MLB Daily Notes - February 26th
Spring training doesn't matter, but...
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One weekend in the books and man does it feel good to have games being played and data flowing!
These next several daily notes post will be littered with qualifying statements like “it probably means nothing, but”… “just something to keep an eye on”… “there’s a lot of randomness in this”… “the velo data might not be trustworthy”…
So lather up for that. Most of the statistical stuff we talk about here will indeed turn out to not have mattered at all. There’s no reason to care about who is putting out good stats and who is putting out bad stats in the spring. But that doesn’t mean we can’t write the daily notes and keep an eye on things. The purpose of all of this is for entertainment, right? So if there’s entertainment available, we should grab it.
There are also some stats that are much more likely to matter, like pitch velocities, new pitches, and those types of things. Stats that are completely skill-based and do not require sample sizes to matter. Still, we have to just soak even that data in asterisks. Some notes on all of that.
New Pitches
Plenty of pitchers will try out a new pitch in the spring just to ditch in the regular season (either outright ditching it, or throwing it <5% of the time). It’s really rare to see a pitcher actually add a new pitch and then use it a bunch. So even if Hunter Greene is throwing a splitter 10% of the time, it does not at all mean that the new pitch will make any difference at all in the regular season. But the few pitchers that do add a new pitch and have it matter in 2024 will start showing that to us now, so it’s good at least know who is doing what.
Pitch Velos
I don’t care if a guy’s velo is down, at least not in these first couple of weeks. There’s no reason to believe a pitcher is even giving full effort in his first few outings here a full month before the games matter. But if a pitch velo is up significantly, that could certainly be meaningful.
Exit Velos
The only thing to even remotely care about as far as hitter exit velo goes is max exit velo. If a guy that previously topped out at 111 is ripping balls at 115, then there’s been a physical change there. So that could be interesting. However, the sad truth is that we can’t even really trust the data in these parks. Last spring, Ryan McMahon registered an EV of 117 in the spring and then maxed out at 113 in the regular season. So there’s some real weird stuff that happens in the spring. That’s enough for me to just completely ignore it, but I don’t know, it’s still fun to do so I made a resource for it anyways. I just advise you not to care about it. Weird stuff I’m doing, right?
Why Even Do This
Even during the regular season, I don’t really use the daily notes as a way to change my mind about a player overnight. Nothing that happens in one game of baseball can ever truly be meaningful. I typically just use the notes as a launching pad to talk about players and stats in more general, more responsible ways. So that’s what we’ll do here.
What I’m Tracking
Paid subs have access to a new Google Sheet called the “2024 Spring Training Tracker”. This is where I’ll store all the data I’m interested in, and it’s automated to re-populate every day after I load the new data in. Here’s what we have in there:
Games Tracked: This tab shows you the list of games where Statcast data was captured. Everything in this file will be from only those games
SwStr%: You should not care about this one at all, but it’s fun to see. It’s just the SwStr% rates for any pitcher that has thrown 20+ pitches so far
Velo Tracker: This compares each pitcher’s spring velo’s with what they did in 2023
New Pitches: This locates new pitches that have been throw in spring that weren’t thrown in the Major Leagues in 2023
Max EV: Another one not to care about given what we said above, but it will show you the names of hitters that have out-done their 2023 max EV in a spring game this year. I put the park in there because I already know there’s a problem at this Salt River Fields at Talking Stick park (that’s where McMahon set that BS mark last year), so any time you see that park, just ignore it EVEN HARDER.
New Pitches
Here’s the full data:
There’s only one real launching pad worth jumping on, and that’s Carlos Rodon. He’s the only fantasy-relevant name here as far as standard leagues go. A new cutter is cool, always a good weapon to have, especially for a guy that already has one good fastball. A cutter could play nicely with the four-seamer and really keep righties off balance. But the pitch mix and results aren’t really the worry with Rodon as much as health.
Another guy that could maybe matter in 2024 is Jake Irvin. He has come into camp seemingly with an overhauled pitch mix. He was a pretty good pitcher in the minors in 2022:
105.1 IP, 3.85 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 25.6% K%, 6.5% BB%, 19.2% K-BB%
But was really awful in the Majors:
121 IP, 4.69 ERA, 1.42 WHIP, 18.7% K%, 10.2% BB%, 8.5 K-BB%
The Stuff+ is at 97 and the Location+ is 100, so that makes him look like a league-average pitcher, which is better than what he was last year. Given the better numbers in the minors, maybe he could improve to a 14-16% K-BB%, so that could make him a streamer option at some point in 2024. But long ways to go on that.
Pitch Velo
Tylor Megill
the original version of this said Trevor (who is a reliever for the Brewers)… but no, we’re talking about Tylor (Mets starter)
Typically we only care about velocities from fastballs, but I have to highlight that Tylor Megill threw six sliders with an average of 90.4mph this weekend. His slider was at 84.3 last year. His fastball velo was the same, so this is clearly an intentional change. He just chose to throw the slider harder. Will he keep doing that? I don’t know. Will it even matter if he does? I don’t know.
With fastball, it’s clear - the faster, the better. But there’s a lot more to it than that with breaking balls.
Still an upward trend there as far as getting whiffs goes from the low 80’s tot he mid 90’s, so yeah in general terms it would seem 90 is better than 84 for Megill.
For xwOBA though, there’s really no difference at all:
So it’s a big shoulder shrug here, but it’s certainly an intentional change and… yeah, you guessed it… it’s… WORTH MONITORING.
Cole Irvin
This was the big name you may have heard about on Twitter yesterday. He saw increased velo’s across the board on his fastballs in that outing against the Pirates.
He was asked about it and did comment that he made a lot of changes over the off-season. Irvin is 30, was not in the original projected rotation, and has a career 4.59 SIERA, so it would make a lot of sense for him to try some stuff to change his game this off-season. And I guess he did that. Will it matter? I doubt it! He’s been around since 2019, if he could just change some stuff and get better I’d think he would have done that a few years ago. But it’s not impossible, there’s certainly more analytics and whatnot around these clubs this year than in prior years, so maybe someone picked something out, and maybe it will matter. Here’s how the full arsenal looked:
28 pitches means nothing, but if you’re going to throw 28 pitches you might as well get six whiffs while you’re at it. Certainly we will be watching his next outing and the subsequent ones, he could end up being a sneaky late-round pick.
I said earlier that we don’t care about low velo’s this early, but if you’re really tracking guys this spring, here are some names that had lower velo’s this weekend, just to jot down and keep an eye on as we progress.
Marcus Stroman’s cutter
Louie Varland’s sinker/cutter
Carlos Rodon’s 4-seam
Exit Velo’s
I’ve already said I’m not going to care about this at all, but let me just give you more information about why.
If we zoom in on all batted balls above 80 miles per hour from 2023 and then average the EV’s by park, we find every MLB stadium coming in between 93.0 and 94.0 miles per hour.
If we do the same for spring training so far:
It’s only one or two games, so too early to take those numbers super seriously, but last year looked much the same. It seems like maybe those bottom four have reliable guns, but certainly the five are extremely suspect. And that’s more than enough to throw it out entirely, let’s just not care about exit velo’s at all in spring.
But we can still take the launching pad on Elehuris Montero, who allegedly hit a ball 112.1 miles per hour this weekend. His max last season was 110.5, so if 112 were true that would be notably. However, 112.1 is almost certainly not true, but nonetheless, he was an interesting fantasy bat prior to this, so he remains so.
He would seem to have a shot to play a lot for the Rockies this year at a corner infield spot. Last year he had a big strikeout problem at 36%, which is horrifying. His contact rate was really horrible as well at 61%, so he needs to do way, way better than that. But if he does, he does have power, so he could be a streamer/mini-breakout infield option for us this year.
That will do it for the daily notes today. I am not going to write these every day in the spring, but at least 2-3 times a week. So we’ll be back soon, thanks for being here! The link to the Spring Training tracker sheet and new dashboard is below the paywall, so sign up to get that and everything else I do here!