Last week’s article outlined some of the projected top relievers and closers to add to your fantasy baseball team. Relievers are a hot commodity in today’s game and can help your team out if you need points. In week seven, we can take another look at the relievers that had the most saves up to this point in the 2022 season. Based on their team’s projected wins, we can accurately predict how many save opportunities each player could have.
As was established in last week’s article, we will utilize the Pythagorean Theorem of baseball to predict the number of wins for each team. This data is constantly changing with every game played, so this is something that can be revisited every day. Remember, when we are looking at teams to pick up pitchers from, we are still looking at the middle of the league because the middle gives us the most save opportunities.
With all that in mind, this was the list of pitchers that we highlighted in the previous article.
| Team | Name | Yahoo % Rostered | ESPN % Rostered | Saves |
| COL | Daniel Bard | 71 | 81 | 9 |
| MIA | Anthony Bender | 16 | 48 | 6 |
| ARI | Mark Melancon | 42 | 83 | 6 |
| SFG | Camilo Doval | 61 | 79 | 5 |
| PHI | Corey Knebel | 73 | 88 | 5 |
| OAK | Dany Jimenez | 18 | 53 | 5 |
| CHC | David Robertson | 64 | 82 | 5 |
| TBR | Andrew Kittredge | 60 | 81 | 4 |
| BAL | Jorge Lopez | 31 | 65 | 4 |
| MIN | Emilio Pagan | 6 | 20 | 4 |
| ARI | Ian Kennedy | 5 | 18 | 3 |
| CWS | Kendall Graveman | 9 | 33 | 2 |
| OAK | Lou Trivino | 24 | 45 | 2 |
I would like to take this a step further and look at projected saves by the player rather than by the team. It is possible to use the Pythagorean Theorem of baseball with an adjusted power level. This time, we will plug in the player’s current number of saves and the number of games they have played instead of the number of team wins. This will give us a good model with current trends and get more accurate as the season progresses.
With updated data, this is the list of players, along with their projected saves, that should be considered for your team.
| Team | Name | Saves | Games Played | Projected Saves | Yahoo Rostered % | ESPN Rostered % |
| COL | Daniel Bard | 10 | 39 | 24 | 64 | 79 |
| ARI | Mark Melancon | 9 | 42 | 19 | 35 | 75 |
| PHI | Corey Knebel | 8 | 40 | 18 | 71 | 88 |
| STL | Giovanny Gallegos | 8 | 40 | 18 | 84 | 92 |
| OAK | Dany Jimenez | 8 | 42 | 17 | 31 | 66 |
| SFG | Camilo Doval | 7 | 39 | 16 | 62 | 80 |
| TEX | Joe Barlow | 7 | 39 | 16 | 43 | 70 |
| MIA | Anthony Bender | 6 | 39 | 13 | 12 | 39 |
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Benjamin Coldiron is a featured writer at FantasyPros.
