MLB Daily Notes - April 9th
A daily automated report of what happened yesterday in Major League Baseball, along with other recent trends and further analysis.
I took all that extra time to write a DFS preview and the lineup was terrible. I got seven points from my two SPs and only one hitter did anything at all. I took 95th out of 100 in the $1 Hundo contest I did, pretty impressive stuff.
Spencer Turnbull
People played Spencer Turnbull a lot last night, which I was excited to see because I know that guy isn’t any good. But he’s been… good. He’s now thrown 11 scoreless innings with 13 strikeouts against the Reds and Cardinals. He has a 12.1% SwStr (league average) but a high 50.3% Strike% and a big 54% GB%.
Turnbull was often a useful Major League pitcher with the Tigers, but he was never great. He missed a bunch of time to injury and then signed this one-year, $2 million contract with the Phillies. But he’s pitched like he’s worth a lot more than that so far. The Stuff+ grade was 100, and so far he’s been pretty average across the board. If the Phillies got a league-average pitcher for $2 million, that’s quite a bargain.
I wouldn’t want to go out and drop someone useful for him, but in a deeper league you can grab him if you’re hurting for SP innings, which a lot of you probably are.
Tyler Anderson
The algo champ of the day was my cousin Tyler. He earned 17 whiffs with an 18.7% SwStr% and threw seven scoreless innings. Strangely, the 17 whiffs got him just three strikeouts.
This is Tyler Anderson we’re talking about, a long-known commodity, but he’s been good and can be streamed in certain spots in deep leagues.
Blake Snell
The debut finally happened, and it was awful. A 45.8% Ball% from ole Blake, some guys just never change. He threw 72 pitches and lasted just three innings, not having any command, and the SwStr% at 15.3% was good but not really up to his standard.
This start shouldn’t matter to us at all, he’s just getting going. You’re starting Snell every time if you have him, because he’s going to have more good outings than bad, but he’s a really annoying pitcher to go through the season with. Watching him is especially annoying. He’s such a goofy looking dude and just takes so much time to make anything happen. Throw some strikes, dude.
It really wouldn’t be all that surprising to me if he does have a legitimately bad year overall, it probably is a little bit tougher to get motivated for a season when you just landed a big contract. But I’m not saying that’s the most likely thing. I ended up taking the discount on Snell in my home league, but I will certainly be looking to ship him the hell off my team if he has a few dominant outings in a row. And it’s not because I think he’s not a good pitcher to have, I just dislike him so much.
Mitch Keller
Still three walks yesterday but a big nine strikeout game as the Pirates won their 9th game of the young season. He was still lacking in the underlying stuff with a 48% Strike%. Shout out to the JA model who projected a big strikeout day for him. Good to see him have a big game, but we have got to see the command get right soon for him to be a truly useful fantasy pitcher (46% Strike% so far this year, not good).
Triston McKenzie
It’s been a slow start for McKenzie after his lost 2023 season. He has thrown as many balls as strikes - and that’s a super duper yikes:
You do not want to see that at all, and the whiffs aren’t there [yet?] either. I think it’s likely he’ll get it together, but man a few more starts with that kind of inability to get strikes and you’ll have to consider cutting ties.
Nestor Cortes
Really nice start for him:
8 IP, 0 R, 6 K, 0 BB, 14.7% SwStr%
The calling card for him has always been great command, and so far he’s posted an elite 32% Ball%, however it hasn’t come with many whiffs at a bad 10.9% SwStr%.
To me, this means he’ll have some really bad starts mixed in with mostly decent to good ones. You aren’t going to love the guy, but I think the net product will be positive.
He’s probably a decent sell-high option right now if you have some Yankees homer in your league, which most leagues seem to have.
The HOT HITTER TRACKER, the SUPER ULTRA MEGA HOT HITTER TRACKER, and the COLD HITTER TRACKER have all now returned to the daily notes. Everybody loves a hot hitter, so that’s a popular part of the notes.
The problem is, of course, that hot hitters don’t actually exist. I’ve disproven the entire idea of my hot hitter tracker already. So that’s a pretty good argument for ditching that part of the notes altogether, but I won’t do it.
There are two things we’re doing here:
Describing
Predicting
Both are important. We want to be able to predict the future better than other people when we’re playing fantasy sports games, that’s the primary focus here.
But we still care about what happened in the past, even if it doesn’t mean much for the future. This is all entertainment here, we’re not putting our lives on the line here. So yeah, if random stuff happened in the past, we still care about that, because we like watching all of this develop.
So the hot and cold hitter trackers are descriptive rather than predictive. If you’re playing dudes in DFS or betting on them because they showed up there, you are mis-using the report. If you want to mis-use the report for fun, that sounds great, go ahead. You’re not doing anything immoral here, none of this is very serious.
It does seem to me that a lot of people have trouble distinguishing between serious things and unserious things. I have a tendency to be more unserious than I should. I’m more likely to take some serious unseriously than to take something unserious seriously. That tendency works amazingly me for me, I mean I love every single minute of my life, but it does sometimes result in people being put off by my attitude. Luckily for me, there are only like five people in the world whose opinion I care about in terms of what they think about me. Three might actually be high. Definitely my wife, and then probably my wife’s parents, and then less so but still in consideration would be my own parents. And I guess if some of my best friends would have some kind of real issue with me, I would take that seriously as well. So yeah we’re like between 3 and 7 somewhere.
But you see like real fights on Twitter about fantasy baseball stuff. But I guess when you don’t have belief in anything higher than your day-to-day life, you can start taking unserious things too seriously.
And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Ecclesiastes 4
A reminder that Mondays are typically off days in the minor leagues. Only make-up games are played on Mondays, so most of the time you won’t see anything here on Tuesdays in the minor league section. In fact, I’ve just removed it altogether today.
Pitcher Reports
Algo SP Ranks - Yesterday
1. Tyler Anderson
2. Nestor Cortes
3. Graham Ashcraft
4. Spencer Turnbull
5. Tanner Banks
6. Zac Gallen
7. Jose Berrios
8. Blake Snell
9. Bailey Ober
10. Mitch Keller
11. Luis Castillo
12. Andrew Heaney
13. Aaron Ashby
14. Zach Eflin
15. Javier Assad
16. Charlie Morton
17. Miles Mikolas
18. Yu Darvish
19. Reese Olson
20. Julio Teheran
21. James Paxton
22. Jesus Luzardo
23. Trevor Williams
24. Triston McKenzie
25. Kyle Freeland
26. Blair Henley
Fantasy Points Leaders - Yesterday
1. Nestor Cortes (vs. MIA): 32.8 Points
2. Jose Berrios (vs. SEA): 28.01 Points
3. Mitch Keller (vs. DET): 26.7 Points
4. Spencer Turnbull (vs. STL): 23.7 Points
5. Tyler Anderson (vs. TB): 22.75 Points
6. Zac Gallen (vs. COL): 20.45 Points
7. Bailey Ober (vs. LAD): 20.25 Points
8. James Paxton (vs. MIN): 19.1 Points
9. Javier Assad (vs. SD): 17.65 Points
10. Triston McKenzie (vs. CWS): 16.56 Points
Whiffs Leaders - Yesterday
1. Tyler Anderson (LAA): 17 Whiffs (91 Pitches)
2. Graham Ashcraft (CIN): 16 Whiffs (99 Pitches)
3. Nestor Cortes (NYY): 15 Whiffs (102 Pitches)
4. Zac Gallen (ARI): 15 Whiffs (108 Pitches)
5. Mitch Keller (PIT): 13 Whiffs (98 Pitches)
6. Jose Berrios (TOR): 13 Whiffs (101 Pitches)
7. Spencer Turnbull (PHI): 12 Whiffs (82 Pitches)
8. Reed Garrett (NYM): 12 Whiffs (34 Pitches)
9. Javier Assad (CHC): 11 Whiffs (104 Pitches)
10. Charlie Morton (ATL): 11 Whiffs (105 Pitches)
Strike% Leaders - Yesterday
1. Zac Gallen (ARI): 53.7 Strike%, 34.3 Ball%
2. Jose Berrios (TOR): 53.5 Strike%, 28.7 Ball%
3. Javier Assad (CHC): 52.9 Strike%, 37.5 Ball%
4. Luis Castillo (SEA): 51.5 Strike%, 30.7 Ball%
5. Graham Ashcraft (CIN): 50.5 Strike%, 29.3 Ball%
6. Tyler Anderson (LAA): 50.5 Strike%, 26.4 Ball%
7. Nestor Cortes (NYY): 49.0 Strike%, 31.4 Ball%
8. Bailey Ober (MIN): 48.5 Strike%, 36.8 Ball%
9. Mitch Keller (PIT): 48.0 Strike%, 38.8 Ball%
10. Yu Darvish (SD): 47.7 Strike%, 40.0 Ball%
11. Spencer Turnbull (PHI): 47.6 Strike%, 35.4 Ball%
12. Andrew Heaney (TEX): 47.6 Strike%, 36.6 Ball%
13. Charlie Morton (ATL): 47.6 Strike%, 37.1 Ball%
14. Zach Eflin (TB): 46.1 Strike%, 28.9 Ball%
15. Miles Mikolas (STL): 44.9 Strike%, 30.3 Ball%
Pitches/Out (POUT) Leaders - Yesterday
1. Nestor Cortes: 102 Pitches, 24 Outs, 4.25 POUT
2. Miles Mikolas: 89 Pitches, 20 Outs, 4.45 POUT
3. Bailey Ober: 68 Pitches, 15 Outs, 4.53 POUT
4. Tyler Anderson: 91 Pitches, 20 Outs, 4.55 POUT
5. Spencer Turnbull: 82 Pitches, 18 Outs, 4.56 POUT
6. James Paxton: 86 Pitches, 18 Outs, 4.78 POUT
7. Jose Berrios: 101 Pitches, 20 Outs, 5.05 POUT
8. Zach Eflin: 76 Pitches, 15 Outs, 5.07 POUT
9. Triston McKenzie: 87 Pitches, 17 Outs, 5.12 POUT
10. Trevor Williams: 81 Pitches, 15 Outs, 5.4 POUT
Velo Changes - Yesterday
Kyle Freeland's CU velo (21 pitches) UP 3.9mph to 84.7
Kyle Freeland's FF velo (38 pitches) UP 3.0mph to 92.2
Kyle Freeland's SI velo (13 pitches) UP 3.0mph to 91.8
Kyle Freeland's SL velo (14 pitches) UP 2.6mph to 86.8
Zac Gallen's FC velo (18 pitches) UP 2.1mph to 91.8
Nestor Cortes's FF velo (42 pitches) DOWN -1.5mph to 89.9
Yu Darvish's SL velo (15 pitches) DOWN -1.5mph to 84.1
Zac Gallen's CU velo (40 pitches) DOWN -1.5mph to 80.8
James Paxton's FF velo (55 pitches) DOWN -1.9mph to 93.1
Zach Eflin's FC velo (13 pitches) DOWN -2.6mph to 85.8
####Pitch Mix Changes - Yesterday
Andrew Heaney's CU usage (14.6%) up 13.9 points
Bailey Ober's FC usage (23.5%) up 22.4 points
Graham Ashcraft's SI usage (22.2%) up 11.3 points
Jacob Waguespack's CU usage (32.4%) up 15.1 points
James Paxton's CU usage (31.4%) up 11.4 points
Jesus Luzardo's SI usage (16.0%) up 10.8 points
Kai-Wei Teng's CU usage (41.0%) up 14.8 points
Kyle Freeland's FF usage (40.9%) up 20.7 points
Mitch Keller's SI usage (39.8%) up 16.4 points
Spencer Turnbull's ST usage (37.8%) up 30.3 points
Trevor Williams's ST usage (18.5%) up 14.9 points
Triston McKenzie's FF usage (72.4%) up 12.4 points
Tyler Anderson's FF usage (53.8%) up 13.5 points
Zac Gallen's CU usage (37.0%) up 10.5 points
CSW% Leaders - Last 3 Weeks
Jared Jones - 48 TBF, 37.6% CSW%
Jack Flaherty - 51 TBF, 35.9% CSW%
Garrett Crochet - 67 TBF, 35.0% CSW%
Graham Ashcraft - 51 TBF, 34.2% CSW%
Zack Wheeler - 48 TBF, 33.5% CSW%
Logan Gilbert - 49 TBF, 33.0% CSW%
Grayson Rodriguez - 49 TBF, 33.0% CSW%
Trevor Rogers - 49 TBF, 32.9% CSW%
Tyler Anderson - 51 TBF, 32.2% CSW%
Brandon Pfaadt - 48 TBF, 32.2% CSW%
K% Leaders - Last 3 Weeks
Jared Jones - 48 TBF, 35.4% K%
Grayson Rodriguez - 49 TBF, 32.7% K%
Garrett Crochet - 67 TBF, 31.3% K%
Zack Wheeler - 48 TBF, 31.2% K%
Logan Gilbert - 49 TBF, 30.6% K%
Zac Gallen - 66 TBF, 28.8% K%
Luis Severino - 48 TBF, 27.1% K%
Brandon Pfaadt - 48 TBF, 27.1% K%
Dane Dunning - 53 TBF, 26.4% K%
Yu Darvish - 79 TBF, 25.3% K%
K-BB% Leaders - Last 3 Weeks
Jared Jones - 48 TBF, 31.2% K-BB%
Garrett Crochet - 67 TBF, 29.9% K-BB%
Zack Wheeler - 48 TBF, 29.2% K-BB%
Logan Gilbert - 49 TBF, 26.5% K-BB%
Grayson Rodriguez - 49 TBF, 26.5% K-BB%
Brandon Pfaadt - 48 TBF, 25.0% K-BB%
Merrill Kelly - 48 TBF, 22.9% K-BB%
Luis Severino - 48 TBF, 22.9% K-BB%
Jack Flaherty - 51 TBF, 21.6% K-BB%
Zac Gallen - 66 TBF, 21.2% K-BB%
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