MLB Daily Notes - March 6th
A look at Taj Bradley and some other spring standouts.
The Daily Notes really aren’t needed right now. My plan was to just do them twice a week during spring, but I am eager to write! Yesterday morning I went into operation shutdown mode as far as baseball stuff goes and I banged out all the work I needed to do for my real job. It was incredible, a solid two hours of just full focus on what I needed to do, and now I’m pretty much done for the week.
Maybe I’m just lucky or something but I have never had a job that demanded very much from me. I’m in the tech world, and I’m able to automate a lot of what needs done and rely on other developers and whatnot, so that helps. It also helps that my commute is just a staircase.
If I didn’t have baseball stuff to get into and this Substack to build out over the last three years, I’m not sure what I’d be doing with all of the free time I’d have. Probably nothing good!
Idle hands are the devil’s play thing
That quote has seemed to be true to me. It’s unclear who actually said it, but it looks like one translation of the Bible turned Proverbs 16:27 into that line, which was a really different translation than what the other translations say. But I suppose this isn’t a Biblical analysis blog [yet].
There’s this idea out there that humans are basically good, like the core of us is good, we just need to put away the bad influences of the world and realize our true nature. But that isn’t true at all, our base nature is evil. This is especially true with men, I think. If left completely free and alone we do a lot more degrading stuff than good stuff. So it’s a fight. The will and the body are in conflict. The body wants all of these quick pleasures that are really horrible things over the long haul, while the will knows we should deny those things. I guess you can get to a point where you don’t even will against that stuff, and that’s pretty rough territory. I think you can dull your conscience to the point where you’re just living in constant sin and not even knowing it. But now I’ve used the s-word!
Whether you’re a believer in sin or not, I think we need to stay busy, stay building things, moving things forward. Having a wife and kids is a huge part of this for me. I’m in such a better place than 5-10 years ago when I had more freedom to do what I wanted. That’s true in all aspects of life really, even financially! Men hesitate to start families because they don’t think they have the money, but it turns out that having some dependents really lights a fire under you, and you end up finding ways to provide that you didn’t previously see.
Baseball Stuff
We have new splitters showing up.
Taj Bradley
Taj Bradley finally got on the mound yesterday and looked healthy. The results weren’t fantastic with a low 9.3% SwStr%, but we’re talking about 43 pitches. Pretty fun to see him messing with a splitter, I did not expect that at all.
Last year in the Majors he was 45% FF, 25% Cutter, 17% Curveball, and 13% Changeup. So it looks like this sinker is new as well. Mister Mahal now has three fastball variations with an offspeed (splitter) and a breaking ball (curveball), so that’s a nice arsenal.
A reminder that Taj Bradley had a 19.6% K-BB% in the Majors last year (104.2 innings) but a 9.9% mark in AAA (37.2 innings), and he had a 5.50 ERA in the Majors with a 3.82 SIERA. It was a really strange season.
Checking the pitcher checklist, he was a four check guy:
Read this to learn about the pitcher checklist, a new resource added this year!
Bradley put up a 49% Strike% last year with a 35% Ball%. That’s two points better than average in Strike% and one point better than average in Ball%. So we we like that. The one place he fell short was that his SwStr% was just 12.7%. That makes some sense since he was really fastball-heavy last year (70% four-seamers and cutters). No pitch earns a higher SwStr% than the split-daddy:
SwStr% by Pitch Type, 2023 MLB
Splitter: 18.2%
Slider: 16.2%
Changeup: 15.7%
Sweeper: 15.3%
Curveball: 15.3%
Cutter: 12.0%
Four-Seam: 10.7%
Sinker: 6.5%
I liked Bradley already just because of the fact that he put up a 19% K-BB% in a significant big league sample, but this makes him extra hype, even though we have a long way to go on that splitter. There’s no risk in experimenting in spring, so he will have to feel really good about the pitch to actually use it real games.
A.J. Puk
Talked about him on the poddy yesterday, but just a reminder that you should give him a good look at the end of your draft. He is likely to make the Marlins rotation and has come into spring as a new pitcher. He has the splitter now, but also has thrown four other pitches (four-seam, sinker, splitter, slider, sweeper). Very interesting!
Yoshinobu Yamamoto
I saw some people say that he doesn’t want to be called Yoshi, so I will respect his wishes. But he got drilled yesterday:
3 IP, 6 H, 5 ER, 3 BB, 4 K
Which means nothing, but it is funny to see how people will react to it. His ADP shot up after that first outing, will it come down a bit in these next few days after that bad one?
There does seem to be a Dodgers tax. ADPs on these guys last two weeks:
Yamamoto… 37
Glasnow……. 43
Miller………… 72
Buehler…….. 168
Sheehan….., 279
Paxton……… 307
Stone……….. 449
By SP rank, Yamamoto is now #7, Glasnow #10, and Miller #20. I think the prices on them take away most of the upside, but these guys are all absolutely electric and the Dodgers will probably win 100 games again, which is good for your roto leagues when you have one of their SPs.
Wins by SP, 2023
ATL 66
LAD 62
HOU 61
SDP 60
TEX 59
.
.
.
CIN 34
KCR 31
SFG 29
COL 28
OAK 20
It would be fun to have Yamamoto on your team, except for at the same time for me it wouldn’t be because I’m asleep by the time half the Dodgers games start.
Dane Dunning also threw a splitter, but just the one so knows if it’s for real or not. He’s going to be asked to throw more innings this year, I think, given the Rangers lack of SPs. And he’s off to a good start this year with a 26% K% after facing 27 batters. There’s no reason to believe that mark yet, but he would become interesting if he can transform his arsenal to get the K% above 23% or so.
Hitter Notes
Miguel Andujar bombed two homers yesterday and now has a 1.187 spring OPS, which is so funny. That guy just goes to town in anything that isn’t a regular season Major League game. He slashed .338/.404/.536 in AAA last year (.941 OPS) and .250/.300/.476 in a short time in the Majors (with the Pirates), but then the Buccos just cut him loose. Now he’s on the Athletics, which I guess is a pretty good situation for him since he could actually be a starter up there. He has just a .656 OPS in 392 MLB PAs since 2021, so he’s probably not going to do anything but he might be better than some of the other waiver wire hitters early on this year.
Hitters with 15 PAs and no strikeouts yet: Alan Trejo, Alec Burleson, Brayan Rocchio, David Fletcher, Eddys Leonard, Hoy Park, Ke’Bryan Hayes, Liover Peguero, Mark Kolozsvary, Miguel Andujar (lol), Ramon Urias, Vinnie Pasquantino
Anthony Rizzo has two homers and a .500/.625/1.167 slash line this spring, looking healthy, I suppose
Eloy Jimenez is also standing upright and hitting .545 in 23 PAs. Good to see Rizzo & Jimenez enjoying some health early on, they could both end up being very good late-round value bats.
And that’s it for today, thanks for checking out the daily notes.