MLB Daily Notes - March 1st
We turn the page to March and have another check-in on spring training.
There’s no real structure to the spring training daily notes, so I have no idea where they are going to go from here. But sometimes I do my best work in these situations.
I am just 15 days away from my home league draft, and this year we’re all getting together in Pittsburgh for it, so I’m extremely excited for that. I talk to these guys almost every day online, but I only get to see them 2-3 times a year now since I fled Pittsburgh in 2020.
You might have seen it already, and you probably don’t care at all, but TFGBI drafts started this week! TGFBI is a collection of NFBC leagues for fantasy baseball content creators to play in, run by Justin Mason. Very cool and fun event every year, and man I am liking the team I’m putting together. So here it is, I had 12th pick (it’s a 15-man league):
Jose Ramirez
Matt Olson
Pablo Lopez
Tyler Glasnow
Christian Yelich
Kyle Schwarber
Bryson Stott
Yainer Diaz
Hunter Greene
Jarren Duran
Kenley Jansen
Bryce Miller
Finally got my Jose Ramirez value there, and backed him up with two 40+ homer bats with Olson/Schwarber. That puts some pressure on steals, but I think I filled in nicely with Yelich/Stott/Duran. And all of my favorite pitchers just keep falling to me right where I want them. With this league actually having waivers, I’m not worrying much about closers, but I was happy to get Kenley Jansen really late to have someone solid at the beginning of the year.
I expect the team to compete early on, and then I’ll fall into the bottom half of the standings in July-September after I stop paying attention because all I care about once again is my home league.
New Pitches
Not many interesting names have popped up on the new pitches tab of the Spring Training Tracker in recent days, but most of these games aren’t giving us Statcast data so we’re missing plenty.
All the talk has been about Spencer Strider throwing a curveball now, and maybe throwing the changeup more. It doesn’t mean anything at all to me since he was already my SP #1, so there’s nowhere to go even if I did think this stuff was really relevant. My guess is that the curveball will very low-usage for him, and he could end up just scrapping it entirely. But it’s certainly not bad news! The best thing to see is that he’s healthy and has already racked up nine strikeouts in five innings (47% K%).
There’s also talk about a Hunter Greene splitter. That makes a lot of sense for him as well as a two-pitch guy that wasn’t having the most success with it. I think Greene’s fastball and slider are both good enough to make him a very good SP, but adding any kind of third option to get hitter’s a little more off-balance could be huge. I’m drafting him as much as I can, but I’m not going to say he’s certain to smash this year. If the new pitch thing doesn’t come through, he’ll be very susceptible to the long ball which could derail his season, and he still hasn’t posted a strong walk rate in the Majors.
We also saw my boy Bryce Miller’s splitter yesterday, and there was a video of him getting a whiff with it so that is all I need to see! Give him the Cy Young award already.
Spring Standouts - Pitchers
Your top strikeout rates so far (four innings minimum):
Ryne Nelson 53%
Landon Knack 50%
Spencer Strider 47%
Garrett Whitlock 40%
Bryan Hoeing 40%
Patrick Corbin 38%
Alec Marsh 37.5%
Tylor Megill 37%
Clayton Beeter 32%
Ryan Weathers 32%
I love some Garrett Whitlock, and he’s looked sharp so far. He’s still not in the rotation, however, so we can’t really draft him. The report was that he’d remain stretched out to be able to pick up 4-5 innings when they need him, so he could be a guy that ends up in the rotation early on with an injury, and at that point I’d be adding him everywhere I could. He showed elite command and the ability to get whiffs at a good rate last year, which is one of the main things I look for.
We’re not ever going to draft or add Patrick Corbin, but hey he does have a new cutter this year.
Again, none of these names become interesting because of what they do in the spring, we’re just using this to talk about guys we already liked. And there are a few names here we should refresh on.
Ryne Nelson, Arizona Diamondbacks
Nelson is a high Stuff+ guy, but it hasn’t translated into anything good for him in the Majors. He’s in the top-left of this plot, which means High Stuff+, Low K%:
Given the clear relationship there, you would think that he’d be a guy who could potentially really increase the strikeout rate in the future. And hey, he’s done that so far striking out 10 of 19 hitters he’s faced this year. Again, I don’t suddenly care about Nelson because of the hot start in spring; he was an interesting pitcher to monitor beforehand.
His pitch mix last year:
The Stuff+:
Four-Seam 107
Cutter 120
Changeup 137
Slider 92
Curveball 99
Despite that, he had below-average swinging-strike rates on every single pitch. He’s probably not going to be a fantasy-relevant pitcher this year, but he certainly has a better chance of a breakout than your run of the mill 17% K% guy. Check out this thread from Rylan Domingues for more.
Alec Marsh, Kansas City Royals
Marsh made some waves last year with a few big performances. Overall he had a really bad 5.69 ERA in 74 innings and struggled mightily with command (11.4% BB%). But the strikeouts were solid at 25% with a 13.5% SwStr%, so there’s something there.
From 2022-2023 in the minors, he posted a 27% K% and a 10.5% BB%, still not an elite K-BB% at 16.5%, but again - the strikeouts were up there. He has a six-pitch mix and he’s still just 25 years old, so there is plenty of road ahead of him and I think he could develop into a pretty good pitcher.
But the key point is that he’s currently outside of the Royals rotation, so completely irrelevant for fantasy to start the year.
Joe Boyle, Oakland Athletics
This is a guy I have pretty much bypassed all off-season, but maybe I shouldn’t have! So I’m here for redemption.
The reason I quickly moved past him even in the Athletics team preview was the 18% walk rate he’s posted in 2022-2023 (234 innings).
That’s right, EIGHTEEN PERCENT IN MORE THAN A FULL SEASON’S WORTH OF INNINGS. That is nutso. For all pitchers in pro ball last year with 120 innings, only two pitchers had a BB% above 16% (Boyle and some dude named Jay Groome).
In 16 MLB innings, it’s only 8.3%, but we can’t possibly forgive him for the wildness in the minors. His Ball% was 42.5% in the minors in 2023, that was in the bottom 10 of the entire minor leagues last year. It’s gross. I’m triggered and offended right now, might even have to yell at my kids later for this.
So what are we doing here? Well, the good news:
130 Stuff+
122 Stuff+ on his four-seamer
Zero walks vs. 19 batters this spring (5 strikeouts)
The best-case scenario for him might be turning into a good version of Michael Kopech, which still isn’t very good. But look, crazier things have happened, all he has to do is drop the walk rate like seven points to become quite interesting!
I have my doubts that any pitcher in MLB history has dropped their walk rate seven points in one year, but hey it has to start somewhere, and maybe Joe Boyle will blow us all away this year.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto
I don’t want to be a disrespector of names or anything like that, but I am really hoping we start calling this guy Yoshi. I mean I hope he’s cool with that and then we can just do it, because Yoshinobu is a hard word to type. I don’t think my fingers have ever typed i-n-o-b-u ever before so it’s really messing with me.
Yamamoto debuted and faced six hitters:
Marcus Semien: Strikeout swinging
Evan Carter: Line single to center
Wyatt Langford: Grounded into double play
Nathaniel Lowe: Strikeout swinging (in the dirt)
Jonah Heim: Fly out to left field
Leody Taveras: Strikeout swinging (in the dirt)
Fantastic debut, and he will probably push up into the top 10 SPs before long. In fact, this week he’s been the 8th SP off the board on average, over the last two weeks he’s #10. So I guess he’s already being drafted as an SP1. Good for you people who drafted him super late in November/December.
I suppose I can’t make a good argument against him being an SP1 for fantasy besides just saying that gives you no room for error and we still have not seen this guy in a real Major League game. Inherently it feels more risky than the other SP1s, but maybe that’s not actually the case. And I suppose you could say there is upside here, because who knows - maybe he’s truly the best pitcher in the league.
No statcast data from that game so I can’t give you the pitch mix stuff.
Spring Standouts - Hitters
It’s even tougher to derive anything from hitters in the spring. We can break down a pitcher pitch-by-pitch and get all of the movement stuff on them, which means we can have useful data in just a few outings. With hitters, we need like 100 PAs to figure anything out, so spring is even more useless on this side of the ball. THAT SAID…
James Wood, Washington Nationals
Wood came up in the Nationals team preview, so check that out here (unlocked now for everyone).
He has posted a .916 OPS over the last two years in the minors with 38 homers and 37 steals, so he’s a really enticing profile for roto fantasy. The strikeouts are high, and that will almost surely continue, but I think he can make up for it with the big power and steals ability. He’s certainly off to a ripping start this spring leading the league with three homers and slashing .500/.563/1.143 in 16 PAs, striking out just twice.
Wood is not going to make the Major League roster, but he could be up in May or June and at that point I’d be adding him in most leagues given that HR+SB upside.
Michael Harris II, Atlanta Braves
He has two homers and just one strikeout early on, and he’s been hitting sixth for the Braves. I really like Harris this year. Given the power and speed, the upside with him is clearly first-round production, and you can get him in the third or fourth round at times. Sign me up for that.
Colton Cowser, Baltimore Orioles
Cowser is one of the forgotten Orioles top prospects as he gets overshadowed by all of these other prospects they have, but he could very well be a factor for them this year. He’s homered twice already this spring as he no doubt has his sights on making the club out of camp.
2022-2023 Minors:
1,030 PA, .286/.409/.487, .896 OPS, 27.6% K%, 15.3% BB%, 36 HR, 27 SB2023 Majors:
77 PA, .115/.286/.148, 433 OPS, 28.6% K%, 16.9% BB%, 0 HR, 1 SB
Very good minor league resume, and the guy has yet to turn 24 (that will happen later this month). So I would expect Cowser to get a good shot in the Majors at some point this year, although it might not be right away. The Orioles are pretty set in the outfield with Santander and Mullins locked in and Austin Hays unlikely to go anywhere. At DH they have Mountcastle and O’Hearn, and then you have Heston Kjerstad who is quite a lot like Cowser as a young prospect competing for a job. So it will probably take an injury or some kind of definitive decision to move on from O’Hearn to get Cowser in an everyday lineup, but keep an eye on that.
I think I’ve written enough for now, here’s hoping everybody has a nice weekend! We’ll be back with more next week.