SubscribeWith Jose Valverde signing with the Tigers and Octavio Dotel apparently heading to Pittsburgh, the closer situation for most teams has been settled.
You may have noticed, however, that one of the most glaring difficulties with using computer-generated projections (CAIRO, CHONE, etc.) for fantasy baseball is the lack of saves in these projections. Recognizing that saves are much more tied to a player’s situation than to his skills, most computerized projections make no attempt to quantify the number of saves for each player.
While that represents the reality of projecting, it obviously won’t work for fantasy, which allocates 20% of the pitching points based on saves. But what can be done to fix this?
I was hoping that the FanGraphs Fan Projections would be helpful for this, but there are still lots of pitchers (Joe Nathan, for one) who don’t have enough projections to show up. As it is, there’s at least enough data to pick an appropriate scale — about 40 saves for the top closers and 15-20 for the marginal ones.
So I have attempted to come up with my own save projections. I started off with a list sorted by the number of saves from the past two years, averaged with a 2:1 weighting. From there, I tweaked the rankings to account for changes in situations and a rough estimate of skill. The results are four basic tiers of closers:
40 Saves
Joe Nathan (47 S in 2009, 39 S in 2008)
Mariano Rivera (44, 39)
35 Saves
Jonathan Papelbon (38, 41)
Francisco Rodriguez (35, 62)
Brian Wilson (38, 41)
Francisco Cordero (39, 34)
Joakim Soria (30, 42)
Heath Bell (42, 0)
Papelbon and K-Rod are near the 40 save tier, but I think they’re just a shade below the top two. Bell and Soria both require some bonus credit to get ranked this highly, compensating for Soria’s missed time in 2009 and Bell’s single year track record.
30 Saves
Trevor Hoffman (37, 30)
Jose Valverde (25, 44)
Jonathan Broxton (36, 14)
David Aardsma (38, 0)
At this level, everyone has question marks. We’ve got injuries (Valverde, Francisco, Qualls), age-concerns (Hoffman), and one-year samples (Broxton, Aardsma) clouding the situation. These guys are still pretty solid, though.
25 Saves
Brian Fuentes (48, 30)
Brad Lidge (31, 41)
Ryan Franklin (38, 17)
Bobby Jenks (29, 30)
Huston Street (35, 18)
Matt Capps (27, 21)
Rafael Soriano (27, 3)
Chad Qualls (24, 9)
Frank Francisco (25, 5)
Billy Wagner (0, 27)
Despite leading the league in saves in 2009, Fuentes was a little rocky and now has Fernando Rodney on his team. Lidge’s totals look good, but I’m also a bit concerned with his late-season breakdown. Capps and Soriano have some question marks for injuries. Basically, this is the tier where I’m not surprised if anyone loses the closer’s gig by the All-Star break.
20 Saves
Kerry Wood (20, 34)
Andrew Bailey (26, 0)
Brandon Lyon (3, 26)
Mike Gonzalez (10, 14)
15 Saves
Leo Nunez (26, 0)
Carlos Marmol (15, 7)
Scott Downs (9, 5)
Jason Frasor (11, 0)
Octavio Dotel (0, 1)
The 15-20 range are all really speculative; I expect a good number of these guys to lose the closing job by midseason. Scott Downs and Jason Frasor seem like the best candidates in Toronto, but I can’t find any information about who is more likely to get saves.
These are back-of-the-envelope calculations — not exactly mathematically rigorous but certainly better than 0’s for everyone. I’m also not watching these players nearly as close as the fans of their teams are, and so I’m hardly an expert on their situations and skills.
I’ve gone ahead and added them to the Price Guide as the default save projections for CHONE, CAIRO, and the composite projections. I’d still encourage you to edit the projections how you see fit, but I think this at least starts things off looking more reasonable.
However, I’d really like some help in refining these numbers. Anybody have any suggestions for improving these tiers?