Jeurys Familia has been absolutely brilliant to begin the 2018 season. Coming into Saturday’s games he had allowed 0 ER on 5 H with a 13/5 K:BB ratio over 11.1 IP. But as in life, all good things must come to an end at some point. Familia was summoned in the eighth inning with two outs and a man on third. The Mets had already allowed two runs in the inning (Ramos/Blevins made appearances), hence the decision to not mess around and bring Familia in. He would make quick work of Preston Tucker – striking him out on four pitches. He came back in for the ninth inning with the Mets continuing to cling to a 3-2 lead. He walked the lead-off man – Dansby Swanson – on four pitches, and fell behind Johan Camargo as well.

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Life is full of guarantees… death, taxes, and Fernando Rodney finding himself on the closer hot seat. Its only April baseball and yet here we are again. Rodney fialed close it down Friday night with just a one-run lead. He would cough this one up in a fairly strange sequence of events.

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The Roto Riteup hopes you always keep things simple!

The @Pirates turned your standard 1-3-4-2-5-8-7 double play. pic.twitter.com/qXgKxNkLSA

— Cut4 (@Cut4) April 21, 2018

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The first few weeks of the season often produce entertaining statistical extremes. Wild ERAs, over-the-top “on pace” numbers, and inflated ratios that give us a sensible chuckle as we collectively understand the lack of truth they hold.

Often among these novelties are the early league-wide leaderboards. I elected to pull up the 2018 strikeout leaders and here is what you’ll see:
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It’s Scherzer v. Kershaw Day!!!

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I’m going over hitters who are getting regular at-bats who I didn’t consider rosterable in the preseason. It’s now time to see if I missed anything.

Christian Villanueva

Everyone missed on Villanueva to start the season. He got no prospect love anywhere and the only preseason profile I found called him a “utilityman”. I don’t like to miss this badly on a player and set up a filter to find these gems. I’m not sure I can.

To start with, he had a decent Triple-A season hitting .296/.369/.528 and continued the results in the majors.

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Ottoneu has historically offered four different formats (two total points linear weights based, one traditional 5×5, and one saber-oriented 4×4), but this year head to head was added as an option for points leagues (think of your typical fantasy football league). You can read more about the format here, but today I wanted to highlight some of the rules that differ between ottoneu head to head and the standard points formats, and some strategy ideas driven by those differences.

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Is the headline a reference? Is it a play on words? Is it just three words – two distinct words – arranged in an arbitrary order avec comma?

AGENDA

1. TDG Invitational
2. Weather Reports
3. Pitchers to Use and Abuse
4. SaberSim Says…
5. Run Fastball, Run
6. FanDuel Next Week?

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With managers relying more on relievers and less on starters last season, and with the emergence of fantasy-relevant non-closers like Chris Devenski, Chad Green and Archie Bradley, fantasy owners have been taking more interest in relievers who aren’t in line to get steady saves. Andrew Miller has long been on the fantasy radar, and he is currently owned in more than 60 percent of ESPN and CBS leagues. However, Bradley and Adam Ottavino are about as popular as some lower-end closers, as both are owned in more than one-third of the leagues on ESPN and CBS. Devenski, Green and Dellin Betances aren’t far behind in popularity.

On Thursday, the season reached its three-week mark, so we are not quite one-eighth through the schedule. In 2017, only five relievers exceeded 80 innings, but so far this season, there are already 43 relievers who have pitched at least 10 innings. Not everyone in this group will keep up this pace, and it’s not hard to imagine that some who stay on this pace will wear down and may even need some DL time.
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To say things have gone very, very well for the Los Angeles Angels so far in 2018 would be an understatement. The club sits quite handily in first place in the American League West division and features two of the most exciting players in all of baseball in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani. The one thing the club hasn’t done exceptionally well in recent memory, though, is develop players. It’s had a bottom third system for quite some time now.

But things are beginning to change for the better. I looked at the Angels Top 10 prospects list back in mid-March and identified a list that was slowly evolving into an impressive collection of players. Today, I’m going to take an early peek at how the top prospect, Jahmai Jones, is doing… along with one player I identified as a “just-missed” sleeper in pitcher Griffin Canning and a third player that I didn’t talk about at all in Taylor Ward.

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