#the ? unown is alone at the end because it's my best friend.

[decamarks]

thanks to tumblr's new 30 image limit, i can now post the entire alphabet of unown sprites from pokemon xd! (lovingly converted from apng to gif by yours truly.) please use these gifs everywhere & for everything. also if you're viewing this on dark mode it might just look like a bunch of eyeballs bouncing around so i'm very sorry for that.

[yahoo-roto-arcade-blog]

Pitchers fantasy owners should buy or sell on trade market

Since Ks and BBs have stabilized for pitchers, let’s get a full accounting of the ones who are radically under- and over-performing their peripherals. This means that their ERAs are way out of whack given their ranking of (Ks-BBs) divided by innings pitched.

There of course is not guarantee that pitchers are going to continue to post similar K and BB rates going forward, though our Stat Stabilization Chart (courtesy of our friends at Fangraphs) says that is at least even money (and an even more likely as the season wears on). And we’re only picking the extreme outliers, meaning guys who are top 15 in Ks and BBs but way worse in ERA and vice versa.

We hear all the time how “sell high, buy low” is a myth. I vehemently disagree. You can definitely deal Dylan Bundy right now for Jeff Samardzija, for example. But there are dumb ways to try to do this. In other words, if you offer that straight up, your trading partner is likely going to see how you’re thinking. But if you get Samardzija for Bundy AND the better hitter for the worse hitter, you are masking your true intentions AND doubling your investment upside because you seem to be losing on the pitching side of that deal despite being at least even money to win it.

But I fear that trading is a lost art.

Note for the recommendations below that the league average is 0.54 Ks minus walks per inning. So basically if you pitch six innings and have less than three more Ks than walks, you’re pitching poorly.

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ERAs Should Be Way Better

Samardzija is fourth in the stat entering Tuesday with exactly one more K per inning than walks, yet his ERA of 5.26 is 80th among qualifying pitchers. I would bet on Samardzija being at least top 20 in ERA going forward while also being helpful in Ks. Samardzija is unowned in only 27% of leagues but should be easy to pick up in a trade in a manner like I stated above.

Jake Arrieta is not as good as he was but should not be nearly this bad. His 5.44 ERA is way inflated given his (Ks-BB)/IP is ranked 14th (0.806). If these aligned closely, as they tend to do, his ERA would be around 3.00 (the 14th ERA now is 2.60). Do not trade Arrieta because you are likely only locking in bad stats that should get much better (as long as the Ks and BBs remain the same or better).

Nate Karns is seemingly struggling with a non-helpful 4.46 ERA but is 11th in the stat. We don’t have a lot of data on Karns but he’s available right now in 73% of Yahoo leagues. He should be owned in all 12-team formats on the basis of 48 Ks in 40.1 innings alone.

John Lackey is seemingly heading for the exits in his career given a 4.29 ERA but he’s 12th in the statistic. You can’t leverage this easily however since he’s so highly owned. But he’s an inviting trade target. The same can be said for Rick Porcello (10th in the stat at 0.872) and Luis Severino (8th, 0.881), both owned in over 85% of leagues.

But if you want another easy pickup, look to Charlie Morton, who is 15th in the stat (0.794) despite ranking 50th in ERA (3.97). Morton is not owned in 53% of leagues.

ERAs Should Be Way Worse

Here’s where I get hate in the comments, but blame the model. Maybe these guys will defy gravity. But as my buddy Scott Pianowski says channeling Radiohead: Gravity always wins.

Ervin Santana is a joke right now, ranking second in ERA (1.50) while sitting 71st in the K and BB stat (0.370). Maybe he’s found the secret to pitching to contact but we say that about every pitcher who does and most of them end up on the side of the road with their ERAs in pieces. Santana is a top-20 most volatile pitcher in baseball history but more on that another day.

Gio Gonzalez isn’t even that extreme a ground-ball pitcher anymore. And he’s giving up homers at a high rate. So ranking 11th in ERA (2.47) while sitting 78th in the stat (0.314) make zero sense.

Derek Holland is 11th in ERA and 65th in the stat but owners are buying giving he’s 60% owned. I will bet a lot of money that Morton will out-earn Holland for the balance of this season.

Dylan Bundy was supposed to be a fireballing strikeout artist and his ERA suggests that he’s arrived (2.26). But he ranks 60th in the stat (0.464). Thus Bundy’s ERA is likely to be at best league average going forward while hurting you in Ks. Yes, he could develop an out-pitch but what’s he waiting for? His fastball velocity is also down.

Mike Leake is pitching to contact as always but has a 1.94 ERA despite ranking 57th in the stat. Leake and Bundy are owned in over 85% of leagues so if you have them make sure you trade them. I bet you can get Lackey or Samardzija for either one in the manner I advised earlier. But shoot for Arrieta first.

Finally, while we’re back to the hitters next week, be sure to read my Wall Street Journal piece on Freddie Freeman and the simple reason he’s so good: the vast majority of the pitches he takes are balls. The strikes, he swings at. I wish we had easily accessible data on this and am trying behind the scenes to make this happen. It’s very important for power hitters to not take more than 25% strikes when they choose not to swing and taking a much higher percentage of strikes than league average (about 30%) is a sign of passivity that typically leads to poor hitting outcomes.

[recentanimenews]

Live Action Pokémon Existed Way Before Detective Pikachu

Detective Pikachu is only days away and if you're a Pokémon fan, I imagine that you're probably pretty excited. Even if you look at it and think "Ugh, I wish it was Detective Metapod instead," there's just something about getting to see Pokémon on the big screen in a live action movie that seems inherently thrilling. You're gonna watch actual actors interacting with Pokémon (one of which is voiced by the star of the best R rated superhero film ever....Blade Trinity.) on a big budget scale. At the very least, it's different, considering that the franchise has mostly been relegated to anime and manga and a video game series that you may have heard about. 

    Mostly.

  Because, if you were alive in the 1990s, you may remember a series of commercials that also featured flesh-and-blood people dealing with Pokémon. Kids like me who became desperately attached to the original set of Pokémon Red and Blue back when they first came out for the Game Boy, looked forward to these commercials more than actual television shows sometimes. Because they presented a world that 1) Had Pokémon in it, and 2) Had people in it that were just as obsessed with Pokémon as we were. 

  Take a look at this first one, in which two kids, separated by an alley, literally trade Pokémon across a high wire link cable: 

    Hey, look! It's Drake Bell, the star of Drake & Josh and the voice of Spider-Man in about a thousand things. But more important than him is the bus driver looking up in astonishment at these creatures walking from apartment to apartment:

    Remember his face, because his story continues in the next Red and Blue commercial. Yes, these commercials told a story. And that story was horrifying. See, apparently after witnessing this feat of Nintendo sorcery, the bus driver concocted a plan to capture and then crush all 150 Pokémon. He would lure them onto his bus and, well, I'll let you watch...

      So, the funniest thing about this commercial is the way the bus driver says "Yeah, whatever" when Pikachu introduces itself to him, which is the exact response I got whenever I was a kid trying to tell an adult about Pokémon. But that goofy moment is quickly replaced by terror as these critters are compacted and shoved into a Game Boy. Sadly, Bus Driver Boris And His Magical Game Crushing Machine never really took off as a PBS kids show. 

  Pokémon Yellow, in which Pikachu hates you and then begrudgingly follows you around and then grows to love you, took a different approach. Realizing that it couldn't win against a human race that was eager to crush it into a game console, it BETRAYED ITS SPECIES and helped humans to load a bunch of Pokémon into the back of a truck. Their fate? Unknown. 

      And it wasn't just the original set of games that did this. But before we jump to that, I'd like to remind you of what might be the weirdest Pokémon commercial of all time, in which a kid holds up flash cards at a screaming, tortured goose until it agonizingly GIVES BIRTH TO A GAME BOY COLOR. I don't understand how you'd be tasked with coming up with a Pokémon commercial and then arrive at...this, but it's an abomination of biology, humanity, and marketing all at once.

    See? I bet you thought when I said "screaming goose" that I was exaggerating to get you to watch the video. Nope. That goose lets out a death screech that you can only make when your own anatomy is being liquified in order to spawn handheld Nintendo products. And then the boy, this wretched adolescent who has smiled into the abyss only to see the abyss recoil in fear, asks about producing five more for his friends. WHAT FRIENDS DO YOU HAVE, HATE GOBLIN? Leave the goose alone and get a new hobby, you trash can of a child.

  Anyway.

  Pokémon Gold and Silver went back to the Yellow concept of having a kid conquer the Pokémon world. Only this time, he does it without Pikachu. If you can only watch a few seconds of this, because you've somehow, against all odds, found a more "important" use of your time than reading about old Pokémon commercials on an anime website, skip to about twenty seconds in, when a kid throws a Pokeball so hard that he absolutely gives that Elekid a concussion.

        Jeez. That kid really beans that monster. In the end, we see him flying in the sky, atop a Lugia, acting as the new lord of his domain. Sadly, the commercial for Pokémon Crystal wouldn't feature any Pokémon and instead just had a bunch of explorers being unable to read some Unown symbols.

      Ha! You can't even understand a simple Pokémon language? Who are you, my parents, my wife, and every person that I love? Losers.

  The next commercial for Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire is kind of cute, as people hang out with Pokémon that resemble them. I'm glad that this commercial came out for the third generation of Pokémon rather than the fifth one, if only because it would be sad to tell someone "Be in our commercial, because you look like the Pokémon that is actual garbage."

    From then on, Pokémon commercials would do a 180 and go full-on apocalyptic, though they never had any actual Pokémon in them. The one for Emerald is about a child being the lone survivor of some kind of mass hysteria/geological disaster, and the one for Diamond and Pearl is about Pokeballs falling from the sky. In fact, we wouldn't get a "What if Pokémon, but in real life?" commercial until Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee, but in that, Pikachu only exists so that it can lead you inside to play its video game, presumably forever.

    So there you have it. Whether it was scary or cute or just plain weird, Pokémon have existed in live action settings for years, and watching all of these makes me even more excited to see Detective Pikachu. But rather than end with Pikachu, I feel like it's only fitting to end with Meowth. Here's the Japanese commercial for Pokémon Yellow, in which Meowth complains to an oden bar chef about Pikachu being the star of the franchise. It's wonderful. God, I love Pokémon.

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  Daniel Dockery is a writer for Crunchyroll. You can be his Pika Pal on Twitter.

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