We have to start with Agustin Ramirez, don’t we? NFBC bro’s were spending upwards of 20% of their season budget on the guy. And that’s probably completely crazy. You’re playing for huge money, and you use a fourth of your full season’s alottment of free agent money on a Marlins prospect who wasn’t even all that highly anticipated because he had one really good week with the bat. I get it, the catcher eligibility and the power and pseed combination are really, really tough to come by. And these leageus are 12 or 15 teamers whre you start two catchers. So that kind of upside does deserve major attention. But there is such a risk that he’s a dud the rest of the way out. There’s no way I was making competitive bids for the guys. I bid $72 in my lone NFBC FAAB league, and the winner was $123. If I could do it again, Ir pobably would have spent the $124 to get him. But that’s fine. So let’s take a look at this guy’s twenty-one career plate appearances.
Let’s check those numbers from his short time in the minors this year:
50.5% Swing% 69% Contact%
So he wasn’t swinging quite as aggressively, and he was whiffing a good bit. Last year, his swing rate was at 46.4% with a 75% Contact%. So we have a mixture of numbers here. It does seem evident to me that he has gotten a disproporationate numbers of pitches to hit so far. That’s something we don’t consider enough, and it makes a big difference over short samples. You might go a week without getting anything to hit, or you might just see 10 meatballs in a few day span. That really sets the groundwork for what you can do with the bat.
I actually had an idea for exploring that when I was lying in bed last night. I’m going to try to come up with a stat that uses a machine learning model to calculate
→ What % of pitches (over any sample you want to choose) were “smashable”, meaning pitches that were possible to do a lot of damage on based on movement and location
→ What each hitter did with those pitches
So that could be fun. But back to Ramirez! His more general minor league numbers from 2023-2024:
Those are strong numbers, but it wasn’t like this was a guy you could not get out at the lower levels. Of course, it’s reasonable to believe that he’s a better player this year at the age of 23 with that valuable full year of experience. But I don’t think I need to tell anybody that it’s extremely unlikely that Ramirez is the best hitting catcher in the Major Leagues right now.
This is another one of those cases where if the cost of acquiring Ramirez is just your worst player, it’s a no-brainer. And the FAAB stuff is largely behind us on him, so I’m not helping anybody, but like I said at the top - I wouldn’t want to put down a huge % of my season budget to get him. It could end up terribly.
The bottom line is that this is a catcher with power and some steals, and that’s rare to find.
Let’s do an update on Chandler Simpson, because it’s been a very successful start to his career.
33 PA, .400/.455/.433, 12% K%, 9% BB%, 3 SB
I think there are two very important numbers to watch for Simpson. First, his zone-contact rate. You want this guy getting as many balls into play as possible so he can use those legs.
He’s at 96.9%, which would be sixth-best in the league if we didn’t do any kind of “minimum PA” filtering. So that’s an extremely good sign. That number does stabilize relatively quickly, so there’s a good amount of signal there, I’d say. It could (and probably will?) come down, but I’d say there’s no chance he falls below the league average in it or something like that.
The other number to watch would be his fly ball rate. Usually, we like fly balls. But with Simpson, we really don’t want them. Fly balls are only good if they’re hit hard, and this guy isn’t going to be hitting the ball hard. He has one of the shortest, slowest swings in the league:
Fly balls on swings between 60 and 66mph have a .163 batting average and a .241 SLG this year. So you don’t want to hit a fly ball with that kind of bat speed. We want ground balls and line drives from Simpson. That’s how he’ll get on base.
And so far, the guy has an 8% FB%. That’s two fly balls on his 26 balls in play. He has 13 ground balls and ten line drives, and that has led to a .462 BABIP.
Can a .462 BABIP be sustained? No! The highest BABIPs of the last ten years:
Yoan Moncada 2019: .406
Nolan Jones 2023: .401
Tim Anderson 2019: .399
Brandon Marsh 2023: .397
Avisail Garcia 2017: .392
So .400 is about as good as you can possibly do. There are basically two skill inputs that can help generate a very high BABIP:
Hitting the ball extremely hard
So, Simpson does not have that. However, he does have the second criteria:
Don’t hit fly balls and be extremely fast
Line drives will go for hits at a very high rate no matter who you are. And you can turn in a decent BABIP on ground balls if you’re super fast. Let’s check th e highest BABIP marks on ground balls since 2021 (100 ground ball minimum):
Fitzgerald, Robles, Witt, and Hampson are four of the fastest players the league has to offer, so you can see how that helps.
That was a lot of words to say that I was probably wrong about Simpson. If he keeps these two things up (in-zone contact and a low fly ball rate), he’ll post a more than acceptable AVG & OBP and steal about a bajlillion bases.
I asked Grok to draw me eating crow.
Speaking of Crow. I went to that South Bend Cubs game on Friday night. They have all kinds of banners and memorabilia and whatnot about Pete Crow-Armstrong. He was there for a year or two. While I was at the game looking at pictures of the guy, he was stealing multiple bases and hitting dingers against my home league fantasy team. So I don’t have the most love for the guy. But what a season so far:
I didn’t want to talk about PCA today, but that transition was too good to pass up.
Weekend Standout SPs
We always have a lot of catching up to do on Saturday-Sunday SPs since I don’t write the notes on Sundays and usually don’t even watch any baseball stuff cause we’re busy with church and family stuff.
Max Meyer
In a truly classic occurence, Meyer followed up his 14 strikeout performance with a stinker.
Max Meyer fantasy points scored by game
Just when you thought you struck gold!
4 IP, 5 H, 5 ER, 6 K, 4 BB, 9.3% SwStr%
The slider (33% usage yesterday) just wasn’t there. That pitch earned a 10.7% SwStr%, a very low number. His fastball got porked (.480 xwOBA).
Just so, so classic. Young pitchers are volatile. Pitchers who depend on breaking balls are volatile. Max Meyer is both of those things. If you have him, you’re riding it out, obviously. There will be more very good outings, but you’re going to have these downers as well. You cannot be a consistently great Major League starter without a very good fastball. I’m holding fast to that rule.
The same thing just recently happened with Landen Roupp by the way. It wasn’t this weekend, but we didn’t mention him in the notes last Friday.
Landen Roupp fantasy points scored by game
Robbie Ray
He threw a bunch of strikes on Saturday. And you saw what happens when Robbie Ray throws a bunch of strikes!
7 IP, 5 H, 2 ER, 8 SO, 1 BB, 24.2 fantasy points
If Ray is available in any leagues, I’d jump at him. You’re going to get the ups and downs, but usually the ups outweigh the downs. And we have seen Ray be super dominant during the stretches where he has command. And maybe this start will be the beginning of improvements on that front. This was a guy who posted a better-than-average walk rate in 64 starts from 2021-2022. It’s not impossible.
Robbie Ray Stats by Year
Yusei Kikuchi
Speaking of veterans left-handed pitchers with high highs and low lows, Kikuchi has been terrible in an Angels uniform. Stop me if you’ve heard that before! The Angels give out a big contract and the player plays terribly! A real man-bites-dog story!
He gave up nine hits and four earnies without a single strikeout on Saturday for a big old -11 point dookie.
The K-BB% is now down to 7% on the year. That’s after years of being above 20%. Sometimes way above!
Yusei Kikuchi Stats by Year
The pitch mix:
It’s all bad news so far. That SwStr% is down a ton from what he usually does, and the Ball% is awful at 39%. The four-seamer and slider haven’t worked so far. Is all hope lost? Of course not. This is a classic buy-low in competitive leagues. The bad peripherals will make the sharp owners willing to give up, and it’s a case where I think we still have to trust the history rather than the first month of the current season.
I’m not telling you to give up a good player to acquire him. But I am telling you to make some offers for him, or pick him up off waivers if somebody gets fed up enough to drop him. I still have to trust the bigger sample and believe Kikuchi will be fine. By “fine”, I don’t mean “a fantasy ace”, but at least a strong SP4 or so. And the current acquisition cost has to be lower than that.
Jack Leiter
He returned from the blisty thing, and it didn’t go well.
The command was not there. And that is the guy’s big issue. He had a lot of issues with the walk in the minors. It’s been a very mixed bag of results so far:
The first start was good and bad, the second start was all good, and this last one was all bad. I’m still holding on in deeper leagues, but it’s possible there are ten-team leagues out there where you just don’t need that kind or risk on your pitching staff. We’ll be watching him closely this week.
Roki Sasaki
I think Sasaki is getting pretty close to a drop in ten or twelve team leagues. He now has 20 strikeouts to 18 walks. He has multiple walks in every start. And that could be fine if he was also mowing dudes down when he wasn’t walking them. That’s kind of what we thought he’d be. But so far, the strikeout indicators are awful (9.6% SwStr%).
His four-seamer has been garbage, absolute garbage. And it’s not good when the pitch you throw 50% of the time is garbage. And it’s not like he can swap those two pitch usages. You can’t throw a splitter much more than 31% of the time, which he’s doing now.
It is all bad. The hope would be that he adds on some velo, because we know this guy was ripping 100+mph in the past. But so far, he’s averaged 96.4. There’s some silver lining in this plot:
He has touched 100+, and the effective velo is higher than the actual. But none of that has helped him put up good numbers with the heater. His next two starts are against the Braves and Diamondbacks. So if you have him, and there’s somebody good available, I think it’s a fine time to cut ties with him (in redraft leagues only, I would be holding for a good while in dynasty).
Nick Lodolo
Lodolo posted his first above-average SwStr% of the year yesterday. It was against the Rockies, though. So take that with a grain of salt.
Someone needs to feed the Grok AI model some MLB player pictures, please. He’s holding the salt with his right hand, inexcusable.
I’m well out of time. Hope you enjoyed this daily notes. Welcome to week five of the fantasy baseball season!
