MLB Daily Notes - March 25th
Roster cuts, skill projections, Luis Gil, Jared Jones, and a lot more as we head towards Opening Day!
It is opening week. Should that be capitalized? I don’t think so. We have now just three more days to endure without regular season baseball, and then we will be off to the races.
DraftKings MLB DFS League
I set up a DraftKings league to run MLB contests in all year long. This will not be an organized thing where we keep standings or run a season-long contest or anything like that, just a place for readers to play some low-stakes DFS contests if they want to during the season. Everything I create will be $5 or less, and there are no commitments. Feel free to create your own contests in there as well! Join that here if you’re interested.
This should be my final spring training daily notes. Some teams play today and/or tomorrow, but I think most of the major news is taken care of. Ohtani speaks today, which is sure to be him denying any involvement in the betting. Hopefully that’s the truth, and hopefully this all turns out to be not that big of a story in the long run. I am very interested to see what kind of numbers he can put up playing 150+ games between Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman. I don’t think I’d be nearly as interested in finding that if I didn’t have him on my home league team, but I do, so I am.
If he acted in a way deserving punishment, then he should get punished. If he bet on baseball, he should get the lifetime ban, that’s all fine with me. Will that happen? Almost surely not. No matter how much we like the idea of equal justice for all, it’s never been a reality in human life and never will be. If you’re a tall man, you have an easier time getting into power. If you’re a hot girl, you have a much easier time getting what you want. If you make the organization you work for hundreds of millions of extra dollars, you get treated differently. Is it right? No. Is it real? Yes. Will it ever change? Nope!
There’s this book that Thomas Sowell wrote called Conflict of Visions, and I won’t get super into it but I read it a number of years ago and it really did clarify things for me. There are generally two views of politics (meaning how societies function, a very broad category that touches all elements of social life):
The constrained vision
The unconstrained vision
The unconstrained vision believes that there isn’t a hard limit on how good we can make society. We just have to get the right people in charge with the right resources, and then those people will be able to solve most of our problems.
The constrained vision believes there is a very obvious and hard limit on what we can do. It builds human nature into the calculation and believes that no configuration of people in power will be able to solve many problems, because everybody just always acts in their own interest and the more power someone gets, the more corrupt they become.
So the one side advocates for more powerful, concentrated government, and the other side advocates for an extremely limited (if not non-existent) central governing authority.
Maybe I’m misrepresenting the unconstrained side a bit. It’s probably clear to you the side I subscribe to, so it’s hard to be fair to a side I don’t agree with. But I see where people on both sides come from, and we certainly need some elements of both sides to get anything working.
And once again, I think it’s important to realize that we have done a pretty bang-up job in America, it’s a great country to live in right now, and we should all be appreciative of that.
I say all that to make the point that when you’re dealing with unjust corruption, you have a lot more peace of mind when you start from the point that humans are horrible and all of this immorality is par for the course, to be expected. You can almost laugh about it.
Luis Gil & Skill Projections
The Yankees have made Luis Gil their #5 starter, that was a bit of a surprise to me, but yeah I think that’s the right choice for them. He made it tough for them not to pick him with his spring performance.
A good way to make a ball club is to strike out 23 of 61 batters, and he did without a putrid walk rate to boot. I tweeted out the skill projection I have on Gil last night, here it is again:
26.2% K%
12.2% BB%
Heavy FB%
He’s a very tough case to project since we have only seen four regular season innings from him since 2021. Maybe he’s a different guy now than he was back then in the data my model is using, but I think this is a generally correct expectation right now.
In 159 total innings since 2021 (including spring), he has a 33% K% and a 13.4% BB% with a high 1.3 HR/9. He’s heavy four-seamer and slider, which lends itself to a high FB%, so yeah bro my projection is looking pretty nice.
If my projection is true and he really has a walk rate above 11%, that’s trouble. I don’t want to roster any pitcher with that kind of walk rate, unless they are Blake Snell (and even then…), but it’s not a guarantee by any means that he’ll have that kind of trouble. We have to #WaitAndSee, but he’s a good speculative add in deeper leagues nonetheless, because his upside is very high with that strikeout ability.
A more general point about skill projections. Every time I tweet a skill projection out for a rookie, I get people yelling at me about young players being able to improve. This happened like a hundred times with the Jordan Walker and Elly De La Cruz debacles last year after I tweeted out pretty pessimistic projections for them:
“You don’t think a 20 year old can improve????”
I guess people read my tweet as saying “this is what the player will do in his career”? Maybe I should clarify it every time I tweet it or something, but I’ll just do it now for those of you reading.
The “skill” projections are just what I projected each player to do right now in a completely neutral environment. It’s the best guess on what to expect from them in the short-term. And these skill projections change every single day when there’s new data available.
So if Gil goes out there for five starts and posts a 6% BB%, that projected BB% is going to drop. It’s a quite beautiful thing. I have these skill projections for every player above the AA level. The less data I have on a guy, the more average the projection will be (meaning if I have absolutely nothing on a guy, I just assume they’re a league-average player until we get enough data to make a bette guess). These are what power the season-long and daily projections, and it’s a lot of fun to look at.
Paid subs don’t get access to these skill projections, but I will be tweeting them out for players of interest as the year goes on. I think I’m going to record another poddy today, and I’ll get a little more in detail about this in that, and probably even go over a lot of the projections on the most relevant players in this current moment.
Bad ERAs
Logan Webb has just been brutalized this spring, but I’m guessing he does not give an F. The K% is 22% and the BB% is 3%, so it seems like he’s just been BABIP’d to death. This should change your view not at all.
It’s harder to not care about a guy like Hunter Greene and his bad ERA since we don’t know for sure that he’s a good MLB pitcher yet. But we still should not care. He has the 28% K% which is good, but has been wild at at 14.7% BB%. He has never posted a good walk rate, but simple regression to the mean should bring that BB% down towards 10%. He’s an interesting one to watch though, the range of outcomes is wide with him. With a good walk rate and some home run luck, he could get some Cy Young votes. With a bad walk rate and bad home run luck, he could be a drop candidate in standard fantasy leagues. Since I hyped him up all off-season, I hope he does well, but hey I didn’t draft him in my home league and I’m a Pirate fan so if I’m not going to cry if he goes for a 6.50 ERA this year either!
Jared Jones
He has made the team! The news just came out. This is awesome to see for people in Pittsburgh, a solid sign that management is truly in win-now mode (to some extent at least). But he’s also very much relevant for fantasy leagues.
The skill projection on him is:
23% K%
9.4% BB%
Slightly above average FB%
So that’s about a league-average arm there, but we’ve never seen him in the Majors so this could go either way. Given what I’ve seen from his stuff, I’d think that K% ends up higher than that, but it’s always better to be more pessimistic on these dudes in their first run at big league competition.
Regardless, he should be owned in all leagues at first. The stuff is so good and the workload was there last year, and that gives him immense upside. He will face the Nationals in his first start, which is a nice matchup. The second time through will likely be against the Orioles, so that’s not as exciting, but yeah go grab him if he’s available in your leagues.
The reason my model doesn’t have an exact GB%, LD%, FB% projection for these guys because I utilize the six batted ball classification from the Statcast algorithm, here’s that plot again showing each of the six based on launch angle and velocity:
The oranges are all fly balls, the greens are all ground balls, but all of the other colors have multiple FB/LD/GB in them, so I can’t translate it exactly to a FB%. I could do an estimate that would get it pretty close, so maybe I’ll do that soon.
There’s a lot more news to cover, but I think I’m actually just going to refer you over to Mike Kurland’s website for that. Here’s a post from him covering the stories from the last five days or so.
I wouldn’t say we have a partnership or anything like that, I’m doing everything I can from now on to stay completely independent, but Mike is one of the few normal-seeming dudes on fantasy baseball Twitter, and from my interactions with him over the years, I like him quite a bit - so support him over there. The problem is that you have no idea if his site will still be running in three months, he has this tendency to jump around to different stuff, but I hope he settles into this project and has enough success to keep it rolling.
It’s been an interesting couple of years from me. I started with FantasyPro’s and then went to RotoBaller and now I’m totally by myself here. There’s a whole lot of BS to deal with when you’re working with/for other people in the sports journalism world (if we can call it that), and I did come to notice that people were asking me for help like 100 times more than I was asking other people for help. So while I’m happy to help people and work with others, it’s just an easier, better, and more profitable life only depending on yourself.
This is especially true for me and my worldview. Recently someone told me that they couldn’t suffer any more of my “antiquated puritanism”, which I took as a great compliment. Bring back the puritans, bro.
I do think I am taking the non-baseball stuff a bit too far here though, but that’s because it’s spring and there’s just not all that much to talk about. I promise you that the percent of words dedicated to baseball in these notes will be much higher in the regular season. That’s not to say it’ll ever be 100%, but it will be higher than it has been early on.
Other Notable SPs
Just to highlight some names that have made the rotation that are interesting right now or that I think could become interesting:
Chase Silseth (LAA)
Garrett Whitlock (BOS)
Casey Mize (DET)
Alec Marsh (KC)
Louie Varland (MIN)
Luis Gil (NYY)
Bowden Francis (TOR)
Reynaldo Lopez (ATL)
Andrew Abbott (CIN)
Max Meyer (MIA)
Gavin Stone (LAD)
DL Hall (MIL)
Tylor Megill (NYM)
Matt Waldron (SD)
Keaton Winn (SF)
Nick Nastrini (CWS) is not officially in the rotation yet, but it’s looking good for him. I liked him a lot when I wrote him up in the White Sox preview, so keep an eye on him (don’t add him though, he might not even make a start in their first week).
I’d add Max Meyer, Garrett Whitlock, and Gavin Stone in most leagues. For the rest of them, I’m watching them closely in their first few starts. If things look good, they’ll be guys I’m looking to add where I have SP need.
Bad Springs - Hitters
Nothing to see here, but still, you should see it:
Jarred Kelenic: .370 OPS, 0 HR (21.4% K% though)
Nico Hoerner: .170/.188/.213
Starling Marte: .167/.239/.190
Paul Goldschmidt: .116/.220/.233, 1 HR, 38% K%
Spencer Torkelson: .146/.241/.250, 0 HR
Logan O’Hoppe: .188/.250/.292, 1 HR
Nolan Jones: 40% K%
Jake Burger: .196/.213/.370, 36% K%
The only reason to even monitor these more solidified names early on is just to make sure they aren’t playing hurt. It’s possible with guys like Marte/Goldy that they just aren’t healthy or the skills have really degraded with age. You would rather have a good spring than a bad one, obviously, but there’s very little correlation between spring OPS and regular season, so don’t make any changes to your fantasy teams based on this.
That will do it for today. Links to paid resources are below the paywall, and during the regular season, a significant portion of the daily notes will be behind the paywall as well, so become a paid sub today to get everything I’m doing here this year! Check out the about page here for more information.