April 26, 2013

Fantasy Beat

Weekly #streameroftheday Update

by Bret Sayre

For those of you unfamiliar with the #streameroftheday process, I recommend one starting pitcher per day who is owned in fewer than 10% of leagues (lower than your typical standards) and post it on Twitter at @dynastyguru. And this Friday post is where I stand in front of the firing squad, fully accountable for these recommendations. I ran a longer introduction in my first post of the season, explaining why my ownership limit is much lower than most others out there, but essentially it's to be helpful in deeper mixed leagues. If you want to read the whole thing, the link is here. With the pleasantries out of the way, let's jump into the action.

Here were the details for the last seven days:

Date	Pitcher	Opp	IP	ER	H	BB	K	Dec
4/19/13	Brett Myers	HOU	5	3	5	2	4	Loss
4/20/13	Bronson Arroyo	CIN	8	1	6	1	6	ND
4/21/13	Wily Peralta	CHC	6 2/3	2	5	3	3	Win
4/22/13	Mike Leake	CHC	7	2	8	2	5	ND
4/23/13	Zach McAllister	CHW	PO	S	T	PO	N	ED
4/24/13	Zach McAllister	CHW	5 2/3	3	5	5	4	Loss
4/25/13	Garrett Richards	SEA	7	5	9	2	5	Loss

The week started out very promising, but the last two starts by McAllister and Richards helped put a damper on some good numbers. Additionally, it didn't help that both of the games started by Arroyo and Leake were low scoring affairs that went into extra innings (at least from a win perspective). It's also the second week I've had one of my picks rained out, though I stuck with McAllister on Wednesday instead of going with Ted Lilly (as I had originally planned), which ended up being a mistake.

And here are my overall numbers for both the week and the season:

	Wins	Win%	IP	ERA	WHIP	K	K/9
Week	1	17%	39 1/3	3.66	1.35	27	6.18
Season	7	32%	126 1/3	5.06	1.42	84	5.98

With a decent week, the overall numbers for the season so far are finally starting to move in the right direction. It's going to take some time to carve those tree trunk ratios into finely crafted wooden spoons, but it's a long season. As it gets easier to decipher which teams are the best matchups and which pitchers are most likely to be problem children for your ratios (I'm looking at you Joe Blanton), it will naturally get a little easier to find quality streamers, so losing patience with early-season streaming is not a worthy endeavor. See you again next week.

Bret Sayre is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @BretSayreBP
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