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Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs posted a few days back about the heroes of April; the top offensive guys for the first month of MLB. He used WPA/LI to determine offensive production. Very cool!

Let me just go ahead and define WPA/LI right now. [from FanGraphs]

WPA/LI (context neutral wins / game state linear weights): How many wins a player contributes to his team with the Leverage Index aspect removed, invented by Tom Tango.

Calculating WPA/LI: WPA is divided by LI for each individual play attributed to a specific player and then the WPA/LI for the individual plays is then added up to create WPA/LI for an entire season. This is considerably different then taking a player’s WPA and dividing it by pLI.

Why you should care: Unlike standard linear weights, WPA/LI does take into account the situation. So at times when a walk would be just as valuable as a home run, WPA/LI accurately weights the walk and the home run, where linear weights would still give .13 wins to the home run and the walk .03 wins.

There is a fantastic post over at Roto Authority that looks at Contact rate in comparison to current batting average to determine which hitters will see upward swings in their batting averages and which batting averages could fall. You really should look this over each week and use the data (especially when there is more data to look through) for the free agent market and for trading.

I just read an interesting post over at The Waiver Wire speaking about xFIP as a tool for ERA forecasting.

“If you had to bet your life on the accuracy of an [tag]ERA forecast[/tag] made by one stat, what would it be? Mine would be xFIP…”

We all know that Johan Santana is far and away the #1 SP that should be taken off the board. I decided to put xFIP to the test and rank the five 2nd tier pitchers available in upcoming drafts. Here they are with their [tag]xFIP[/tag] value, in order of how I have ranked them :

Chris Carpenter - 3.53
Carlos Zambrano - 4.43
Roy Oswalt - 3.75
Brandon Webb - 3.13
Roy Halladay - 3.59