MLB Daily Notes - March 15th

Draft weekend is upon us! I complain about complaints, update the season-long projections, and look into some more spring standouts.

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It is draft weekend! I assume most of the uncompleted drafts will be firing off in the next five days, and probably most over this weekend. Exciting stuff, and I wish everybody reading this the best of luck, except of course those drafting against me tomorrow. And really, good luck is the best thing that you can have in a fantasy draft. Regardless of the tens of thousands of words I have written since last November getting ready for this fantasy season, I would still take a lot of good luck over that.

The influence of luck isn’t nearly as strong in baseball as it is in football, which does make fantasy baseball a much better game in my opinion, but most of the skill stuff comes in-season. The better players separate in the middle of the year with roster decisions, the draft is largely just about not being an idiot and avoiding injuries.

I would say “don’t be an idiot and avoid injury” is pretty good general advice for getting ahead in world as well. We are really fortunate to live in modern times and in the country we do live in. You really don’t have to be that impressive of a person to make a good living and have a really nice life. I’m not even just talking about America either, I know I have plenty of people reading from Canada and even some in Europe, and yeah life is good in those places too - although that’s largely thanks to America and what the founders of our country setup that ended up flowing all over the globe.

The main focus of humans for most of human history was just staying alive, and now we don’t have to worry about that at all. We have comfort that most people that have ever lived couldn’t even imagine. We all take that for granted every single day. This reminds me of probably my favorite comedy bit of all time:

This isn’t really an indictment specific to western people living today, but just an indictment of human nature more broadly. We just are never satisfied, but if you can start beating that and find some contentment, man it’s amazing how much peace and joy you find.

This isn’t coming from nowhere, I’ve seen it a bunch this week. First I saw someone complaining about their job and “corporate America” and the demands and all that stuff. And that’s one thing, plenty of people have a job they don’t like and it’s not like they can just up and leave.

But the second one really had me shaking my head. It was this person that loves baseball, as long as I’ve been on Twitter, so has he - talking about baseball. And last night he was like “The Spring Breakout is a rare W for Major League Baseball” or something like that. And this isn’t a one-off thing, all the time you see people that pay all kinds of attention and devote all kinds of energy into MLB baseball bitching about MLB baseball. Like this is your chosen hobby, right? This is the thing you choose to entertain yourself with when you have free time, but you still don’t like it?

So is that you don’t like it, or you just have this predisposition to be negative and find the worst in everything? Obviously it’s the second one. It’s just so weird and wasteful, man. I think some sects of our culture teach that though. The “constant progress” mindset is well-intentioned, I know, but what it does it lead to a lack of appreciation for the good things we do have. And so many younger people have been told about all the bad thing that needs fixed without being given any understanding of how many good things we have and how good they really are.

What I’m saying is, draft Griffin Canning this weekend and be thankful about it.

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Season Long Projection Update

In going through refining the daily projections, I made some slight tweaks to the player skill projection model, which is at the root of both projection models. How my projections work very simply:

• Project every player’s skill in a neutral environment

• Apply each player’s current environment to their skills

• Project

So the first model is the most important. Because of the tweaks, I did a fresh run of the season-long projections. The biggest difference you might notice is that some guys went up 2-3 steals. I say this just to tell you that if you’re heavily relying on my projections for your draft, get a fresh copy of them today.

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Zack Littell

Littell was a somewhat valuable fantasy asset in the second half last year as he entered the Rays rotation following those injuries, and pitched pretty well. In the second half:

12 GS, 3.57 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 18.8% K%, 2.4% BB%, 1.3 HR/9

Low K%, but still a pretty solid 55:7 K:BB overall. One thing we should start thinking more about is how many balls in play a guy is allowing.

Littell’s K-BB% in this sample was 16.4%, a well above-average mark. Since we (my especially) often cite K-BB% by itself (meaning, without showing the K% and BB%), we could see Littell’s 16% K-BB% and equate it with a pitcher who went 27% K%, 11% BB%.

19-3=16
27-11=16
19-3=27-11

That’s the transitive property or something, right?

So it’s tempting to say that both of those are equivalent. But when we look at how many balls in play each of those ratios results in:

19%-3% K-BB%:
100%-19%-3%=78%

27%-11% K-BB%
100%-27%-11%=62%

So for every 100 batters each guy faces there, the second pitcher allows 16 fewer balls in play, and you don’t really want to allow balls in play. Now, a lot of it offset by the fact that there will be fewer men on base when you do allow a ball in play, but not all of it.

I looked deeper into in January, using a 14% K-BB% example. I looked at 11 different ways to get to a 14% K-BB%, found all the pitchers that did that over the years, and then averaged out their ERAs:

So the 14% K-BB% is steady down the list, but the ERA is lowest at the highest end of K%. So you could say that a high K% is more important than a low BB% when you’re talking about similar K-BB% ratios.

I had no intention of getting into this when I started writing about Littell. Here is what he did yesterday:

That is six strikeouts out of 16 batters faced, a 37.5% K% against a pretty regular-season-like Braves lineup.

He struck out Acuna twice, which really isn’t notable since he’s just getting back into the swing of things, this is one game, and it’s the spring, but I was curious anyways, how many times did a pitcher strikeout Acuna twice in the same game last year? I wouldn’t be that surprised if nobody did it, but let’s check.

Okay I checked, and it happened four times last year:

May 2nd: Sandy Alcantara
May 15th: Cole Ragans
June 7th: Max Scherzer
August 9th: Quinn Priester

Should you draft Zack Littell? Probably not. He has been drafted inside the top 300 just a few times all year on NFBC, so the higher stakes players certainly don’t believe in him. I don’t really either given the 11% SwStr% and that really low K% last year, but I suppose you could do worse than him in very deep leagues. The low walk rate keeps him away from major disasters most times out, but I would really like to avoid anybody with strikeout rate below 24%, as a general rule.

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Paul Skenes

I finally got to watch Skenes pitch live for the first time last night, and man was that impressive. Just piping 101-102 right past dudes. He threw Jackson Holliday a 3-1 slider and I think Holliday’s whiff popped three of his pimples. And then he got him to chase a 3-2 changeup off the plate outside. Holliday might have just been not wanting to take a walk in an exhibition game that a lot of people were watching, and I respect that a lot. But Skenes still sent his ass back to grammar school.

As a Pirate fan, this is the most hyped prospect we’ve had since Gerrit Cole, so it’s really exciting to anticipate his arrival. Originally I didn’t think it was sure that would happen this year, but it’s pretty clear to me now that he’ll be in the Majors before June as long as he’s healthy.

Whether or not you should draft him really depends on your league. I’m not willing to use a valuable bench spot on him, but some leagues have minor league spots or super deep benches to where it might be worthwhile. It’s possible he comes up and struggles against Major League hitters at first, but I don’t know man, that kind of raw stuff plays.

Hitters against 99+ mile per hour four-seamer last year:

.200 AVG, .311 SLG, 70% Contact%, .277 wOBA

Conversely, against four-seamers under 95:

.280 AVG, .502 SLG, 80% Contact%, .381 wOBA

Velo plays…

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Wyatt Langford

It would seem that Langford is going to make the club, so he should be drafted in your league. Someone will probably reach into the top 100 for him in your league, and I don’t think I would do that, but it’s not the most insane thing to do either. I would guess he’s already owned in dynasty leagues, but if not that should be corrected. In that type of league I could see using a higher pick on him, but I like to just focus on redraft leagues in these notes since things are much simpler.

He’s obviously super-skilled and was clearly above college and minor league pitching last year, and he’s hit five bombs with a 1.271 OPS this spring (43 PAs), so yeah maybe he is just one of those generational talents that comes up and crushes right away. He has a 28% K% and a 14% BB% this spring. I do think the strikeout rate is likely to be high early on, but he might be able to make up for it with quality of contact and walks. You would also have to imagine he’ll improve as the year goes on.

So I guess I’m saying I’m not drafting Langford myself tomorrow, but I won’t do that thing where do a snort-laugh and act like it just slipped out at the person who does.

The only other hitters to have homered five times this spring? Oneil Cruz and David Bote.

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OPS Leaders

The 30-PA minimum OPS Leaders from Spring:

1. Colton Cowser 1.430

2. Anthony Rizzo 1.394

3. Wyatt Langford 1.271

4. Miguel Andujar 1.237 (snort-laugh)

5. Zack Gelof 1.209

6. James Outman 1.172

7. Aaron Hicks 1.167

8. Ketel Marte 1.150

9. Nick Pratto 1.141

10. Andy Ibanez 1.141

11. Elly De La Cruz 1.138

12. Mookie Betts 1.130

13. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. 1.130

14. Miguel Toglia 1.129

15. Jonathan Aranda 1.124

I did this dynasty league draft back in 2020 because I was desperate for something to do, and by the time half of it was done I was completely over it so I just started drafting the entire Colorado Rockies top hitter prospects list. The team sucked for three years and then I abandoned it this off-season, classic fairy tale ending.

The most fun thing I can imagine in fantasy baseball would be a super competitive, involved dynasty league. That sounds awesome. But life isn’t a utopia, and I think 90% of dynasty leagues end up being stupid because you don’t get the participation you want and people just play dumb and quit all the time.

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Shota Imanaga

He now has a 46% K% this spring (41 batters faced), so that’s a resoundingly positive sign. In Japan he posted a 10.6 K/9, which is good but not great for MLB purposes, but the league K/9 over there was 7.3, so with that in mind - it’s pretty clear that Imanaga was pooping on dudes.

There are three possibilities with Imanaga this this year:

• He is great

• He is horrible

• He is somewhere in the middle

#Analysis. I must refer to Donald Rumsfeld on this one.

I always talk about this quote. People still make fun of the guy for it, but that is such an important thing to understand. The difference things that we don’t know and the things we don’t know that we don’t know.

I find it so funny when people talk like they know what’s in space. They are so full of themselves talking about what they’ve discovered, and while they’re at it they’ll like casually slip in that 95% of the known universe is “dark matter”, which sounds smart until you ask what “dark matter” is… and the answer to that is just like “some shit we have no idea about”.

So we know like .000000000000000001% of what there is to know out there (of course that number is impossible to actually calculate since we have no idea what the denominator would be, but we can just call it 0%, and then we only know 5% of the ~0% we do know.

Imanaga is not an unknown unknown, he’s a known unknown. Everything in the future to some extent is a known unknown, but Imanaga is more unknown because we haven’t seen him against Major League hitters. But he’s a guy I’m willing to take a risk on. The high reward potential is certainly there, and a huge way to get ahead in fantasy is to find that very cheap pitcher that pitches like an ace.

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I have used a lot of words here today so I think it’s time to hang it out. I promise to keep things more focused on baseball stuff when the regular season starts, not entirely so, but more so.

So long, and wish me LUCK at my home draft tomorrow!