In recent seasons as the usage of bullpens has changed, the fantasy community has responded by switching from saves only leagues to saves plus holds. As the closer role has become less defined and teams are more willing to use a closer by committee approach this has widened the pool of viable relief options. This can especially important in deeper and only leagues as the number of reliable closers has dramatically dropped. For fantasy owners however, holds are not as easy to find as some may imagine. The typical roto categories have been chosen because with some minor exceptions there are fairly simple to project. Runs come from top of the order hitters in good lineups, RBIs from those guys in the middle. However, for holds there really is no one size fits all plan to find them. The common approach I have taken, especially in draft and hold formats is to load up on the second or third best relief option on a great team. The logic obviously being that since their team will be winning often it should put them in good position for hold opportunities. Often, as I did with the Red Sox bullpen this season, I will try to pair my top closer with his set-up man. This will allowed me to often times rack up two points on days the Red Sox won and Kimbrel earned a save.
Yet by the same idea if you had went after Yankees set-up options you would have found yourself near the bottom of your league’s holds leaderboards. The Yankees who won 100 games only had 77 holds on the season, good for 23rd in the league. They found themselves only ahead of seven other teams, six of which were among the worst teams in the league and the other was the Cleveland Indians. So near the bottom of a list that should reward the better teams we find two of the better teams in baseball with track records of having great bullpens – Cleveland’s did struggle a ton in 2018- near the bottom of the list. This means that owners of Andrew Miller, Dellin Betances, and David Robertson were likely disappointed with the results of their picks. Outside of Miller the other two were healthy in 2018 but just did not put up large holds totals. Betances and Robertson both did finish with 20 and 21 holds respectively making them pretty solid options but not the absolute studs they were expected to be.
This lead me to look into a number of different things to try to determine how to predict which teams will be near the top of the holds leader boards in 2019. I looked into a number of different things including wins, run differential, offensive variability (stdev of runs scored), and several other team level metrics. The results determined that all else equal having a better pitching staff leads to more holds opportunities compared to having a better offense. This is pretty intuitive so no real major takeaway here.
However, the final two conclusions may actually be something that we as fantasy owners can capitalize on. The chart below shows the relationships between Save Situations (Holds Opportunities), Holds, and team Wins from 2014-2018 using data pulled from Baseball-Reference. There definitely exists a positive relationship between both values and wins as teams that win more games will lead to more holds. However, the more important thing to note is that this relationship is not linear it actually has a slightly quadratic relationship. The teams that have provided the most holds on a regular basis have been the teams that are slightly above .500. So instead of targeting the teams that are expected to be the best in the league owners aiming for holds should look to teams projected win totals around 85 teams.
Looking at teams Pecota projected to win between 80-89 games we have:
Boston Red Sox – 4th in Holds
Tampa Bay Rays – 1st in Holds
Toronto Blue Jays – 18th in Holds
Minnesota Twins – 17th in Holds
Seattle Mariners – 3rd in Holds
Philadelphia Phillies – 7th in Holds
New York Mets – 28th in Holds
St. Louis Cardinals – 14th in Holds
Milwaukee Brewers – 10th in Holds
Arizona Diamondbacks – 2nd in Holds
San Francisco Giants – 21st in Holds
So out of the eleven teams that were projected between 80 and 89 wins just looking at Pecota we find six of the top ten teams in holds for the 2018 season. This is just one sampling of a projection system but going into 2018 outside of a few situations most people were not targeting these bullpens for their holds. In extremely deep leagues or draft and hold leagues taking several members of bullpens that fall into this projection group could be a very valuable strategy for owners.
Similarly, I looked into the impact of run differential on save situations and holds opportunities and found similar findings. Save Situations and Holds both peaked with a per game run differential of around 0.5 runs across the sample. This is a bit more difficult to project but brings up a very similar list of teams. Many projections systems use some form of Pythagorean Win Loss Expectations and as a result teams with closer to even run differential projections will fall in the 85 win range.
Now while this helps us to identify the teams we want to target when searching for holds, this is not extremely helpful for fantasy purposes. As owners we do not want to be wasting multiple bench spots on non-closing relievers. So we need to do a better job of finding the players who will be thrust into these opportunities. That can prove to be a much more difficult endeavor, as even just looking at the Rays, Jose Alvarado and Chaz Roe both eclipsed 30 holds. While Alvarado was on fantasy radars as a speculative closer add, Roe was a virtual unknown going into 2018 for fantasy purposes. As Roe proves, elite holds options can come out of nowhere year to year but having the ability to limit the names you want to target to a handful of teams increases your chances to find that pop up guy. In a future article I plan to get a bit more granular with the data and will try to see if there is a trend at the player level to help us better predict the league leaders in holds.
Leave a Reply
Friends don't let friends talk to themselves.
You must be logged in to post a comment.