A few weeks ago, I took a deep dive on Luke Weaver, budding Cardinals No. 2 and Adam Wainwright torch-taker. I came out of it reluctant to invest in him at his hefty asking price: per National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) average draft position (ADP) data, 27th among starting pitchers and 105th overall. His lackluster swinging strike rate (SwStr%) indicated to me he could not sustain his lofty 28% strikeout rate (K%) when pitchers of similar SwStr% caliber had strikeout rates ranging from 18% at worst to 25% at best. The best, in that instance, was Aaron Nola. I doubted Weaver could compare so favorably, primarily because Nola steals strikes in a way few others can.

What I failed to do — what I should’ve done — is check. Duh! I should’ve checked how often Weaver earns called strikes. So I did, and I came away feeling even more scared than before. Turns out, I’m an idiot who botched some simple arithmetic: Weaver falls just outside the top quartile of pitchers in stealing strikes, as opposed to literally 3rd-worst like I claimed in the previously linked Tweet. That would’ve been really bad. Still, this miscalculation and subsequent mischaracterization of Weaver’s ability sent me on a quest of ultimately marginal value.

The more I looked at Weaver’s plate discipline peripherals, the more I realized Weaver doesn’t coerce many swings-and-misses out of the zone. He’s actually pretty bad at it. That means he generates most of his success in the zone, which, to me, seemed unusual. I was nervous that thriving by threading the needle — i.e., pounding the zone (assuming some semblance of command) and hoping for whiffs — might be a dangerous way to live, or that, at the very least, a young pitcher for whom the proverbial book on him isn’t out yet might be subject to regression in this particular area. The freshly FanGraphs-retired Eno Sarris thought thriving in the zone is better than thriving outside the zone:

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Here in Fantasyland, relief pitchers come in three varieties: Closers, Guys Who Aren’t But Might Become Closers, and Everbody Else. Fantasy fortunes are made and broken on the basis of these distinctions. If, say, you were sharp enough to acquire Hector Neris, Felipe Rivero, and Brad Hand on draft day, you won a category and spent essentially nothing to do it. If, conversely, you started the season with Seung Hwan Oh and Francisco Rodriguez as your closers, then you were probably waiting till next year by the All-Star break.

We like unanticipated delight as much as anyone, but for Fantasy players, avoidance of hearbreak seems to us even more essential. And to that end, we reintroduce to you our Who Got Lucky report. The back story: In the middle of the 2015 season, we stumbled upon a simple approach that enabled us to avoid trading for Danny Salazar—an excellent move, although it didn’t help us much. We wondered: which pitchers who’d given up a lot of hard-hit balls had emerged unscarred by virtue of having low BABIPs and HR/FB percentages? We figured those guys had gotten lucky, and that their luck would change. It worked so well in identifying Salazar, and—in the other direction, as a guy who’d been unlucky—Carlos Rodon, that before last season we ran the numbers for both starters and relievers, and even for hitters, on the theory that anomalies in the same categories would once again right themselves.

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A quiet January of free agency came to a close when Alex Avila reportedly agreed to a deal to join the Diamondbacks on Tuesday. Avila is not enough to ease the pain D-Backs fans will feel if they lose J.D. Martinez in the next few weeks, but his recent performance suggests he could be a nice addition to the team and one at a position where they needed the help. With Chris Iannetta signing in Colorado, the D-Back’s remaining trio of catchers from last season—Jeff Mathis, Chris Herrmann, and J.R. Murphy—each played below the replacement level in 2017.

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Yesterday, I used my new xHR/FB rate to identify and discuss 15 hitters whose xHR/FB rates actually validate their HR/FB rate spikes in 2017. Today, I’m going to check in on the opposite end of the validations — those hitters who suffered severe declines in HR/FB rate that was confirmed by xHR/FB rate. Without xHR/FB rate, we cannot be sure if it’s luck or just skill changes driving the swings in HR/FB, so the metric assists in making that determination.

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