Today's Fantasy Rx

As in yesterday's article, while I excerpted parts of today's introduction and the quotes from last season's Rotosirens article, all the player discussion is brand new.

In discussing Rotosiren hitters yesterday, I ignored perpetually unhealthy players like J.D. Drew since drastic swings in performance by players with injuries affect values in a fundamentally different way than inconsistency by normally healthy performers. I'll adopt the same philosophy when discussing pitchers since plenty of hurlers in both leagues stayed healthy all year and didn't match expectations.

You must drive straight on past, but melt down sweet wax of honey
and with it stop your companions' ears, so none can listen;

Tomo Ohka suffered the effects of playing in Puerto Rico more than most pitchers as his 4.96 ERA in 6 games at Hiram Bithorn Stadium forced his ERA over 4.00. He also posted an equally poor ERA in road starts, however that doesn't explain the following splits:

		ERA	G-F	QA
April		3.18	1.33	04330
May		5.06	1.73	040442
June		5.06	1.36	020354
July		5.58	1.78	34344
August		3.93	.98	404134
September	3.26	1.20	304354

While Ohka's dominance and control both remained fairly stable all year, he posted a 1.6 HR/9 during May, June, and July yet managed a .7 homer rate over the rest of the season. However his monthly ground-fly ratio doesn't appear to explains his ERA jump, and as even his hit rate didn't overly vary between most months, I don't believe that accounts for more than part of the ERA swing. Of course, experiencing disastrous starts in nearly a third of his appearances this year indicates significant qualitative downside, and dominating in 44% of his starts also doesn't provide a sufficient skill foundation for future growth.

Ohka's going to finish the year by essentially repeating his strikeout rate, walk rate, and ground-fly ratio for the second year. Yet his ERA will jump around a full point thanks to a .2 HR/9 increase and a 1.4 H/9 jump even though Montreal's defensive efficiency improved from .7063 to .7092. While Ohka remains more vulnerable to defensive changes than most pitchers thanks to his unimpressive dominance, I see no obvious reason for his qualitative problems this year unless he experienced truly bad luck compared to the rest of the staff. Playing 81 games in Montreal with potential defensive improvements help to make Ohka a respectable play in 2004, but he isn't someone to target in most leagues due to his inconsistency and limited upside.

Tomorrow I'll return to Sunday Morning Musings for the first time in months, and then on Monday we'll begin our end-of-season review by analyzing the effectiveness of some of my predictions. I expect to spend two weeks examining what lessons we should learn from the 2003 fantasy season, and then I should begin my review of each team's minor league system by the middle of the month.

Today's Fantasy Rx: If the Cubs managed to win today's doubleheader, we may be able to look towards the playoffs a day earlier than expected as every other race is done. Thanks to Houston's loss Friday night, a couple of Cubs' wins should assure Chicago the Central Title barring an unexpected rally by the Astros against a Milwaukee team that remains hot. As we longer expect any Monday playoff, you're free to determine your final standings in all leagues as soon as tomorrow's games finish.

All previous italicized text from these past two articles is from the Perennial Classics' edition of Homer's The Odyssey, translated by Richmond Lattimore.