Feb 15 Spring Training News & Analysis
Reacting to some of the earliest news & notes from the opening days of camp
I have been reading the beat, monitoring the news, digging for nuggets. And what I have found is that a lot of players are in the best shape of their lives. A lot of teams are hoping that their players do well this year. There is motivation and good feelings all over the place!
If all of this is true, this is going to be the best baseball season in a long time. Every player will be above average!
I have been making jokes on Twitter, and I will continue to do. 90% of news that comes from February and March is useless. But some of it’s interesting, at least.
Some stuff that might be worth knowing.
Heston Kjerstad
The report is that the O’s want Kjerstad to be on the 26-man. The quote was that he’s a “front-runner.” I suppose that’s not news. But you’d have to say it’s positive for his fantasy outlook. At least they’re favoring him over some other names.
Kjerstad would definitely be a fantasy name to watch. The guy murdered AAA pitching last year. He slugged .647 off of righties with 14 bangers in 205 PAs. Overall, it was a 12.6% Brl% and a 75% Contact%.
Here’s the profile from the MiLB Statcast Dashboard:
I don’t think he has a ton more to prove there. It was also interesting in the article that management commented that they believe in his ability to hit lefties.
The question is WHERE.
O’Neill is locked in there. Cowser had a pretty nice season last year, and you’d think they’d want Mullins in center a lot (at least in the two-thirds of games where they’re facing a righty). I could see Kjerstad eventually beating out Cowser, but I’m not sure that’s something they’d be looking at right out of the gate.
Maybe they go with the young guys instead of O’Hearn at DH. I don’t know. Kjerstad is certainly someone to keep a close eye on, because he’d be pretty close to must-own right if he’s going to play every day, and he’s getting cheaper as draft season progresses.
Slade Cecconi
The Guardians got him from the D’Backs in the Josh Naylor deal. It was interesting that he was a target of theirs. The report I read talked about him adding variations to the fastball. He has been working on one that goes left, and one that goes right.
I don’t know what that means. The pitch mix from last year shows a four-seamer only in the arsenal. It was pretty good at getting strikes (53% Strike%), but it didn’t get many whiffs and did get hit pretty hard with a .355 xwOBA.
Maybe that’s the one that goes “right”, and maybe the other thing will be called a cutter? I imagine there are plenty of guys in the league throwing two different pitches that both get the same label in the algorithm. I think we’re going to see a new pitch or two added to the classification model every year. In ten years, we could be looking at like six different kinds of fastballs. It could real confusing. I’ve heard stuff about a “spike changeup” or something this spring already. I’d rather not get into that business; it’ll make my job a lot harder.
But anyhoo, Cecconi has not been good in these last two seasons. The K% is under 19% in the Majors, and he wasn’t anything special in AAA either.
The pitch modeling stuff did like him. He was at a 104.8 Pitching+ last year, that’s very good.
It’s pretty easy to trick those models, though, especially in small samples. And Location+ and Pitching+ aren’t all that predictive of results.
I think the most important data point of all was that the Guardians picked him as part of the return in the trade. They must like him, and the stuff is at least interesting at worst. He’s just 25 and pretty much free in drafts this year.
He’s getting more expensive, but if you look at the y-axis there, he’s going after pick 500 almost every time.
He is a good one to keep an eye on when spring games get going.