I’m starting to wonder if Spencer Strider was just duping us with those first four starts. Was he just holding back for some reason? I mean what makes a guy go from not looking anything like himself to being (almost) 100% back to normal overnight?
He is a unique personality, so who knows. His last three starts now:
43% K%, 9% BB%, 20.7% SwStr%, 54.5% Strike%, 1.33 JA ERA
I would say that Strider is the #1 SP in baseball again.
Ryne Nelson passed the test against the White Sox.
I think we’ve seen more than enough for Nelson over the years to know he’s not going to be a help for your fantasy team. The JA ERA on the year is 3.80, which is bad. His K-BB% remains under 13%.
He has a decent fastball, but that’s really all he offers:
Chase Burns was the highlight man of the night.
81 PC, 5 IP, 6 H, 3 ER, 8 SO, 0 BB, 14.8% SwStr%, 34.6% Ball%
Here’s what it looked like:
He was hyped up and came out ripping fastballs. He struck out the side in the first, averaging almost 100mph on the fastball. But he had to rein it in and the fastball velo dipped as he went on.
The slider was also thrown for a ton of strikes. The zero walks was probably the best thing about the start in my opinion. Burns is good, and I don’t think we need to spend much time on it.
It is too bad, though, that it seems pretty unavoidable that guys like this will have to have at least one elbow surgery. At best, that costs them a year in their prime. At worst, it derails their career. It does seem extremely tough to come back from multiple elbow surgeries, and we’ve seen a lot of cases of that. It’s not impossible, but it does seem close to impossible to get back to peak performance. But I guess we shouldn’t dwell on that stuff. We should enjoy the things we have while we have them.
There’s this new Luke Combs song out there called WHY.
Okay, it’s actually a Jon Bellion song, but I’ve never heard of that guy, so we’ll call it a Luke Combs song.
The chorus:
Why love anything at all? If the higher I fly is the further I fall Then why love anything at all?
The second verse:
Stressed and strung out about the things that could happen I could move mountains with the worrying I’ve done So I called my father and he started laughing He said ‘You think it’s bad now? Will til you have a son’
So why love anything, anything at all?
It’s a good song. Very simple, and an interesting message. Three chords and the truth stuff.
But it disappointed me because they didn’t end it by answering the question. I was waiting for like a one-liner at the end of the song that was just like… because what if you don’t fall? Or… what else are you going to do? What other option is there?
Are there really people out there who just don’t do things and don’t take any chances in life because they can’t get the possible downside of the thing out of the spotlight? I guess there are.
I have a wife and three kids now. So, over the last ten years, I’ve added four new things to my life that could potentially rip me to pieces. If anything super bad ever happens to any of those four people, I’m in for it. But to think that’s a reason to not start a family is beyond me, and a very sad disposition to have. I could maybe see if it there was like a 90% chance that your child will die. And even like 100 years ago it was around 50-60% or something like that, but it’s not like that anymore. But I guess none of this comes from rational calculation. It’s just a spirit of fear that, in my opinion, comes right from hell.
So I guess what I’m saying is that intentionally holding back on your fastball velocity for the sake of future health is demonic.
It was another sort of weird start for Kris Bubic. He gave up eight more hits and four runs. But only two earned and another pristine 8:0 K:BB. He’s gievn up 23 hits in his last three starts. He has a 51.9% hard hit rate allowed in that time, which is not a good sign. But he’s only given up one homer. And he’s given up an obviously unsustainable .431 BABIP.
But it’s not like the underlying numbers are elite. He has a 22.7% K%, a 6.7% BB%, a 3.27 JA ERA, and a 2.80 WHIP+. So I don’t know. I think you could try to buy a little low on Bubic, but it’s looking more and more like he’s just a “good” arm rather than one of the better ones in the league, and that’s what he was looking like prior to June.
Kris Bubic Stats by Month
Frankie Montas, man. It turns out that all he needed to do to turn his season around was get back to the Major Leagues and face the Atlanta Braves.
He gave up at three earned runs in all four of his AAA rehab starts, and we mentioned yesterday about his 12+ ERA in that rehab. But he went up for five scoreless yesterday was five strikeouts.
This teaches us two things, I think.
Small samples are extremely random
Pitchers aren’t necessarily trying to do well during rehab assignments
I don’t think Frankie Montas main goal during those rehab starts was “let me help this team win this game”. Who knows what kind of stuff guys might be focused on in those situations. And I wonder if like the career minor league second baseman on that team got super pissed at Montas for shipping them losses. Like you’re really focused on getting this AA team to the playoffs and some big league douche comes in and just throws fastball after fastball over the middle and your team gets throttled.
This has been a really frustrating morning to get through for me right now. Every time I finish a paragraph something else pops up on my screen with someone needing something for one thing or another.
But here we go, we have hitters to talk about. But first I have to go drain the main vein.
Okay I’m back and Christian Moore homered twice last night, including a walk-off. It was about the least smooth walk off homer I’ve ever seen. It barely cleared the wall, and live you couldn’t even tell that it was a homer. So the outfielder fired it in to try to get him at second, so you had Christian Moore diving into second just thinking he had tied the game rather than won it. And then he gets up and sticks his tongue out, which is gross.
It’s not how I’d want my first walk-off dinger to go. But okay, I’ll chill out. That was an impressively struck batted ball. It looked like a gapshot that would two-hop the wall off the bat to me.
Let’s check the early profile on Moore. Here’s the full picture:
My quick summary is that he’s striking out an absolute ton (35% K%, 62% Contact%, 77% Z-Contact%), and that’s going to hold him down. His average exit velocity is 81.8, which is really bad, but it’s just 24 balls in play, and his EV90 early on is nice at 107.3.
He’s not overly aggressive with a 52% Swing%, but that is an aggressive approach. He’s hit a good number of fly balls at 38%, but the air pull is bad at 12.5%, and the .190 BABIP plus .222 xBA show you that his batted ball profile haven’t been great.
He’s still well within that expected adjustment period. I’m usually going to be in a pretty “forgive and forget” mood over a guys first 100 PAs. That’s a pretty tough thing to do in a redraft league. Since Moore got called up this month, 100 PAs is going to be like 30% of his entire season. That’s why I won’t typically use a roster spot on these rookies in redraft leagues, and that has proven to work very well this year with so many of these rookies really not doing much with the bat.
There are going to be a ton of these second-year bats to buy in drafts next year. They’ll be guys that aren’t overly expensive in drafts, and they’ll have insane upside. The guys I’m thinking of:
Nick Kurtz (although he might end up being pretty expensive)
Jac Caglianone
Roman Anthony
Kristian Campbell
Matt Shaw
Christian Moore
Cam Smith
Surely I’m missing some, but I’m now in hurry-up mode to get these daily notes out because I’m going to lunch with someone here in 15 minutes.
Caleb Durbin had himself a nice game. He had a couple of hits, including a homer.
I’ve heard that he’s been swiging the bat harder lately, but it doesn’t look to me like that’s true.
But let’s look at some time splits with him and then I’ve gotta run.
The strikeouts climbing a bit at the same time as the rest of the stats does suggest that maybe he’s “going for it” more. This is a common trade-off you’ll see. Most guys have to strike a balance between making contact and making hard contact. There are a lot of guys (Arraez, Kwan, Edwards, etc.) who just want to put the bat on the ball. And there are other guys (Stanton, Cruz, Robert) who just want to hit as many homers as possible and they’ll happily trade 200 strikeouts for it.
Durbin was much closer to that first group at the beginning, but he’s moving a bit more in the power direction. He’s never going to be a power hitter, I don’t think, but I think he’s made a good move here. An 18% K% is fine number if he’s going to keep driving the ball into gaps more often.
And all of that is without even mentioning his steals ability. He has six steals this year on a 16% attempt rate.
That’s a middling attempt rate. It’s not low by any means, but it’s also not a rate that turns into 40 steals or something like that. The highest attempt rates in the leagues will be above 25%.
I still don’t think Durbin is a standard roto league guy right now, but he’s clearly making big improvements and he can do a little bit of everything. I think he’s a nice points league target, especially in those leagues where you strikeouts hurt you.
That’s it for today! I’ll get a slate preview out for the night slate, but nothing for the day games, too much going on today - sorry about that.
