MLB Daily Notes - February 23rd
The first daily notes of the year! We talk about what lies ahead, review new tools, and look at a few choice things from the one game that was played yesterday.
We’re back! It’s year three of the daily notes, and this post was the reason the Substack began in the first place! I had the idea to just write a Python script to spit out a summary of the previous day, so I started this publication with the original intention of just posting those every day. The next thing I got into quickly after that was the daily projections, and then things have really snowballed from there. Now I do seemingly dozens of different things here, and it’s been a huge success and blessing to me and my family. So the daily notes have a special place here!
I have never done daily notes for spring training, but I think I’ll dabble in it a bit this year. It might not be a good idea overall, because spring training stuff is misleading just as often as it is useful. But I’m anxious to write about games, and you’re anxious to read about them. So we’ll get our salt shaker out and break down some stuff this spring.
One game opened up the spring yesterday, with the Dodgers playing the Padres and housing them 14-1, scoring eight runs in the first inning and chasing Joe Musgrove before he could record an out. So what did we learn it? Absolutely nothin’!
But one thing worth mentioning, I suppose, is the one guy that everybody was very quick to [over] react to yesterday, and that was Padres reliever Yuki Matsui. He signed with the Padres this winter, coming over from Japan. That signing generated much less of a buzz than the Yamamoto and Imanaga signings, and that’s because the guy is a freakin’ reliever and nobody cares about relievers!
Except for the people that do. The reliever wing of fantasy baseball Twitter is small but very passionate. Shout out to my guy BullpenGuru, who does a bunch of bullpen stuff with a collection of other guys, I think… at least I hope he’s still doing it.
Matsui is 28 years old and signed a five-year deal deal with the Fathers, for a total of $28 milly. The reason we might care about him for fantasy purposes is that he could certainly be in the mix for saves in San Diego.
From the 2024 Bullpen Data sheet:
So the back-end of the bullpen is Robert Suarez, these two international signings (Woo Suk Go is the other, he came over here from the Korean League, and yes I will do my best to avoid making a joke about the name there), and then a bunch of pretty meh names.
The game yesterday was played in a stadium without the needed technology to get full pitch data. And even the basic pitch-by-pitch stuff wasn’t captured correctly. Here’s how it went:
For whatever reason, it only inserted rows into the JSON data (shout to you if you know what I’m talking about) based on the outcome of the plate appearances. Matsui threw 12 pitches, but when you look at each PA you’ll only see the three strikes recorded:
It’s the same with a walk, it will show all four balls with their locations there if it was a walk, but none of the strikes or foul balls that might have come in that PA as well. For any plate appearances that had a ball in play, it just shows the pitch that resulted in the ball in play. So they are capturing all the pitches, but it just goes back and erases some of that after the fact… weird stuff.
Anyways, some people got fooled. Matsui did not throw nine pitches for three strikeouts (an immaculate innings), he threw 12 pitches. But hey, 12 pitches and three punchies is a pretty good way to start your Major League career, even if it is just a spring outing.
Should we draft this guy? In holds leagues, the answer is yes. In saves leagues, I don’t really think so right now. He is a left-hander with no big league experience. You know why it matters that he has no experience, but why do I also mention his left-handedness? Am I being hateful? Discriminatory! One could say so - at least we could say that reality discriminates in this case.
Since 2021, left-handed pitchers have thrown just 28% of the pitches in the Majors. In the 9th inning, they have thrown just 21% of the pitches. They have recorded just 18% of the saves. And if you take Josh Hader and his 103 saves out of the picture, it’s only 16%.
So they are
Under-represented overall
Even more under-represented in the ninth inning
Even more under-represented at getting saves
This is mostly because managers really like to use their left-handed relievers against left-handed hitters. So if a tough lefty is due up in the eighth inning, the best left-handed reliever is likely to face him.
You might have wondered at some point why doesn’t the same apply to right-righty? Why couldn’t it just be the opposite where the managers bring in the best righty in the eighth if the best right-handed hitter is up.
RHB vs. RHP: .243/.307/.407, .313 wOBA, 23.5% K%
LHB vs. LHP: .231/.303/.359, .297 wOBA, 24.0% K%,
For whatever reason, lefty vs. lefty is more advantageous than righty vs. righty for a pitcher. And the most dangerous matchup for a pitcher is LHP vs. RHB:
RHB vs. LHP: .256/.321/.430, .331 wOBA, 22.1% K%
LHB vs. RHP: .244/.318/.412, .324 wOBA, 22.3% K%
There is some physical explanation for this, but I don’t know it. I’m using the last three seasons worth of data for this too, so this isn’t noise.
Teams know this, and they prioritize getting their left-handed relievers matched up against left-handed batters more than they prioritize the other way around.
So all of that is to say, it’s bad news for Matsui. Even if he is truly dominant in the Majors (it will be awhile before we really know this), he’s unlikely to be a good source of saves to bother with in standard fantasy leagues.
That’s pretty much all I have to say about the game. Kevin Padlo and Jake Cronenworth went deep, so that’s good for them. Joe Musgrove was awful, his outing went like this:
Walked Mookie Betts
Gave up a flare single to Chris Taylor
Hit James Outman
Gave up a solid ground-rule double (possibly a barrel, who knows!) to Teoscar Hernandez
And then he was done. And now he is saddled with an INFINITE ERA and WHIP until the next time he gets out there. I wrote a paper about infinity in college, people used to get killed by the government for even believing in the concept. It was senior year and I had already landed a job so I made a complete joke out of the paper, and the professor let me get away with it. One of my prouder academic moments. And now that I revisit the memory, I doubt the thing about people getting killed was even true. Ever since 2020 I pretty much don’t believe anything anybody tells me about the past. I will actually argue against the existence of dinosaurs (as we know them…), that’s the kind of guy I am. But while I do that, I fully believe everything written in the Bible. And some of you probably think I’m really dumb because of that, but no… don’t say that. Infinity is real, and so is the spiritual world and divine inspiration!
If you’re new to the Daily Notes, this is quite often how it goes. We go from Teoscar Hernandez ripping a double to me talking about history and the existence of God in less than three sentences. I really get a kick out of myself.
The 2024 Daily Notes
So let’s talk more generally about the notes for a minute. The first year, they were completely free. Last year, I started hiding half of them behind the paywall. This year, I am going to at least do that again, and I will likely be even more restrictive. They’re never going to go fully behind the paywall, I don’t think, because they are a pretty good lure to bring new subscribers in. I do have new data and refined coding and automation skills this year, so I am going to make the automation portion of the better, more useful, and more interesting this year.
I’ve added some really cool stuff even in the last few weeks as new ideas hit me. Some examples:
League-adjusted minor league stats
Automated player checklist
Some peeks:
That’s on top of several other similar things that I’ve developed over these last two seasons, and there will be plenty more coming. That’s the kind of stuff I limit to paid subs. Only paid subs get access to the Google sheets, and any part of the notes that includes that stuff goes behind the paywall.
I also limit all of the Tableau dashboards to paid subs. I’m not going to get into the details of that right now, but there are several customizable and interactive dashboards I’ve made (all the Major and minor league data that’s publicly available) that you simply aren’t finding anywhere else on the Internet. There’s no one else here to toot this horn so I have to do it myself, they are some of the best and more useful tools anywhere, so you’ll benefit and enjoy yourself greatly for getting access to them.
So sign up today and come along for the full ride in 2024, I’m pretty pumped to be back doing this!