MLB Daily Notes - March 13th
Pitcher injuries, Jackson Merrill makes the team, Spring K% leaders, daily projections update
Some of the bigger story lines of the last few days.
The State of SP
Gerrit Cole has an elbow thing going on. He had an MRI and now they need further testing. It would seem the absolute best case scenario is that he misses a few starts at the beginning of the year. Much more information is needed, but if you’re drafting tonight and seeking my advice I would say avoid Cole. At least avoid him to the point where you aren’t making him your SP1. Personally I don’t think I would consider Cole before the point where I’m picking him as my SP3, and I doubt many leagues would let it get to that point. So I’m still out on Cole, but at least now there is a situation where I’d draft him (if he falls into round six or something…). Prior to that, he was going in the top 20 picks of every draft and I just wanted nothing to do with that.
If we look at the top 30 SPs from early December drafts:
Strider,
Cole, Burnes, Wheeler, Castillo,Gausman, Kirby, Gallen, Glasnow, Lopez, Nola, Skubal, Peralta, Valdez, Snell, Yamamoto, Fried, Gilbert, Webb,Senga, Rodriguez, Perez, Miller, Luzardo, Eflin, Ryan,Bradish,Buehler, Steele, Musgrove
Five of them are now hurt. There are varying degrees there, but given the volatility of pitchers, they are all plummeting in drafts.
At the beginning of all of this I would have said there were seven aces that I had no questions about whatsoever. That list is down to five now (Strider, Burnes, Wheeler, Castillo, Gallen). It’s not a huge knock on Kirby/Glasnow/Lopez, but there’s just a separation from that top five in terms of sustained ace production.
My favorite place to build a fantasy rotation is in the 80-160 range, but that doesn’t mean I want to wait that long to start it off. We need 7-10 SPs in most fantasy leagues, and that’s a lot to build after pick 80. So I would say I really want one of those five. And the cat is out of the bag, I’m coming for Wheeler in round two of the home league draft (20 players are kept so most of the studs are unavailable). Me saying that publicly to the league shouldn’t even make a difference because I have 9th and 12th picks. The first eight picks have to be hitters, you jackasses can’t really take an SP there. And then the guys with picks 10 and 11 are keeping Strider & Lopez, so I’m willing to roll the dice that they’ll go with hitters and I will have a beautiful start to my team of Ozzie Albies and Zack Wheeler, which would be fantastic additions to my Shohei Ohtani and Cole Ragans keepers.
Back to more general talk, I think the way to win pitching in your league this year will be with
Luck
Waiver wire adds
There are plenty of young stud pitching prospects coming, and I imagine they’ll make a big impact on the game this year.
I am guessing that young pitchers are better now than they were in the past. The surge of the analytics and pitch modeling and all that business we hear about benefits the young guys more than the old guys, for sure. They can know a lot more about what their arsenal should look like to have success in the Majors, there’s less to learn experientially.
A dude can just look at the numbers and be like “hey a slider that moves like this works really well in the Majors” and then they can just try to make their slider move like that. Hitters adjust and whatnot, it’s not the same rules every year for all-time, but all of this data clearly benefits young pitchers. So I think that plays into it, and I think we’ll see more and more players in their low-twenties come up and be really good right away.
We saw that with Eury Perez last year, and some of the names we could see fit that mold in 2024:
Jackson Jobe (DET)
Paul Skenes (PIT) 🤞🤞🤞
Ricky Tiedemann (TOR)
Cade Horton (CHC)
Jacob Misiorowski (MIL)
Robby Snelling (SD)
Jared Jones (PIT) 🤞🤞🤞
I don’t really think Jones belongs on that list, but I can dream, can’t I? Do you understand how much more enjoyable the days are for me when the Pirates are competitive?
My typical day goes like this
6:30 AM - 8:00 AM: Get up with the kids, get everybody ready
8:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Work
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM: Run, Shower, Eat
12:30 PM - 4:00 PM: Work
4:00 PM - 8:00 PM: Family stuff, dinner
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM: Read/Study
9:00 PM - 10:30 PM: Watch TV with my wife
Right now that 9:00-10:30 is filled up by Top Chef and Next Level Chef, which is working great. But when we get some interesting Pirate games in the mix there it’s just bliss.
There’s this other problem which I’m sure I’ll be complaining about early on this year where the Pirate home games are going to start at 6:40, which means it will be like the 6th or 7th inning by the time my kids are asleep and the games will be over by 9:15, so it won’t be quite my optimal, but that’s okay. We’ll still have time for Top Chef.
Jackson Merrill
He has made the Padres big league roster. He is a 20 year old (turns 21 in April) infield prospect who will play in the outfield for San Diego. Good for the Padres being aggressive there.
Last year:
.277/.326/.444, .770 OPS, 12% K%, 7% BB%, 15 HR (33.5 PA/HR), 15 SB
His launch angle stuff seemed good in the minors, meaning he wasn’t hitting too many ground balls. With the extremely good K%, he should be able to manage a decent batting average at the worst. I don’t know about the power, but my projection model likes the possibilities, giving him a 9% Brl%, which surprised me. Given the lower home run rate in the minors, I am skeptical of that, but yeah he’s at the age where the power should improve in a hurry, and it’s really good to see him hitting fly balls in the minors last year.
I think he should be drafted. There’s still the possibility that the K% is too high (25%+), but it’s much less likely given the 12% K% in the minors. The minor league average K% is 23%, and Merrill was one of just 25 minor league hitters under 13%.
Sal Frelick might be a nice comp here for him. Frelick also had a 12% K% in the minor leagues coming up, and in the Majors it came up just five points to 17%. So if we’re expecting Merrill to stay under 20% with non-zero power, that’s enough to draft him in standard leagues just to see what comes. But he’s not someone you need to hold onto if he’s struggling early on.
I drafted him in the MLB DW league in the last round, shout out to me.
Taj Bradley
Originally he was day-to-day with a pec, but now he’s shut down multiple weeks and will not be ready for Opening Day. So that’s now:
Tyler Glasnow
Shane McClanahan
Jeffrey Springs
Drew Rasmussen
Taj Bradley
That the Rays have lost in the last 10 months or so. That’s an all-star rotation. Brutal beats in Tampa Bay. The Rays rotation is looking pretty rough, and there’s only so much the good management and proper use of analytics can do! I don’t think it’s going to be a good year for them.
I think Bradley is still a fine late-round pick for an IL stash. #NotADoctor but I am less concerned with a chest injury than with an arm or shoulder thing.
The Rays top prospects list is mostly hitters, only two SPs in the top ten (Mason Montgomery and Santiago Suarez). Montgomery could factor in this year as a 23 year old, but Suarez is just 19.
Montgomery threw 124 innings last year with a 26.8% K% and 11.2% BB%, so it’s not fantastic stuff but the Rays could make it work.
Daily Projections
This week I began work on getting the daily projection model back up and running. If you’re new here, the daily projections are probably the most valuable thing I do. Paid subs get access to the full daily projections for hitters and pitchers. It’s intended to help with DraftKings DFS, but you get a full projection for every player (meaning I project each statistical category), so you can use that for your season-long lineup decisions and betting stuff as well (I also put out a really nice prop betting sheet that compares my model to the Sportsbook lines and highlights value bets).
My projections aren’t as good as The Bat, but they are much better than what you’ll find elsewhere for free. I think they alone make the $9/month worthwhile.
Nothing will come out until the morning of Opening Day, and I am praying that things go smoothly so I don’t have to scramble that morning to get them working again. It shouldn’t be a problem since it’s a model I’ve had for two years now, but wish me luck there anyways.
Spring SP K% Leaders
Just for a little bit of fun here, SPs who have faced at least 40 batters so far:
Spencer Strider 41.5% K%
Ryan Weathers 34.7%
Tylor Megill 33.3%
Justin Steele 31.7%
Patrick Corbin 30.2%
Jhony Brito 30.2%
Ryne Nelson 29.2%
Tanner Houck 28.6%
Andrew Heaney 27.3%
Nestor Cortes 26.5%
And that will do it for today’s daily notes. I don’t expect to put out a ton more stuff over the next two weeks with traveling this weekend and with my attention really turning to getting all of the daily scripts and stuff working, and trying to get ahead in my real job too so I can be ready to really hit baseball stuff hard early on so we can get everything running well as quickly as possible.