Offseason Notebook - November 1st
Offseason Notebook - November 1st
My player ranking system explained, the Braves and Angels swing a trade, and I zoom in on my offseason topic analysis process.
Welcome to the offseason. The Dodgers have won the World Series in their first year with Shohei Ohtani. It didn’t even really feel like the Dodgers won their World Series as much as their opposition just didn’t beat them. But you could argue that, and I’m sure plenty of people would.
It all started with Ohtani’s unprecedented contract, and then the gambling scandal ended with Freddie Freeman and a bunch of bullpen pitchers dominating. I honestly don’t even care who wins the World Series. That’s one of the least interesting parts of the MLB season to me, as a fantasy bro. I care about the regular season and individual player performances.
But now we begin the offseason. It’s six months long for some teams and five months for other teams, but really, there is no off-season for me on this blog. I’ve already begun the long process of writing up the 2025 team previews. I’m three teams in, but I’m probably not going to start publishing them until December or January. What I’m really looking to do is
Wait for Steamer Projections (I use these as a baseline for the playing time projections)
Run my projections
Start publishing the team previews very slowly (2-3 per week for a couple of months)
The thing I do, as you’ll see, when I’m doing these team previews is that I go player-by-player and build out my rankings one player at a time. I call it insertion ranking. It’s inspired by the insertion sort, a computer algorithm.
We all take sorting for granted. We think we just tell the computer to sort and it’s just like yeah bro no problem and then goes blelldlbleldeebeeepboop, and you have it. But in fact, it’s doing a bunch of calculations extremely fast to sort a list.
Here’s a GIF of it, which I don’t think will work in your inbox… you’ll have to open this in a browser to get the effect. But it shows the very slow process of sorting the numbers 1-8.
It goes one number at a time, and then compares it to one number at a time, moving it or leaving it depending on if it’s bigger or smaller. It does that over and over again until there are no numbers left, and then it moves on to the next number. I’m not sure if that’s how Excel, for example, actually works (probably not), but it’s one way you can do it. It’s very simple, any fifth-grader could do it, but computers can do it extremely fast.
So that’s how I do my rankings.
The first player I started with this year was Luis Robert. I did the analysis to give myself an idea of what the expectation is, and then he went in at #1:
2025 Rankings
Luis Robert
And then I looked at Andrew Vaughn. I did the full analysis and compared him to Luis Robert, which was pretty easy.
2025 Rankings
Luis Robert
Andrew Vaughn
And so on and so forth. In the second team preview, I came to Brenton Doyle. I did the analysis and compared it all to Luis Robert. I decided that I’d rather have Doyle than Robert, so I inserted him at #1.
2025 Rankings
Brenton Doyle
Luis Robert
Andrew Vaughn
I’m explaining something extremely simple and easy in detail, and I don’t know why. You understood what I was talking about four paragraphs ago. But this is my notebook, and I get tickled by hearing things explained in a step-by-step manner. Stuff like this excites me.
So I’m like 18 hitters and six pitchers deep, and it’s a really, really fun process for me to go through each fall and winter. And it turns into strong content. If you read along the whole way through each team, you will have the strongest grasp on the player pool in your league (unless someone else in your league also read it and is smarter than you, I guess).
Again, that stuff will start hitting your inbox in December.
We have some offseason news already!
Jorge Soler to Angels
I don’t have a good memory, but I don’t ever remember a trade happening on the first day of the offseason. The return to the Braves was my boy Griffin Canning.
This was a salary dump for the Braves, probably to free up money to spend on some starting pitching this offseason. With the Sale resurgence and the elite duo of Acuna and Strider coming back after missed seasons, they certainly have their sights set on a World Series. Their one potential weakness is the rotation (although plenty of teams would be happy to take Sale + Strider + Schwellenbach + whatever as their rotation).
I don’t see Griffin Canning as someone they were targeting; they just wanted to find a team to pay Soler. It probably went something like:
Braves: Hey Angels, you guys love to give money to veteran players who will surely not pay off their contracts, do you want Jorge Soler for a cheap return?
Angels: Yes.
Braves: Great, who will you give us? Maybe some crappy SP depth? We don’t want much, we just don’t want to pay Soler anymore.
Angels: Well, we were told by this idiot 150 pound blogger that Griffin Canning was our ace, and he sucked this year so we hate him. How about him?
Braves: Sure whatever just get me off this phone.
Fantasy-wise, it’s a downgrade for Soler - and that’s probably all there is to say. And Soler wasn’t all that interesting as a 33-year-old outfielder whose never been more of a “role player” in the fantasy game (by that I mean he’s just someone you acquire if you’re looking for some homers and RBI, but you know he’s not going to take your team to the next level or anything like that).
Should I still have belief in Canning? I can’t completely forget about the 2023 SwStr%, but at the same time, his fastball is proven crappy, and he was awful in 2024.
AT THE SAME TIME (this is going to be a yo-yo), my brain (and my projection system) does not erase data from two years ago. Going from a 26% K% to an 18% K% is a huge difference, and I can tell you right now the 2025 projection is going to be in the middle. In fact, I’m pretty sure the basic math looks like this with how I coded it:
So we consider both but weigh the most recent data double (or it might be triple, I don’t remember). There is also some fancier stuff built in, so Canning might get docked even further because of the very telling 11.9% SwStr%. The point, I suspect a 20%+ K% projection on Canning for 2025.
So:
The field will value him based on 2024 alone
I will value him based on 2023 and 2024
Therefore, ergo, hence, consequently, whence:
I will be higher on Canning than the field
Sports analysis is simple logic. It’s such a beautiful thing.
I’ve been inciting and surveying some political arguments on Twitter again, and what you find in that arena is that logic isn’t really part of the calculation. And that’s not even (all the time) because of a lack of logical thinking. Logic only works on simple things, and politics are extremely complex.
Sports = Simple, Single-Faceted, Amoral
Politics = Complex, Multi-Faceted, Moral
Any time you have something complex that involves morality, you’re in for a total mess when two people start trying to talk about it. And that’s what you see when people start talking/arguing about politics. It’s a mess. That doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly fun, especially for me - because I have found the magic way to completely divorce emotion from the calculation. I like politics a lot. This time of year thrills me. But I’ve long grown out of the idea that I can change anybody’s mind.
I do think I can make an impression on other people at least by being calm, polite, and able to possess and show humility. And I think that’s what people, especially Christians, should be aiming for. I know I don’t know much about politics. And 2024 Griffin Canning taught me that I don’t know all that much about MLB pitching either!
MLB Analysis Articles
A cool process I’ve come across in my early offseason writing! I will be analyzing a player, and I will notice something somewhat unique about them. And that will put a question in my head, so I will then immediately start work on a separate analysis piece on that topic. Those pieces will be general and centered on learning thought patterns and processes rather than evaluating individual players (but they do turn into targets & fades for the next season as residual).
As an example, I was writing up the Marlins, and I came across Connor Norby. I noticed that he flashed a very high barrel rate despite not hitting the ball very hard overall. I found the reason for that was his extraordinarily high sweet spot rate. So that inspired an analysis post about Sweet Spot Rate. The point of that post was for me to get an idea of what we should expect for year-over-year sweet spot rates at the player level.
The question in my head was:
“Norby had a 48% Sweet Spot Rate in 2024, and that led the league. What are the chances he can come close to that again in 2025 and continue to post a high barrel rate?”
That piece is here:
I’m going to continue that pattern as I go through the team previews. Nolan Schanuel has inspired one this week. So we’ll cover a lot of useful ground in that way, and it also gives me a nice change of pace as I write.
Until next time!