Closer Monkey

Category: Uncategorized

  • No trust in Hector Rondon…yet

    April 5, 2017 Chicago Cubs — The Cubs are two games into their season and Hector Rondon’s name hasn’t been called yet. The Cubs never led on Sunday, but with a one-run lead on Tuesday, it was Koji Uehara and Pedro Strop serving as the bridge to Wade Davis. Joe Maddon wasn’t ready to panic this…

  • Top Middle Relievers 2017 – Holds Edition

    Predicting hold candidates is difficult because hold opportunities are largely a function of team success. Teams that have late leads can generate multiple holds per game, and dominant LOOGYs can rack up holds in a hurry. Further complicating things is the growing trend for managers to (correctly!) use their best arms in the biggest spots…

  • Top 15 Middle Relievers for 2017

    Below is a ranking of our top 15 middle relievers, based on their likelihood to get saves this season — not necessarily their skill level. As an example, Pedro Strop is a very good reliever who’s unlikely to get any save chances, because he’s stuck behind Wade Davis and Hector Rondon. So although Strop is a much better pitcher than a number of…

  • 2017 Tiered Closer Rankings

    March 3, 2017 Here are the Monkey’s closer rankings for 2017. As always, we’ve got them divided into tiers for your drafting ease. Tier 1 1. Kenley Jansen 2. Aroldis Chapman 3. Zach Britton Analysis: Not much to say about these guys. For the sake of semantics, we have Jansen above Chapman mainly because the…

  • Closer Monkey hibernation

    Closer Monkey is going into hibernation for the winter, but as always, we wanted to say thank you to all of our subscribers for a great year. We tried our best to respond to your feedback from previous seasons (speed! speed! and more speed!) and are happy to report that our average alert time this…