a few will be similar to last year’s Oakland Athletics and pleasantly surprise.

Here are seven teams that could unexpectedly make some noise in MLB this season.

7. Pittsburgh Pirates

The Pirates quietly won 82 games a year ago, and they may be poised to do even more this season. The key will be finding out where the offense comes from; the likes of Starling Marte will have to have solid seasons for the Pirates to improve. They were helped significantly last season with the emergence of Trevor Williams as a solid starting pitcher. The addition of Chris Archer should really start to bear fruit this year, potentially leading to some improvement from the club.

6. Cincinnati Reds

The Reds were very aggressive in trying to add new talent during the offseason, and it could certainly pay off for them. The addition of Yasiel Puig will likely prove the big headline, and moving to a very friendly hitter’s park in Cincinnati should help him. The Reds had a decent lineup in place already, but the real coup could be acquiring Sonny Gray from the Yankees. Gray was once one of the game’s brightest young pitchers, and a change of scenery and departure from New York could be just what he needs to get his career back on track.

5. Chicago White Sox

The White Sox failed to land Manny Machado, but they’re in line for some natural improvement anyway. Part of this is down to the progression of their prospects, including Yoan Moncada, and the arrival of the likes of Eloy Jimenez. Carlos Rodon is healthy, and adding Ivan Nova to the rotation can only help. If their young players progress and start to move closer to fulfilling their potential, it’s entirely plausible that the White Sox are a lot better in 2019.

4. Minnesota Twins

The 2018 season was a big disappointment for the Twins, who had visions of pushing the Cleveland Indians for a division title. The post-Joe Mauer era brings in three new lineup regulars, most prominently Nelson Cruz, who should provide the Twins with a much-needed shot of power. Improvement from the rotation is imperative, and they have a good foundation in Jose Berrios, Kyle Gibson, and Jake Odorizzi. Keep an eye on Michael Pineda, who underwent Tommy John surgery in 2017 and a knee operation last year. He could be a big help as they shore up their pitching staff, as long as he’s healthy.

3. San Diego Padres

The addition of Manny Machado should really accelerate the Padres’ timeline, and they’ll be a big dark horse pick to do something good this year. They should be. Machado will slot in nicely to the top of the lineup with Ian Kinsler, Eric Hosmer, and Wil Myers in support, all of who can be key contributors to a pretty good team. Pitching is a question mark; while the back of the bullpen is good, the rotation is filled with unknowns. If the Padres get some pitching, they could give some teams real trouble.

2. New York Mets

Don’t sleep on the Mets. The addition of Robinson Cano gives the team a legitimate middle-of-the-order bat to go with the rapidly improving Michael Conforto, and a rotation that includes Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, Steven Matz, and Zack Wheeler can’t be ignored. The key for the Mets is health. If they avoid major injuries and their players play up to their capability, they could see some significant improvement this season. One player worth watching? Yoenis Cespedes, whose status for 2019 is uncertain. He could be a big late-season addition if things break right.

1. Tampa Bay Rays

The Rays won 90 games last season. Perhaps the surprise is that they could certainly do it again. The addition of Charlie Morton to the rotation is an excellent one, and he could prove a very good investment in 2019. So, too, are trades for Mike Zunino and Avisail Garcia, and a full season of Tommy Pham should be beneficial to them as well. Don’t forget that they boast the reigning AL Cy Young winner in Blake Snell. There may be some discontent in the ranks, but the Rays have built themselves a nice little team that could prove quite dangerous.

from Larry Brown Sports https://ift.tt/2T4gqe9

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ntrending · 7 years ago

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There’s still time for us to save the Great Barrier Reef

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/theres-still-time-for-us-to-save-the-great-barrier-reef/

There’s still time for us to save the Great Barrier Reef

“It’s been pretty well established that if you take the present day coral and you put it into the future conditions, it will most likely die,” Mikhail Matz explains. The rather stark phrasing functions as something of an understatement these days. Just this week, a paper in Nature detailed the loss of fully half the coral on the Great Barrier Reef during the back-to-back bleaching of 2016 and 2017.

“But,” Matz goes on, lightly, “does it mean all the coral will die when they get to these conditions in real life? Not necessarily. This will depend on how much they would be able to evolve.”

Matz is an evolutionary biologist at University of Texas at Austin, and, for a coral researcher, his outlook can seem surprisingly hopeful. In a study published today in PLOS Genetics, Matz and coauthors calculated the likelihood of Australian corals adapting to—and, at least for a while, surviving—climate change. According to their model, some corals on the Great Barrier Reef will be able to stick around for at least another century, more than 50 years longer than current worst-case estimates, thanks to good old-fashioned evolution.

Unlike the models we usually talk about when we talk about climate change, the model Matz’s team built is genetic, not climactic. In other words, they didn’t just ask how modern corals would fare in a much warmer ocean; they asked how corals well would adapt to those warming waters over time. “The capacity of corals to adapt to climate change is the largest missing number of the equation to predict what will happen to them in the future,” Matz explains over the phone. To try to answer this question, Matz’s team sampled a common reef-building coral called Acropora from five locations along the Great Barrier Reef. They used the genotypes of these corals to estimate the total genetic diversity of the Great Barrier Reef as well as the pattern of dispersal of larvae along north to south currents.

It turns out there are three key pieces of information that, evolutionarily speaking, give the Great Barrier Reef’s corals a leg up. One, he explains, is that every species of coral on the Reef currently exists across a variety of conditions, including different temperatures. Corals on the northern part of the reef tend to experience warmer water on average than corals along the Reef’s southern stretch. The second important thing is that these corals adapt to a range of local conditions as well, tolerating hotter, sunnier climes closer to the surface of the ocean and cooler ones the deeper they are on a reef.

And for the third? Because of the way corals breed, releasing their eggs and sperm into the water in a single spawning event timed to the moon, fertilized larvae can drift along ocean currents for hundreds of miles before settling down to grow into colonies. The result is that roughly 1 percent of corals in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef originally came from the far north, where the conditions are much warmer, Matz explains. This means that adaptations developed in one set of conditions on the Reef have the potential to spread to other populations.

All this paints a picture of the Great Barrier Reef’s overall genetic wealth, a wealth that Matz says will likely survive even dramatic levels of population loss. It would take a reduction of much higher magnitude than the 50 percent population loss seen between 2014 and 2017 before the genetic variety of the reef could be noticeably reduced.

“Because the reefs that experienced strong die-off only represent a small fraction of the total species range, the species overall did not really experience much decline in numbers,” Matz points out. And even if you did lose half of all the individuals in a species, “What would you immediately lose? Half of the rarest genetic variants found in only one individual, yes,” he says. But as for more common variants, he goes on, you’d only lose a quarter of those genes present in only two individuals, one-eighth of those present in 3 individuals, and so on. Variants that are found in only 10 individuals (“Out of the whole species! Still pretty rare”) would only have about a one in 1000 chance of being lost.

“They have safety in numbers, in genetic terms,” Matz says. “It is like currency in your pocket, fuel for your car. If you have genetic diversity, you will go on for a while, because natural selection will always have something to choose from.”

In other words, the outlook for the Great Barrier Reef might be better than it looks through the lens of recent events: “Things will hold on for a while. There might be quite dramatic die-offs of reefs, then they will regrow,” Matz explains. “And as long as this cycle of regrowth continues, I believe that everything will be fine.”

The uncertainty lies in the “if” statements that Matz’s model is build upon, as he acknowledges. His model tends to low-ball the genetic diversity and advantage the reef has, he says, even considering the fact that his samples were collected before the heat wave that killed millions of Acropora colonies. But it also takes a potentially conservative view on how fast warming will occur in the future: just one tenth of a degree per decade. That’s the middle road in the range of climate predictions from best case scenario to worst, and there’s little that is moderate about the world’s current emissions path.

“The more dramatic the disturbances get”—drama like 2016 and 2017’s mass die-offs—“the more likely something could come in and mess up our predictions,” Matz admits. “Climate change is all about things becoming freakier and freakier. Every year is weirder than the one before.”

By definition, that kind of uncertainty is almost impossible to model. Computer models, whether of the climate or a population’s genetic survival, are built out of our understanding of how past events unfolded to create the present. Using records and observational data, we build an approximation of how the world has worked under certain variables, and then we try to peer into the future by dialing those variables into the unknown. Like tuning a TV with bad reception—or like a psychic with a good eye for your unconscious tells—these models can often show us the rough outline the future may take, but they cannot show things which have no historical analogue. If it’s never happened before, we are unlikely to be able to make it happen in a computer model, no matter how much data we have to start with.

“I hope the authors are correct,” says Ruth Gates, president of the International Society for Reef Studies and director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. The ISRS issued a statement in 2015 predicting that the majority of the world’s reef would be gone by 2050, a good 50 years before Matz’ model predicts. “When we generated the statement, we had lost 30 percent of the world’s reefs as a result of two global bleaching events,” Gates says. “Today we have now lost 50 percent of the world’s reefs,” including a third of the Great Barrier Reef.

The gap between what has been lost to climate change and what remains to lose can often divide scientists and communicators alike. The urgency of drawing attention to the vast and unprecedented upheaval of entire global systems can often sink a listener, like a pinball fumbled between the flippers, into defeat and apathy. But paint too rosy a picture, and you risk giving a false sense of security. Matz has called out research into so-called “assisted evolution”—the idea that humans might need to boost the natural evolution of corals to help them keep pace with a changing world. He says that compared to the vast diversity of the reef itself, any lab-based experiment in evolution will be less powerful than the real thing. Other scientists, like Gates and her collaborator at the Australia Institute of Marine Biology, Madeleine van Oppen, have argued that it’s too late to not explore every possible avenue for coral survival, including assisted evolution.

Part of the tension comes from the fact that corals do have an ability to adapt or evolve to their environment, but it’s not clear how far that ability will be able to stretch. “There is evidence that some coral are able to adapt very rapidly,” says Andrea Grottoli, a coral biologist at Ohio State University. “But it is not the norm.”

In a study published last year, Grottoli examined “super corals” in the Red Sea, which are able to survive five or six times more heat stress than those that perished on the Great Barrier Reef between 2015 and 2017. “There are locations on the planet that are already pre-adapted, like those. We have also shown experimentally that some species can adapt to heat stress within a year,” she points out, suggesting that some adaptation is clearly possible.

“But that is probably not the norm,” Grottoli points out. And there are too many unknowns in the system to say that this will happen for sure. For example, a 2009 study subjected coral larvae to acidified ocean water as they tried to form their initial skeletal structures. “They just make a crappy skeleton,” she said—weak, brittle, poorly formed. A genetic capacity to deal with Red Sea-level temperatures once they’re adults isn’t very helpful if they can’t survive the larval stage.

“There are still a billion survivors out there, and they’ve gone through a hell of a natural selection event,” says Terry Hughes, lead author of the Nature paper that found half the Great Barrier Reef’s corals died between 2015 and the end of 2017. Hughes has a grimly determined glass-half-full attitude, perhaps the result of surveying Australia’s bleached-white reefs starting in 2016 and 2017. This week’s Nature paper is only the latest of a series of studies he’s published cataloguing and categorizing the losses. “Our focus now should be on ensuring that those survivors which are genetically diverse can rebound as much as possible. The recovery’s going to take a decade, and it’s contingent on how many bleaching events we get in that period,” Hughes said. Another “if” to content with.

“Much of what is seen when you talk about reefs becoming more resilient is the result of simple darwinian fitness—you know, the survival of the fittest,” says NOAA’s Mark Eakin, Hughes’ coauthor. In any event where you lose individuals but some survive, you’re generally left with the tougher members of the species. But, Eakin says, if the creatures continue to suffer hit after hit, then even the fit ones are going to eventually die. “A mass extinction is going to be made up of a whole lot of smaller extinction events that are added together,” says Eakin. “It’s not one big boom and instantly everything falls over.”

“There are still a lot of corals, genetic diversity is still pretty considerable,” Matz says. His model, and the extra decades of wiggle room it suggests, to him means we should be fighting twice as hard to reduce emissions and get climate change under control while we still can. “I’ve seen claims that corals are dying, that’s it, bye bye,” he says. If that’s the case, he says, it would be too late to do anything. Instead, he sees hope—for now. “If we don’t do anything, it will get desperate. There’s still time for us to come to our senses.”

Written By Amelia Urry

#Environment

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yahoo-roto-arcade-blog · 7 years ago

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Lessons from Fantasy Baseball experts draft: Steals and reaches

Is Robbie Ray firmly in the circle of trust for good? (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

We’re up to 15 teams in the Yahoo Friends & Family League this year, adding rookies Michael Lazarus (Yahoo DFS maestro) and Scott Jenstad (Rotowire stalwart). Dalton Del Don is back to defend his title, something no one expects to happen.

[Batter up: Join a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league for free today]

The draft went down Thursday afternoon, a 390-pick meandering. We’ll let the combatants retell the story in their own words. Everyone started with a graph or two in any direction they chose, then we specifically inquired about steals and reaches.

As you consider the results, keep these specs in mind:

— standard 5×5 format

— transactions capped at 125

— only one catcher and four outfielders required; two utility players

— 1400 innings-pitched maximum; no minimum

— trading allowed, with a deadline of Aug. 12

— maximum of two DL spots; one NA slot (new this year)

Let’s get to it, if you have an hour to kill and want to improve your winning chances this year. (If not: too long, didn’t read.)

Michael Salfino – Wall Street Journal/Yahoo – @michaelsalfino

Previous F&F Finishes: 5th, 10th, 8th, 12th, 13th, 2nd, 7th, 11th, 12th

1. (1) Mike Trout (LAA – OF)

2. (30) Jacob deGrom (NYM – SP)

3. (31) Carlos Carrasco (Cle – SP)

4. (60) Khris Davis (Oak – OF)

5. (61) A.J. Pollock (Ari – OF)

6. (90) Daniel Murphy (Was – 2B)

7. (91) Yoenis Cespedes (NYM – OF)

8. (120) Archie Bradley (Ari – RP)

9. (121) Blake Parker (LAA – RP)

10. (150) DJ LeMahieu (Col – 2B)

11. (151) Didi Gregorius (NYY – SS)

12. (180) Evan Longoria (SF – 3B)

13. (181) Justin Bour (Mia – 1B)

14. (210) Amed Rosario (NYM – SS)

15. (211) Dellin Betances (NYY – RP)

16. (240) Sean Manaea (Oak – SP)

17. (241) Danny Salazar (Cle – SP)

18. (270) Yonder Alonso (Cle – 1B)

19. (271) Matt Chapman (Oak – 3B)

20. (300) Randal Grichuk (Tor – OF)

21. (301) Robinson Chirinos (Tex – C)

22. (330) Matt Harvey (NYM – SP)

23. (331) Austin Hedges (SD – C)

24. (360) Kirby Yates (SD – RP)

25. (361) Colin Moran (Pit – CI)

26. (390) Vince Velasquez (Phi – SP)

Mike’s Take: This went pretty much to plan. Based on my draft slot, I wanted Trout, two pitchers (figured it would be deGrom and Carrasco actually), two second-tier closers double-tap in rounds 8 and 9, and then the best hitters I could scramble to find (mixed in with some K/9 middle relievers and cuttable starters). I’m disappointed that I didn’t land 20 more steals.

Steal: This should be Round 10-plus to qualify. Ryan Zimmerman has been good and was great last year and bats cleanup in a great lineup. His stats last year were no fluke given his sterling well-hit rate, according to Inside Edge. And he goes pick 161. I understand first-base is easy and I had my sites set on Alonso or Bour way later (got them both), but still. Zimmerman is better.

Reach: A reach should be top 60 picks. So that’s four rounds. Andy Behrens is a great player and often right, but I don’t like paying a top 50 price for a player who only has about that many games. So Rhys Hoskins, who was a meh prospect in dynasty, at 45 overall.

Fred Zinkie – MLB.com – @fredzinkieMLB

Previous F&F Finish: 4th

1. (8) Corey Kluber (Cle – SP)

2. (23) Aaron Judge (NYY – OF)

3. (38) Kenley Jansen (LAD – RP)

4. (53) Justin Upton (LAA – OF)

5. (68) Tommy Pham (StL – OF)

6. (83) Lorenzo Cain (Mil – OF)

7. (98) Rougned Odor (Tex – 2B)

8. (113) Ian Desmond (Col – 1B,OF)

9. (128) Kyle Seager (Sea – 3B)

10. (143) Jeff Samardzija (SF – SP)

11. (158) J.T. Realmuto (Mia – C,1B)

12. (173) Ian Kinsler (LAA – 2B)

13. (188) Kenta Maeda (LAD – SP)

14. (203) Zack Cozart (LAA – SS)

15. (218) Adam Duvall (Cin – OF)

16. (233) Addison Reed (Min – RP)

17. (248) Carl Edwards Jr. (ChC – RP)

18. (263) Kole Calhoun (LAA – OF)

19. (278) David Robertson (NYY – RP)

20. (293) J.A. Happ (Tor – SP)

21. (308) Ryon Healy (Sea – 1B,3B)

22. (323) Pat Neshek (Phi – RP)

23. (338) Marco Estrada (Tor – SP)

24. (353) Gerardo Parra (Col – OF)

25. (368) Dominic Leone (StL – RP)

26. (383) Drew Steckenrider (Mia – RP)

Fred’s Take: Overall, I’m very happy with the results of the draft. I was able to execute my plan of getting one of the Big 4 starters (Corey Kluber), an elite closer (Kenley Jansen) and a deep group of hitters. With Aaron Judge, Rougned Odor and Adam Duvall in my lineup, winning the batting average category seems like a longshot. However, finishing high in the four counting-stat hitting categories seems attainable. And with a year of experience in this format, I dramatically changed my pitching strategy. After nabbing three starters I believe in (Kluber, Jeff Samardzija, Kenta Maeda), I loaded up on skilled setup men such as David Robertson, Carl Edwards Jr., Addison Reed and Pat Neshek. I’m hoping my approach will lead to outstanding results in strikeouts and the ratio categories.

Steal: Dee Gordon (Dalton Del Don, pick 36): Sure, Gordon is changing leagues and positions. But with all due respect to Billy Hamilton and Trea Turner, the veteran remains the safest steals source. And with the ability to hit .300 and score 100 runs, Gordon is much more than a one-category contributor.

Reach: Anthony Rizzo (Andy Behrens, pick 16): I understand the lure of Rizzo. He’s safe, and safety has value. But I don’t believe that his 2B eligibility gives him a big boost in value (position scarcity is largely a myth and multi-position options are plentiful in the Yahoo format), and at that point in the draft there were at least seven hitters on the board that I would have preferred over Rizzo.

Jason Klabacha – Yahoo – @YahooFantasy

Previous F&F Finish: 12th

1. (14) Kris Bryant (ChC – 3B,OF)

2. (17) Carlos Correa (Hou – SS)

3. (44) Corey Seager (LAD – SS)

4. (47) Anthony Rendon (Was – 3B)

5. (74) Domingo Santana (Mil – OF)

6. (77) Jonathan Schoop (Bal – 2B)

7. (104) Wade Davis (Col – RP)

8. (107) Matt Carpenter (StL – 1B,2B,3B)

9. (134) Jake Arrieta (ChC – SP)

10. (137) Alex Wood (LAD – SP)

11. (164) Adam Jones (Bal – OF)

12. (167) Salvador Perez (KC – C)

13. (194) Odubel Herrera (Phi – OF)

14. (197) Taijuan Walker (Ari – SP)

15. (224) Mike Clevinger (Cle – SP,RP)

16. (227) Aaron Hicks (NYY – OF)

17. (254) Marcus Stroman (Tor – SP)

18. (257) Andrelton Simmons (LAA – SS)

19. (284) AJ Ramos (NYM – RP)

20. (287) Tyler Chatwood (ChC – SP,RP)

21. (314) Jarrod Dyson (Ari – OF)

22. (317) Michael Kopech (CWS – SP)

23. (344) Matt Shoemaker (LAA – SP)

24. (347) Steven Matz (NYM – SP)

25. (374) Adalberto Mondesi (KC – 2B)

26. (377) A.J. Minter (Atl – RP)

Jason’s Take: Pitching went heavy early and pushed some big bats later than you would expect. Liked the value of Machado, Judge, Lindor and Martinez in what would be late second or early third round of most drafts because of that.

Steal: It’s not an exciting pick but Edwin Encarnacion going at pick 70 is pretty good value for a guy that consistently puts up 30-plus homers and 100-plus RBI without crushing you on average.

Reach: Everyone in this room knows more than I do when it comes to drafting, including the Hall of Famer Brandon Funston, but I was surprised Robbie Ray went 33rd. He put up great numbers last year and should be a solid starter again but felt a little early on him. Believe in the humidor.

What can Hoskins do for an encore? (AP/Lynne Sladky)

Andy Behrens – Yahoo – @andybehrens

Previous F&F Finishes: 8th, 3rd, 10th, 14th, 3rd, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 3rd, 7th, 1st

1. (15) Joey Votto (Cin – 1B)

2. (16) Anthony Rizzo (ChC – 1B,2B)

3. (45) Rhys Hoskins (Phi – 1B,OF)

4. (46) Yu Darvish (ChC – SP)

5. (75) Justin Turner (LAD – 3B)

6. (76) Rafael Devers (Bos – 3B)

7. (105) Matt Olson (Oak – 1B,OF)

8. (106) Masahiro Tanaka (NYY – SP)

9. (135) Yoan Moncada (CWS – 2B)

10. (136) Kelvin Herrera (KC – RP)

11. (165) Orlando Arcia (Mil – SS)

12. (166) Brett Gardner (NYY – OF)

13. (195) Delino DeShields (Tex – OF)

14. (196) Jameson Taillon (Pit – SP)

15. (225) Brad Ziegler (Mia – RP)

16. (226) Chad Green (NYY – RP)

17. (255) Jake Odorizzi (Min – SP)

18. (256) Brian McCann (Hou – C)

19. (285) Corey Dickerson (Pit – OF)

20. (286) Joakim Soria (CWS – RP)

21. (315) Carlos Gonzalez (Col – OF)

22. (316) Derek Fisher (Hou – OF)

23. (345) Eloy Jimenez (CWS – OF)

24. (346) Mychal Givens (Bal – RP)

25. (375) Jed Lowrie (Oak – 2B)

26. (376) Shohei Ohtani (Batter) (LAA – Util)

Andy’s Iliad: As the architect of perhaps the most successful and groundbreaking fantasy baseball draft method yet devised, I do feel a certain pressure to execute it flawlessly in every league. But there’s no better spot from which to employ TOTAL CORNER CONTROL™ principles than the fifteenth pick in a 15-team league. If you’re going to hand me the keys to the turn, TCC is definitely happening. Thus, six of my first seven selections in the Friends & Family draft were corner infielders: Joey Votto (15), Anthony Rizzo (16), Rhys Hoskins (45), Justin Turner (75), Rafael Devers (76) and Matt Olson (105).

It was a near-flawless TCC performance, basically. My only great regret was missing Alex Bregman, a third baseman with shortstop eligibility, who was selected early in Round 3. Otherwise, it was a master class in TCC team-building. Rizzo at second? Yes, please. The draft room was shattered. Beaten men, all of them. Salfino wept like a child. Liss retired from the industry. Grey Albright begged me to take him on as an apprentice (not for the first time), but I rejected him.

When you compulsively collect corner infielders, your rosters are generally solid in the power categories. I won’t hurt for home runs or RBIs, in all likelihood. Hopefully the presence of Votto, Turner and Devers is enough to guarantee that my team batting average remains competitive. I managed to draft a few sources for steals who should produce in multiple categories (Gardner, Arcia, Moncada), but couldn’t avoid adding a speed specialist (DeShields). These things happen when you’re picking fifteenth, and therefore have no shot at guys like Jose Altuve and Trea Turner.

My starting rotation is led by a pair of high-strikeout pitchers in winning environments, Yu Darvish and Masahiro Tanaka. Here’s hoping we get the second-half version of Tanaka (1.06 WHIP, 10.7 K/9) and not the guy who was torched in the early months of 2017. We use a relatively easy-to-reach innings max in the F&F league, so I’m not yet concerned about having only four starters. As in prior years, I’m using a few high-K middle relievers (Chad Green, Mychal Givens, Carson Smith) to control my pitching ratios. My closers are a sketchy group, but at least I have two (Herrera, Ziegler), and possibly a third (Soria).

All things considered, it was another triumph of a TCC draft. Fear me, friends and family.

Steal: It will not surprise you to learn that I thought Kyle Schwarber in the eleventh round was a filthy steal. You can read this year’s Schwarber propaganda right here. I also loved Manuel Margot in the tenth, and Miguel Andujar in the 20th.

Reach: I’ve already explained my position on Shohei Ohtani’s pitching outlook. He’s a fun story for sure, but I’m concerned that his innings won’t be there, limiting his impact. Someone always gets him a full round ahead of where I’d consider him. I’ll take Lance McCullers, Gerrit Cole and various other Astros ahead of Ohtani.

Jeff Erickson – Rotowire – @Jeff_Erickson

Previous F&F Finishes: 10th, 8th, 12th, 7th, 4th, 4th, 1st, 13th, 11th, 12th, 8th, 10th

1. (11) Max Scherzer (Was – SP)

2. (20) Madison Bumgarner (SF – SP)

3. (41) Justin Verlander (Hou – SP)

4. (50) Starling Marte (Pit – OF)

5. (71) Wil Myers (SD – 1B)

6. (80) Robinson Cano (Sea – 2B)

7. (101) Sean Doolittle (Was – RP)

8. (110) Hector Neris (Phi – RP)

9. (131) Jay Bruce (NYM – 1B,OF)

10. (140) Rich Hill (LAD – SP)

11. (161) Ryan Zimmerman (Was – 1B)

12. (170) Eugenio Suarez (Cin – 3B)

13. (191) Jorge Polanco (Min – SS)

14. (200) Mike Zunino (Sea – C)

15. (221) Jason Kipnis (Cle – 2B,OF)

16. (230) Kendrys Morales (Tor – 1B)

17. (251) Brad Peacock (Hou – SP,RP)

18. (260) Mark Trumbo (Bal – OF)

19. (281) Yangervis Solarte (Tor – 2B,3B,SS)

20. (290) Kevin Pillar (Tor – OF)

21. (311) Josh Reddick (Hou – OF)

22. (320) Ryan Madson (Was – RP)

23. (341) Melky Cabrera (KC – OF)

24. (350) Freddy Galvis (SD – SS)

25. (371) Kolten Wong (StL – 2B)

26. (380) Trevor Hildenberger (Min – RP)

Jeff’s Take: The critical decision in my draft was my second-round pick of Madison Bumgarner. Because of the nature of this league – daily moves albeit with a high-innings cap – and the current run climate, I want to avoid most of the shakier starting pitching tiers, and instead get most of my innings from either aces or relievers. Once I took Bumgarner, I also committed to getting a third ace in the third round, with the notion that I could try to catch up in the hitting counting stats with volume in the subsequent rounds. That comes with a cost – it’s almost impossible to compete in batting average if you miss out on the first three rounds of hitters, especially if you want to get saves later in the draft, too. So instead I tried to embrace punting average – the Mark Trumbo types are more than welcomed here.

Steal: Marwin Gonzalez, 11.9 – D.J. Short.

Reach: Lance McCullers, 6.9 – Grey Albright.

Ryan Boyer – Rotoworld – @RyanPBoyer

Previous F&F Finishes: 11th, 1st, 3rd, 4th, 10th

1. (2) Jose Altuve (Hou – 2B)

2. (29) Gary Sanchez (NYY – C)

3. (32) Josh Donaldson (Tor – 3B)

4. (59) James Paxton (Sea – SP)

5. (62) Corey Knebel (Mil – RP)

6. (89) Billy Hamilton (Cin – OF)

7. (92) Raisel Iglesias (Cin – RP)

8. (119) Zack Godley (Ari – SP)

9. (122) Ryan Braun (Mil – OF)

10. (149) Adam Eaton (Was – OF)

11. (152) Kyle Schwarber (ChC – OF)

12. (179) Greg Holland (Col – RP)

13. (182) Josh Bell (Pit – 1B)

14. (209) Addison Russell (ChC – SS)

15. (212) Blake Snell (TB – SP)

16. (239) Gio Gonzalez (Was – SP)

17. (242) Hanley Ramirez (Bos – 1B)

18. (269) Gleyber Torres (NYY – SS)

19. (272) Max Kepler (Min – OF)

20. (299) Devon Travis (Tor – 2B)

21. (302) Jordan Montgomery (NYY – SP)

22. (329) Jesse Winker (Cin – OF)

23. (332) Alex Cobb (TB – SP)

24. (359) Andrew Heaney (LAA – SP)

25. (362) Austin Barnes (LAD – C,2B)

26. (389) Adrian Gonzalez (NYM – 1B)

Ryan’s Take: As much as I enjoy starting my team out with Jose Altuve, being toward the end of a snake draft in a 15-teamer can be really rough because you just go so long in between picks. In general I’m happy with a Gary Sanchez/Josh Donaldson swing at 2/3, but it meant I was going to miss out on a lot of upper echelon starters and also that I’d have to grab a closer a little earlier than I’d like or risk really falling behind there. I also thought it was interesting how far the unsigned guys fell. Jake Arrieta at the end of Round 9. Greg Holland at the end of Round 12 (in a league where relievers are massively important). Alex Cobb and Lance Lynn in Round 23. I know it’s been a unique offseason, but these guys will find jobs. I think.

Steal: I get that there some concerns with Aaron Judge, but him falling to the 23rd pick looks like a win for Zinkie after he got his ace in Corey Kluber in Round 1. I have a feeling Rudy nabbing Ronald Acuna at pick No. 116 will wind up paying big dividends.

Reach: Giancarlo Stanton with the fifth overall pick is aggressive with the other options available there. Liss was willing to bet on a Miguel Cabrera bounce-back earlier that I would’ve been.

Lots of positions, homers, strikeouts (AP/Carlos Osorio)

Grey Albright – Razzball – @razzball

Previous F&F Finishes: 9th, 5th, 4th, 12th, 12th, 10th, 10th, 3rd

1. (7) Mookie Betts (Bos – OF)

2. (24) Francisco Lindor (Cle – SS)

3. (37) Jose Abreu (CWS – 1B)

4. (54) Carlos Martinez (StL – SP)

5. (67) Whit Merrifield (KC – 2B,OF)

6. (84) Lance McCullers Jr. (Hou – SP)

7. (97) Joey Gallo (Tex – 1B,3B,OF)

8. (114) Arodys Vizcaino (Atl – RP)

9. (127) Eddie Rosario (Min – OF)

10. (144) Justin Smoak (Tor – 1B)

11. (157) Shane Greene (Det – RP)

12. (174) Sonny Gray (NYY – SP)

13. (187) Trey Mancini (Bal – 1B,OF)

14. (204) Ketel Marte (Ari – SS)

15. (217) Patrick Corbin (Ari – SP)

16. (234) Chase Anderson (Mil – SP)

17. (247) Alex Claudio (Tex – RP)

18. (264) Alex Reyes (StL – SP)

19. (277) David Peralta (Ari – OF)

20. (294) Miguel Andujar (NYY – 3B)

21. (307) Jackie Bradley Jr. (Bos – OF)

22. (324) Juan Minaya (CWS – RP)

23. (337) Matt Kemp (LAD – OF)

24. (354) Chris Iannetta (Col – C)

25. (367) Trevor Williams (Pit – SP,RP)

26. (384) Jimmy Nelson (Mil – SP)

Grey’s Take: I was drafting two 15-team leagues at the same time — so, technically, I was drafting one 30-team league, right? No? Well, it felt like that with how the pitching was being drafted. I’ve heard people talk about how one should draft less pitching this year, because, after the top 5-7 starters, the rest is all treyf (Word of the Day!). That “Don’t bother drafting starters high” memo, yeah, that didn’t make it to this group of drafters. One drafter, let’s call him, Rotowire Erickson, because that’s his team name, drafted three starters with his 1st three picks. You’d think after taking Scherzer with the first pick it would be a solid foundation for pitching. But no! Or maybe Madison Bumgarner with the 2nd pick would’ve been enough. Nuh-uh. He followed Scherzer and Bumgarner with Justin Verlander. Oh… *climbs Mt. Everest* … Kay. (Editor’s note: we don’t edit Grey. Nor do we edit his annual finish.)

Steal: Ryan Braun in the 9th round. I know he’s as brittle as an 18-inch fingernail of a calcium deficient person, but at pick 122 overall, I would’ve taken him too.

Reach: Willson Contreras in the 5th round. In a one-catcher league, even one as deep as this, you should be punting catchers like you’re The Ghost of Reggie Roby.

Dalton Del Don – Yahoo – @daltondeldon

Previous F&F Finishes: 1st, 7th, 5th, 5th, 6th, 5th, 5th, 2nd

1. (6) Clayton Kershaw (LAD – SP)

2. (25) J.D. Martinez (Bos – OF)

3. (36) Dee Gordon (Sea – 2B)

4. (55) Jose Quintana (ChC – SP)

5. (66) Roberto Osuna (Tor – RP)

6. (85) Luis Castillo (Cin – SP)

7. (96) Trevor Story (Col – SS)

8. (115) Mark Melancon (SF – RP)

9. (126) Greg Bird (NYY – 1B)

10. (145) Manuel Margot (SD – OF)

11. (156) Ender Inciarte (Atl – OF)

12. (175) Garrett Richards (LAA – SP)

13. (186) Jose Peraza (Cin – 2B,SS)

14. (205) Wilson Ramos (TB – C)

15. (216) Scooter Gennett (Cin – 2B,3B,OF)

16. (235) Danny Duffy (KC – SP)

17. (246) Michael A. Taylor (Was – OF)

18. (265) Cole Hamels (Tex – SP)

19. (276) Mallex Smith (TB – OF)

20. (295) Scott Schebler (Cin – OF)

21. (306) Nick Williams (Phi – OF)

22. (325) Jeimer Candelario (Det – 3B)

23. (336) Lucas Giolito (CWS – SP)

24. (355) Joc Pederson (LAD – OF)

25. (366) Teoscar Hernandez (Tor – OF)

26. (385) Matt Bush (Tex – RP)

Dalton’s Take: I’m typically more aggressive drafting starting pitchers earlier than most and even more so in a format like this, so I knew I’d get one of the “big four” with my first pick and was pleased to have Kershaw fall. After that, it was mostly a “best player available” approach, albeit realizing this league drafts closers sooner than usual. The 15-team format this year added a new depth, as reaching the 1,400-inning limit will be tougher, but K/9 should still remain plenty important. I was happy with my draft overall, although I’m woefully thin at CI, but there’s trading allowed here.

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Steal: Chris Davis averaged 42.5 homers, 99.5 runs scored and 100.5 RBI from 2015-2016 and still hits in an extreme hitters’ park, so he was a bargain at the end of the 13th round in a 15-team league.

Reach: Given his extensive injury history and the introduction of the humidor in Chase Field, I wouldn’t have taken A.J. Pollock at the 4/5 turn, as I far preferred Byron Buxton’s upside there (he went three picks later).

Scott Pianowski – Yahoo – @scott_pianowski

Previous F&F Finishes: 3rd, 4th, 6th, 1st, 2nd, 11th, 4th, 1st, 2nd, 1st, 2nd, 6th, 2nd

1. (4) Nolan Arenado (Col – 3B)

2. (27) George Springer (Hou – OF)

3. (34) Brian Dozier (Min – 2B)

4. (57) Xander Bogaerts (Bos – SS)

5. (64) Byron Buxton (Min – OF)

6. (87) Cody Allen (Cle – RP)

7. (94) Kyle Hendricks (ChC – SP)

8. (117) Jose Berrios (Min – SP)

9. (124) Gregory Polanco (Pit – OF)

10. (147) Carlos Santana (Phi – 1B,OF)

11. (154) Blake Treinen (Oak – RP)

12. (177) Tim Anderson (CWS – SS)

13. (184) Maikel Franco (Phi – 3B)

14. (207) Dinelson Lamet (SD – SP)

15. (214) Aaron Altherr (Phi – OF)

16. (237) Dexter Fowler (StL – OF)

17. (244) Yadier Molina (StL – C)

18. (267) Jedd Gyorko (StL – 1B,2B,3B)

19. (274) Cameron Maybin (Mia – OF)

20. (297) Shin-soo Choo (Tex – OF)

21. (304) Julio Teheran (Atl – SP)

22. (327) Tommy Kahnle (NYY – RP)

23. (334) Lance Lynn (StL – SP)

24. (357) Dustin Pedroia (Bos – 2B)

25. (364) Brandon Drury (NYY – 2B)

26. (387) Steve Cishek (ChC – RP)

Scott’s Take: I agree with many of the competitors, this was a hard draft. The addition of a team forces us to have less depth than usual, and I didn’t see anyone who was shanking the draft — everyone was present for the full three hours, no one was bumped offline.

It’s no fun to draft pitching. I didn’t ignore it, but I guess I semi-punted it. I really need my two closers to be solid, or I’ll have to outduel 14 other guys for the fresh saves (cheap saves is a lovely idea in shallow leagues or less-competitive ones, but it’s a tricky needle to thread in a scrum like this). I went for a core of highly-projectable players (the base), then shifted mostly to upside in the middle rounds. A lot of players in that pocket will be dropped, anyway.

[2018 Fantasy Baseball rankings: Overall | H | P | C | 1B | 2B | 3B |SS | OF | SP | RP]

I was hoping to get more position-flexible guys, but given this league uses two utility spots and just four outfielders, that might not matter much. Outfield is so deep, I don’t think it needs to be prioritized in a mixer, even a 15-teamer. Primarily, just get the best offensive players, work the positions later. Yahoo’s game has very low qualification hurdles, which I’m in favor of.

As usual, a bunch of boring, solid veterans are on my team. Some things never change. Altherr might be a screw-up, since his gig isn’t guaranteed, but it’s late enough that I’ll get over it.

Steal: Batting average is the least sexy of the 5×5 categories. D.J. LeMahieu offers a very high floor there, and will do some other things. He also seems like a lock to slot No. 2 in Colorado. Sounds good at Pick 150. Other reasonable values: Justin Smoak at 144, Mike Moustakas at 161, Taijuan Walker at 197 (under ADP, but I thought he’d go earlier in this room), Avisail Garcia at 193 (he can regress a bunch and still make a profit, as can Smoak and Moose).

Reach: Given that Stephen Strasburg is a virtual lock for DL time, I would not take him in the second round. And given that Aroldis Chapman is not a big-inning reliever — he’s made it to 70 innings just once — I wouldn’t take him in the Top 50.

Marwin Gonzalez, defensive chameleon (AP/Jeff Roberson)

D.J. Short – Rotoworld – @djshort

Previous F&F Finishes: 6th, 6th, 1st, 10th, 1st

1. (9) Chris Sale (Bos – SP)

2. (22) Manny Machado (Bal – 3B)

3. (39) Christian Yelich (Mil – OF)

4. (52) Aaron Nola (Phi – SP)

5. (69) Buster Posey (SF – C,1B)

6. (82) Edwin Diaz (Sea – RP)

7. (99) Eric Hosmer (SD – 1B)

8. (112) Andrew McCutchen (SF – OF)

9. (129) Travis Shaw (Mil – 3B)

10. (142) Trevor Bauer (Cle – SP)

11. (159) Marwin Gonzalez (Hou – 1B,2B,3B,SS,OF, PG, TE)

12. (172) Steven Souza Jr. (Ari – OF)

13. (189) Todd Frazier (NYM – 3B)

14. (202) Cesar Hernandez (Phi – 2B)

15. (219) Kevin Gausman (Bal – SP)

16. (232) Nate Jones (CWS – RP)

17. (249) Jake Faria (TB – SP)

18. (262) Hunter Renfroe (SD – OF)

19. (279) Kyle Barraclough (Mia – RP)

20. (292) Asdrubal Cabrera (NYM – 2B,3B,SS)

21. (309) Dustin Fowler (Oak – OF)

22. (322) Zach Britton (Bal – RP)

23. (339) Joe Musgrove (Pit – SP,RP)

24. (352) Yasmani Grandal (LAD – C)

25. (369) Yoshihisa Hirano (Ari – RP)

26. (382) Jorge Soler (KC – OF)

D.J.’s Take: Expanding to 15 teams definitely made this a challenging exercise. This was one of those drafts where I found myself consistently being sniped. I suppose that’s to be expected with this level of competition in the same (virtual) room. You aren’t sneaking up on anyone here. I was happy to begin my draft with one of the big four starting pitchers (Chris Sale) before landing Manny Machado (and his pending shortstop eligibility), but the rest of the draft wasn’t about specific players as much as plugging spots. I ended up taking a couple of players I probably would avoid in more shallow leagues (Eric Hosmer and Andrew McCutchen, for example), but I could live with it under these circumstances.

Steal: J.T. Realmuto at 158. I really liked this pick, mostly because it made me feel dumb for taking Buster Posey a lot earlier. I see them as fairly comparable at this point, even though Realmuto will have to deal with a diminished supporting cast if he stays in Miami. I know this is a one-catcher league, but there’s something to be said for having one of the better ones in a 15-team set-up. The quality at the position drops off fast. Taking into account my selection of Posey, Zinkie got a great value.

Reach: Domingo Santana at 74. On talent alone, you could say it’s deserved, but playing time could be a challenge for him in Milwaukee following the offseason additions of Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain. Even if Ryan Braun gets comfortable at first base, the best-case scenario is that Santana gets part-time at-bats. That’s not going to justify this price. Maybe a trade can save him?

Chris Liss – Rotowire – @chris_liss

Previous F&F Finishes: 7th, 2nd, 2nd, 3rd, 9th, 3rd, 2nd, 9th, 1st, 6th, 3rd, 1st, 9th

1. (12) Bryce Harper (Was – OF)

2. (19) Noah Syndergaard (NYM – SP)

3. (42) Luis Severino (NYY – SP)

4. (49) Aroldis Chapman (NYY – RP)

5. (72) Miguel Cabrera (Det – 1B)

6. (79) Yasiel Puig (LAD – OF)

7. (102) Brandon Morrow (ChC – RP)

8. (109) Javier Baez (ChC – 2B,SS,CI)

9. (132) Ian Happ (ChC – 2B,OF)

10. (139) Jonathan Villar (Mil – 2B,OF)

11. (162) Mike Moustakas (KC – 3B)

12. (169) Chris Devenski (Hou – RP)

13. (192) Chris Davis (Bal – 1B)

14. (199) Michael Wacha (StL – SP)

15. (222) Michael Brantley (Cle – OF)

16. (229) Keone Kela (Tex – RP)

17. (252) Tim Beckham (Bal – 2B,SS)

18. (259) Carlos Gomez (TB – OF)

19. (282) Victor Robles (Was – OF)

20. (289) Yuli Gurriel (Hou – 1B)

21. (312) Emilio Pagan (Oak – RP)

22. (319) Felix Hernandez (Sea – SP)

23. (342) Rick Porcello (Bos – SP)

24. (349) Tyler Glasnow (Pit – SP)

25. (372) Jose Reyes (NYM – 2B,3B,SS)

26. (379) Tim Lincecum (LAA – SP)

Chris’s Take: That was a tough draft. I like the 12 spot in the 12-team, but in 15, I think you’re a little light by the time Round 3 gets to you. I was hoping to get Kenley Jansen or Craig Kimbrel there, but both were gone, and I settled for Luis Severino instead. I might have the riskiest team I’ve ever drafted. Every single pick from Bryce Harper to Syndergaard to Miguel Cabrera to Brandon Morrow on down is fraught with risk. I don’t mind that, but it’s worth noting there’s collapse potential here. The only pick I seriously regret was Chris Devenski in the 12th. Ace relievers are gold in this format, but it was too early. I should have picked Sonny Gray instead.

[Chris Liss’s extended F&F review]

Steal: Jake Arrieta at 9.14. I almost pulled the trigger on him, but my team needed offense. I still probably should have taken him instead of Ian Happ. There’s big upside if Arrieta signs in the right place.

Reach: Robbie Ray at 3.3 seems early to me. He’s a good K source, and the humidor should help, but he’s not a real ace given his command issues.

Rudy Gamble – Razzball – @rudygamble

Previous F&F Finishes: 2nd, 10th, 9th, 6th

1. (5) Giancarlo Stanton (NYY – OF)

2. (26) Jose Ramirez (Cle – 2B,3B)

3. (35) Alex Bregman (Hou – 3B,SS)

4. (56) Marcell Ozuna (StL – OF)

5. (65) Shohei Ohtani (Pitcher) (LAA – SP)

6. (86) Felipe Rivero (Pit – RP)

7. (95) Ozzie Albies (Atl – 2B)

8. (116) Ronald Acuña (Atl – OF)

9. (125) Jon Lester (ChC – SP)

10. (146) Alex Colome (TB – RP)

11. (155) Jon Gray (Col – SP)

12. (176) Paul DeJong (StL – 2B,SS)

13. (185) Charlie Morton (Hou – SP)

14. (206) Willie Calhoun (Tex – OF)

15. (215) Logan Morrison (Min – 1B)

16. (236) Marcus Semien (Oak – SS)

17. (245) Cam Bedrosian (LAA – RP)

18. (266) Josh Harrison (Pit – 2B,3B,OF)

19. (275) Brad Boxberger (Ari – RP)

20. (296) Lucas Duda (KC – 1B)

21. (305) Tanner Roark (Was – SP)

22. (326) Nicky Delmonico (CWS – OF)

23. (335) Chris Stratton (SF – SP)

24. (356) Leonys Martin (Det – OF)

25. (365) Tyler Flowers (Atl – C)

26. (386) Sam Dyson (SF – RP)

Rudy’s Take: I love this league as it is the closest expert league to the format most fantasy baseball players play. No slow drafting. Daily transactions. Just the change-up that it is 15 teams vs 10/12 team which helps facilitate delicious “I hate this guy’s team” takes in the comments of this post. That said, this draft (60 seconds/pick) is like getting a Thor fastball after the Jamie Moyer-like pace of slow drafts.

As always, a couple folks (Erickson, Liss, DDD) go heavy on starting pitchers in the first 3 rounds which forces the rest of us to either pay up for guys we like, draft the guys in our rankings that we typically shy away from, or some combination. Yada yada, I tried not to pay up and my first 3 SPs are Ohtani/Lester/Jon Gray. Yay?! On the bright side, when a couple teams heavily invest in SPs, the rest of the teams have diluted staffs so there are more points to gain by having an average pitching staff.

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The biggest change from previous years is this draft moved up several weeks which changed my end game strategy. I took 3 closer lottery tickets (Bedrosian, Boxberger, Dyson) as the value of a Closer in this format is so huge (given I have 0.001% chance of beating anyone to waiver wire for a new closer). After repeating my Acuna/Calhoun rookie nookie picks from mixed LABR, I avoided any prospecting in late rounds in favor of a few OFs (Delmonico, Leonys) that might default their ways into nice batting order spots in early April. I also have a slew of multi-position hitters (not hard in Yahoo, amiright?) which should come in handy for maximizing ABs without using all my bench spots on hitters.

Steal: Manny Machado at pick #22 to DJ Short is a gift. Granted, the bats in the 2nd round are uniformly great (I got Jose Ramirez at pick #26?!) but I think Machado is more valuable than the 6 other hitters taken after Bryce Harper and he will have nice SS/3B eligibility.

Reach: While I am not a fan of closers in the 3rd round, the biggest reach for me was Domingo Santana at 5.14. The talent is there but there is still too much uncertainty on his playing time and I cannot see him hitting any higher than 5th in this lineup.

Josh Hader pitches with his hair on fire (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Brandon Funston – Fantasy Record – @brandonfunston

Previous F&F Finishes: 14th, 9th, 11th, 9th, 13th, 13th, 9th, 7th, 5th, 9th, 7th, 9th, 1st

1. (3) Trea Turner (Was – SS)

2. (28) Cody Bellinger (LAD – 1B,OF)

3. (33) Robbie Ray (Ari – SP)

4. (58) Chris Archer (TB – SP)

5. (63) Willson Contreras (ChC – C)

6. (88) Ken Giles (Hou – RP)

7. (93) Miguel Sano (Min – 1B,3B)

8. (118) Jeurys Familia (NYM – RP)

9. (123) Adrian Beltre (Tex – 3B)

10. (148) Eduardo Nunez (Bos – 2B,3B,SS,OF)

11. (153) Johnny Cueto (SF – SP)

12. (178) Bradley Zimmer (Cle – OF)

13. (183) Jake Lamb (Ari – 3B)

14. (208) Mitch Haniger (Sea – OF)

15. (213) David Dahl (Col – OF)

16. (238) Josh Hader (Mil – RP)

17. (243) Michael Conforto (NYM – OF)

18. (268) Luiz Gohara (Atl – SP)

19. (273) Jose Martinez (StL – 1B,OF)

20. (298) Miles Mikolas (StL – SP)

21. (303) Starlin Castro (Mia – 2B)

22. (328) Juan Nicasio (Sea – RP)

23. (333) Will Harris (Hou – RP)

24. (358) Hunter Pence (SF – OF)

25. (363) Francisco Mejia (Cle – Util)

26. (388) Hernan Perez (Mil – 2B,3B,SS,OF)

Brandon’s Take: This was actually my first baseball draft of ’18, so I went in to this with my top priority being to not embarrass myself — I may not have been successful in that endeavor. With the No. 3 overall pick, I figured I would take who was left from Mike Trout, Jose Altuve or Trea Turner. I was fine with Turner falling to me because he’s capable of stealing 50-60 bags which, given how little players are running these days (just 29 players stole 20+ bases in ’17), should keep me very competitive in that category. He also should fatten my bottom line in batting average and runs, as well. I went looking for a couple aces to anchor my staff in the next few rounds. I was dreaming of a Jacob deGrom, Carlos Martinez 1-2 punch in Rounds 3-4, but both pitchers went just a couple picks ahead of my draft spot in each of those rounds, so I settled for Robbie Ray and Chris Archer. They combined for nearly 450 Ks last season, which well play well in an IP capped league such as this, but they lack the sleep-well-at-night track record that deGrom/Martinez would have provided.

[Salfino and Pianow break down the F&F Draft]

Steal: I thought Jean Segura (pick No. 100, Rotowire-Jenstad) was a sweet deal. He missed 37 games last season, but still stole 22 bases and scored 80 runs while hitting .300. He’s in the catbird seat in the M’s lineup this season hitting between Dee Gordon and Robinson Cano. A shortstop that should push 15/25 with plus tallies in Runs and BA should have gone about 20 picks sooner, in my opinion.

Reach: I’m not interested in Joey Gallo at the price he went for (No. 97 overall, 40 spots ahead of his Yahoo ADP). The power is definitely elite, but it comes at the price of a Mendoza neighborhood batting average. Power is just not that hard to find. I’d prefer to take mine without the need for a ladder to climb out of the huge hole that Gallo leaves in your team’s batting average category.

Michael Lazarus – Yahoo – @mroblaz

First year in F&F

1. (13) Paul Goldschmidt (Ari – 1B)

2. (18) Freddie Freeman (Atl – 1B,3B)

3. (43) Zack Greinke (Ari – SP)

4. (48) Nelson Cruz (Sea – OF)

5. (73) Elvis Andrus (Tex – SS)

6. (78) Dallas Keuchel (Hou – SP)

7. (103) Brad Hand (SD – RP)

8. (108) Chris Taylor (LAD – 2B,SS,OF)

9. (133) Brad Brach (Bal – RP)

10. (138) Aaron Sanchez (Tor – SP)

11. (163) Nomar Mazara (Tex – OF)

12. (168) Fernando Rodney (Min – RP)

13. (193) Avisail Garcia (CWS – OF)

14. (198) Drew Pomeranz (Bos – SP)

15. (223) Ryan McMahon (Col – CI)

16. (228) Welington Castillo (CWS – C)

17. (253) Michael Fulmer (Det – SP)

18. (258) Lewis Brinson (Mia – OF)

19. (283) Stephen Piscotty (Oak – OF)

20. (288) J.P. Crawford (Phi – 3B,SS)

21. (313) Dansby Swanson (Atl – SS)

22. (318) German Marquez (Col – SP)

23. (343) Bud Norris (StL – SP,RP)

24. (348) Wilmer Flores (NYM – 1B,2B,3B)

25. (373) Zach Davies (Mil – SP)

26. (378) Ben Gamel (Sea – OF)

Laz’s Take: First time I’ve drafted this early into spring training. About 6 rounds in realized that my team was on the safe side (high floor, maybe low ceiling). Was very happy with a Goldschmidt/Freeman corner combination but found myself reaching for relief pitching too early for my taste because of the 15-team league. The last time I punted saves it did not go well. So now I need my Hand, Barch, Rodney combo to hold up.

Steal: Heading into round 10 I have Yoan Moncada and Alex Wood lined up and both were taken in the three picks before. I had to panic a bit and hope that Aaron Sanchez’ blister problems are behind him, really felt Wood was good value where he went. There was also a lot of batting value in round 13 with Justin Bour, Jake Lamb, Todd Frazier and a bunch of outfielders.

Reach: There were definitely some in the third round. While I like Robbie Ray, I was surprised he went before Zach Greinke. I’ve never been a Dee Gordon fan and Alex Bregman felt like a reach midway through Round 3.

Scott Jenstad – Rotowire – @scottjenstad

First Year in F&F

1. (10) Charlie Blackmon (Col – OF)

2. (21) Stephen Strasburg (Was – SP)

3. (40) Craig Kimbrel (Bos – RP)

4. (51) Andrew Benintendi (Bos – OF)

5. (70) Edwin Encarnacion (Cle – 1B)

6. (81) Gerrit Cole (Hou – SP)

7. (100) Jean Segura (Sea – SS)

8. (111) Nicholas Castellanos (Det – 3B,OF)

9. (130) Luke Weaver (StL – SP)

10. (141) David Price (Bos – SP,RP)

11. (160) Andrew Miller (Cle – RP)

12. (171) Kevin Kiermaier (TB – OF)

13. (190) Evan Gattis (Hou – C)

14. (201) Luke Gregerson (StL – RP)

15. (220) Eric Thames (Mil – 1B,OF)

16. (231) Chris Owings (Ari – 2B,SS,OF)

17. (250) Brandon Belt (SF – 1B,OF)

18. (261) Dylan Bundy (Bal – SP)

19. (280) Albert Pujols (LAA – 1B)

20. (291) C.J. Cron (TB – 1B)

21. (310) Brandon Crawford (SF – SS)

22. (321) Eduardo Rodriguez (Bos – SP)

23. (340) Neil Walker (Mil – 1B,2B)

24. (351) Mikie Mahtook (Det – OF)

25. (370) Collin McHugh (Hou – SP)

26. (381) Jonathan Lucroy (Col – C)

Scott’s Take: With the depth of a 15 teamer, I went into the draft wanting to make sure to get four starting pitchers I really liked as I think the pitching really drops off rapidly in the middle rounds (and while I am comfortable finding hitters in the middle and back of the draft that I like, I am wary of most of them arms in that range). I was able to get one ace and three other starters I like as a solid base, and can now mix and match the back end with strong core plus Kimbrel.

[2018 Fantasy Baseball rankings: Overall | H | P | C | 1B | 2B | 3B |SS | OF | SP | RP]

With daily pickups in this league, I wanted to get one strong closer, but then not worry as much after that as I figured I will be able to grab some speculative guys during the season and hit on some saves. The closers came off the table earlier than ADP and I went elsewhere in those rounds to try and build the rest of my team with players I liked more than some mid-ranger and risky closers. Hopefully it works!

Steal: I loved where Salfino got Yoenis Cespedes in the 7th round at pick 91. I almost took him in the 6th and 7th round with my picks and think he has significant upside at that price.

Reach: I didn’t like Robbie Ray early in round 3. I know the humidor is a factor and K’s are big in this league with the innings limit, but I think the next 4-5 starters would have been my choice over Ray.

#_uuid:161c8cf4-158d-38d8-838e-406abb2c44de #_author:Scott Pianowski #_category:yct:001000854 #_lmsid:a077000000CFoGyAAL #_revsp:54edcaf7-cdbb-43d7-a41b-bffdcc37fb56

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usnewsaggregator-blog · 7 years ago

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Here's why David Cone could be perfect candidate for Yankees

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/heres-why-david-cone-could-be-perfect-candidate-for-yankees/

Here's why David Cone could be perfect candidate for Yankees

Would Brian Cashman really hire someone like Josh Paul as the next Yankee manager, even if most fans in the Bronx have never heard of the guy?

More to the point, would Hal Steinbrenner be OK with that?

On Friday I asked that question of multiple people close to the situation and didn’t get a no, apparently because the owner trusts Cashman to make the right call and isn’t really concerned about name value now that the Yankees have young stars and a bright future.

OK, but if the GM is looking for an outside-the-box, analytically-savvy candidate, I’ve got one for him that does have name value:

Yankees coaching staff in limbo as search for manager is on

David Cone.

If you listen to him doing Yankee games on YES, you know Cone was ahead of the curve on analytics, in terms of bringing it to the audience for years now, and he offers smart analysis about all phases of the game.

David Cone, who celebrates 1999 perfect game with Joe Girardi, appears to have all the skills Brian Cashman is looking for to replace his former teammate as next manager of the Yankees.

(JEFF ZELEVANSKY/AP)

No less significant, as a top starting pitcher Cone was a big part of the Yankees’ dynasty in the 1990s, a player that teammates considered a leader in the clubhouse, and someone who was great with the media.

The former Cy Young Award winner always had plenty of ideas about the state of the game, as a player representative who was involved in then-contentious bargaining discussions between the players union and owners.

Naehring not interested in being next Yankees manager: report

On Friday, Cone didn’t want to get into discussing himself as a potential candidate, but I’ve talked to him enough to know he’d be interested in talking to Cashman about managing.

The GM ought to make that call, as one Yankee person on Friday agreed:

Joe Girardi’s Yankees career through the years

“I think he’d do an incredible job – he was more of a leader than most people knew, great at talking man-to-man with teammates. I just don’t know if Cash would go that far outside the box.”

There is precedent for it. Then-Astros’ GM Gerry Hunsicker pulled Larry Dierker, also a former pitcher, out of the TV booth to manage in 1997, and his teams won four division titles in his five years on the job, before he moved on due to health reasons.

Yuli Gurriel mocks Yu Darvish with racist gesture

One thing that is becoming clear: if Cashman thought it would work, he could sell it to Hal Steinbrenner.

“Cash has built up a lot of equity with everything he’s done to improve the team and the farm system in the last few years,” was the way one Yankee person put it. “He already had the trust of ownership, but now it’s on a different level.”

And then there’s this:

“Hal knows he has a team with young stars that fans love again and doesn’t need a name manager to help sell it,” another person said. “And he’s bought into the analytics philosophy that the team is good enough to win no matter who is managing, as long as he’s competent.”

Why the Yankees should hire Willie Randolph to be next manager

David Cone could be just what the Yankees are looking for in a new manager.

(Al Bello/Getty Images)

That would seem to open the door for someone like Paul, the organizational catching coordinator who I’ve heard Cashman speak highly of in the past, in terms of his coaching and people skills, though not specifically as a managerial candidate.

Would the GM really go that route? Well, I do remember him telling me a decade ago that if he hadn’t hired Girardi in 2008, the guy he liked was Trey Hillman, then a Yankee minor-league manager who never played in the big leagues.

I’m not sure Cashman actually would have had the guts to hire someone that unknown to follow a legend like Joe Torre. But as it turned out, Hillman eventually did get hired by the Royals and flopped badly, lasting barely more than two seasons.

At least Paul played in the big leagues as a backup catcher for nine seasons, though none with the Yankees.

Joe Girardi will not return as manager of Yankees

Anyway, people I spoke to on Friday said that Cashman does think highly of Paul, but none of them knew how seriously the GM is considering him as a candidate.

The same people seemed to think bench coach Rob Thomson would be very much in the running, with one saying, “He’s analytics-savvy, and has a lot of Girardi’s qualities, only more easy-going.”

As for reaction to a couple of other potential candidates:

Jay Bell, the former major leaguer who is the Yankees’ Class-A manager in Tampa?

It may not be fair to Girardi, but time was right for him to go

“Too much like Girardi,” one person said. “Pretty high-strung.”

Kevin Long, the Yankees’ former hitting coach who was once a Cashman favorite, but wound up getting fired after the 2014 season? After two years as Mets’ hitting coach, Long made a good impression interviewing for the Mets’ job, before losing out to Mickey Callaway.

“There’s some kind of issue there,” one person said, meaning between Long and Cashman. “It might be that he talked too much (to the press) or that he was too close to A-Rod. But I’d be surprised (if he got hired).”

SHOWCASE VIN

That little theater performance Vin Scully put on before Game 2 might be what I remember most from this World Series. It was a gem, wasn’t it?

By moving on from Joe Girardi, Yankees are Brian Cashman’s team

If you didn’t know Scully’s story as the legendary Dodger broadcaster, you’d never believe that he will be 90 years old next month, as he captivated the big crowd with his storytelling magic.

Ah, but I was sure when he faked the shoulder problem and asked if there was another lefthander in the house, that Sandy Koufax was going to pop out of the dugout.

Fernando Valenzuela is a beloved lefty to Dodger fans himself, but there’s only one Koufax. He would have brought down the house.

He was in attendance too, but as much as he has avoided the spotlight all these years in retirement, Koufax probably turned down the part.

5 leading candidates to replace Joe Girardi as Yankees manager

BIRD IS THE WORD

When all was said and done, in the Yankees’ postseason, Didi Gregorius, Aaron Judge, Greg Bird, Gary Sanchez, and Todd Frazier all hit important home runs, but which was the most memorable?

To at least one major-league scout, it was no contest, as he cited the home run Bird hit off Indians’ lefty Andrew Miller, the only run in the Yankees’ 1-0 win in Game 3 of the ALDS.

“I mean, Miller doesn’t give up home runs to lefties,” the scout said. “And in that at-bat, he started him with two sliders, and Bird had a good swing to foul off the second slider, so Miller is probably thinking he’s sitting on it.

“He tries to come in on him with 96 (mph), and Bird turned on it like it was BP fastball. That kid is some hitter. Great plate discipline, easy power. If he can stay healthy, and the ball is flying again next year, he’ll hit 40 home runs.”

Derek Jeter and other Yankees react to Joe Girardi not returning

In that case, Judge, Sanchez, and Bird could combine for what, 140 dingers? Should be quite a power show.

SABER-RATTLING

This is the All-Analytics World Series, of course, as Dodgers vs. Astros features two of the most sabermetrically-driven franchises in the sport.

And obviously it’s working for them, but Game 2 was a reminder that managing-by-the-numbers has its risks as well. There was absolutely no reason for Dodgers’ manager Dave Roberts to pull lefty Rich Hill after four scoreless innings, no matter what the analytics said about facing the lineup a third time.

Was Roberts not watching Hill completely baffle Jose Altuve, among others? More likely he didn’t really have a choice, as such decisions are made ahead of time, in concert with the front office.

Many Yankee fans sad to see Joe Girardi leave

Sure, the Dodgers’ pen has been practically unhittable in the postseason, but going to it so early produced a ripple effect that led to Kenley Jansen needing to get a six-out save.

And when Jansen gave up the game-tying home run in the ninth, the Dodgers paid for it needing to use Josh Fields and Brandon McCarthy in the extra-inning defeat.

Sometimes it still pays to let managers make decisions based on what their eyes are telling them during the game.

THROWN FOR A CURVE

He may be the Mets’ new manager, but no doubt Mickey Callaway will be expected to work some magic with the starting rotation after such a disappointing season.

Joe Girardi, by the numbers as Yankees skipper

Callaway had great success as the Indians’ pitching coach at least partly by emphasizing the use of curveballs. According to a story on MLB.com, the Tribe staff threw the highest percentage of curve balls of any in the majors – and more than 1,000 more than any other staff over the last two seasons.

For Seth Lugo, who rather famously has the highest spin rate of any curve ball in the majors, Callaway could be a big benefit. Steven Matz and Noah Syndergaard have good ones as well that perhaps they’ll use to more effect now.

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othersportsnews-blog · 7 years ago

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ESPN professionals make their predictions for the 2nd half of the 2017 MLB period

New Post has been published on https://othersportsnews.com/espn-professionals-make-their-predictions-for-the-2nd-half-of-the-2017-mlb-period/

ESPN professionals make their predictions for the 2nd half of the 2017 MLB period

We asked 27 of our MLB professionals to search in advance to the 2nd half and make some close-of-period predictions. From the major name you will listen to at the trade deadline to the winner of the Tumble Basic, this is how the period is shaping up in their eyes.

AL champion

Eddie, Houston is 10 wins in advance of Boston at the crack. What designed you go with the Pink Sox around the Astros?

Admittedly, again in March when I picked the Pink Sox to go the Planet Sequence, that was centered on the assumption that Chris Sale, Rick Porcello and David Rate would all be dominant. Even while that hasn’t been the case, I’m stickin’ to my guns. Mainly because which is what I do. — Eddie Matz

NL champion

Scott, what’s it likely to just take to make your Nationals pick materialize?

Immediately after a few Division Sequence losses in the previous 5 decades, it can be incumbent on typical supervisor Mike Rizzo to tackle the Nationals’ only weak spot and do no matter what it can take to get again-close bullpen assist. There figure to be a good deal of solutions way too, from Raisel Iglesias or David Robertson to Ryan Madson or even a reunion with Mark Melancon. — Scott Lauber

Planet Sequence winner

Dave, you’re the only just one taking Washington. Why?

Okay, the Nationals will not have a championship-caliber bullpen. Tanner Roark has been awful. Dusty Baker’s historical past in the postseason is, umm, a little bit checkered. But you know they will trade for a few of relievers, they have four of the major 11 hitters in the majors centered on wOBA, and Max Scherzer is able of a Bumgarner-like run in the postseason. Furthermore, this was my preseason pick, so I am going to stick with it. — David Schoenfield

AL MVP

Sarah, what is it that will make Decide the very clear beloved in this article?

Decide is foremost the majors in wins earlier mentioned replacement, he is setting information still left and right (like the Yankees rookie household run full), and his group has completed far better than was envisioned. The bullpen has faltered currently — and other offensive performers haven’t been pretty to Judge’s level, which is bringing the offense down — but Decide himself has saved the group in the playoff race with his electrical power. And he is carrying out it all at just 25 decades aged. If he wins and also can take household Rookie of the Yr honors, he’d be the 3rd player ever to get ROY and MVP in the same period, becoming a member of 27-year-aged Ichiro Suzuki in 2001 and 23-year-aged Fred Lynn in 1975. — Sarah Langs

Brad, there are a few other Astros on this record. Why does Springer stand out to you?

It just feels like the AL MVP will arrive from the Astros. Even though there is a faculty of considered that the amount of their superior-level performances this period will result in their stars drafting votes from each other in the balloting, I see Springer emerging as the major vote-getter. He will get the most time on the emphasize reels simply because of his prodigious and plentiful leadoff homers and will make the performs in center industry. — Brad Doolittle

NL MVP

Dave, you went with the perennially underrated Paul Goldschmidt. What will make you believe he’ll get his due this period?

The NL MVP race appears to be like like a crowded affair, such as numerous players from the Nationals furthermore Clayton Kershaw in the combine. As a lot as Kershaw and Max Scherzer will in all probability have earned consideration, it can be tough for pitchers to get — particularly when there are two standouts. So I am going to go with America’s first baseman, who has the greatest WAR at the crack and will direct his group to the playoffs. — Dave Schoenfield

AL Cy Young

Mark, how can Kluber surpass Sale in the 2nd half?

Corey Kluber‘s again strain in May might have been a blessing in disguise. It enables him to maintain his arm fresh with a physically-demanding workload in 2017. Look at what he has completed considering that he came again: a one.24 Period, 74 strikeouts and just just one household run permitted in his first 7 begins. Even if his Period doubles, he’ll be in powerful rivalry for the honor. — Mark Simon

NL Cy Young

This is a shut connect with, Brad. How did you come to a decision?

Scherzer is both of those dominant and dependable, qualities that of course also explain Kershaw. Mainly because Kershaw could really have his most effective period but in wins (which I’m certain however issues to some subset of the voters), this ought to be a actually epic race. But I believe Scherzer will close up acquiring additional innings, and he is already on speed to have additional than a two-WAR gain, an awfully major hole for Kershaw to shut. — Brad Doolittle

How a lot of online games will the Astros get?

You experienced the greatest full for Houston, Sarah. What places it earlier mentioned 110 for you?

The Astros are on speed for just below 110 wins, but this group has demonstrated resilience and has not appeared “bad” for a complete week at any position this year. They just misplaced their tenth highway video game of the period. In July. It took them 41 highway conclusions to shed their tenth highway video game. The only teams to enjoy additional highway online games right before losing that tenth highway video game had been the 1906 Cubs and 2001 Mariners, who share the all-time wins record of 116. — Sarah Langs

How a lot of online games will the Dodgers get?

The panel is likely triple digits for the Dodgers, way too. What will make them this sort of a menace, Christina?

If you want major-tier talent providing superior-close performances, it does not get any much better or further than what the Dodgers are acquiring from their most effective. Their Kershaw-Kenley relationship gives them the single most effective setting up pitcher in the video game and the single most effective closer in the video game, but Alex Wood’s breakthrough period gives them a just one-two punch atop the rotation that could be overpowering in a small collection. They’ll however want to score on other teams’ major starters, but the Dodgers’ depth gives them an edge there as perfectly. Their lineup might start off with Corey Seager, Justin Turner and Cody Bellinger, but they have the electrical power just one as a result of 8 in the lineup to produce a major inning on offense at any position in-video game. Try to remember, Yasiel Puig bats eighth for this group fairly normally — and he ought to, even whilst placing up his most effective electrical power figures considering that his rookie period. Include in Dave Roberts’ lively and aggressive management of his bench and bullpen to get matchups past what his marquee players do in their turns and at-bats, and there is no group additional possible to get a 7-video game collection in October. — Christina Kahrl

Will Aaron Decide hit 50 household runs?

Another shut just one in this article, Dave. Why did you just take the around?

Even while he remains on speed for additional than 200 strikeouts, Judge’s potential to zero in on strikes suggests that when he does hook up, it normally goes a long way. With his apparent raw electrical power, merged with the lively baseballs, he’ll turn into the 3rd 50-homer male in the previous 10 seasons (becoming a member of Chris Davis in 2013 and Jose Bautista in 2010). — Dave Schoenfield

Who’s the major name that will get traded?

Dave, is McCutchen’s modern warm streak truly more than enough to entice other teams?

His modern surge — he has arguably been the most effective hitter in the majors considering that May 26 — has introduced his trade benefit again up. Even though he is signed as a result of following period, it will make sense for the Pirates to trade the previous MVP winner now whilst he is swinging a warm bat. — Dave Schoenfield

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