Yesterday, I published 15 starting pitcher blurbs, just because. It involved a long prologue behind the what, when, and why of the matter. In short, I spent much of the offseason secluding my digital self from outside noise (fantasy baseball articles, Twitter opinions, etc.), forcing myself to develop opinions on as many relevant players as possible. I isolated my brain from outside analysis and biases, leaving me with only my own. I wanted to document my thoughts, both to have a point of reference during drafts and to have a record of those thoughts for accountability’s sake. If nothing else, be accountable to yourself.

At the end of yesterday’s article, I solicited recommendations from readers for more pitchers to feature. That, my friends, was an enormous mistake. Although I alleged I would pick names at random, instead I combed through 85 comments (and counting) and tallied up the most combined recommendations and up-votes. Those are the ones I’ll present here.

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This offseason I set out on a personal journey. Sentences like that usually precede stories of enlightenment, and I suppose this story features some enlightenment of its own. We won’t know how much enlightenment until after the 2022 season concludes.

I’m not asked this question often, but I have been asked it often enough to have a stock answer for it. It’s some variation of, “What’s the best thing someone can do to improve as a fantasy baseball player?”, to which my answer is some variation of, “Develop an opinion about every player—well, not every player, but you know what I mean.”

This is something that, when I had more time on my hands, I used to do. But in 2020 I became a work-from-home/stay-at-home father navigating a pandemic, and I burned out. Although I managed sporadic success and positive returns on investment in the 2020 and 2021 seasons, I was lucky to escape unscathed—I was all but flying blind. I was, and still am, fortunate to have years and years of watching baseball and playing fantasy baseball to have built an encyclopedic knowledge about most players.

It’s easy, however, to miss the big changes—the breakouts, the fall-offs, the rookies. It’s easy to dismiss them, and easier yet to enter a draft room and ignore them all together. Indeed, you can build a winning team without deeply investigating these types of players, instead relying on existing knowledge about existing players. You can do it, but it’s difficult, and it’s foolish.

So, I dedicated myself to the task of developing opinions about nearly every player.

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No prologue, just bold predictions. Bold, but not stupidly bold, and actionable in a way that can tangibly affect your fantasy season (for better or worse). Let’s go.

1) Steven Kwan is a top-30 outfielder.

The marquee peripheral prospect hitter for 2021, Kwan comes from a long line of peripheral prospects who boast elite contact skills (José Ramírez, Jeff McNeil, Jake Cronenworth, Josh Rojas) and a smattering of other fantasy-relevant skills, be it a little bit of power, speed, or both. Kwan looked David Fletcheresque, hitting only three home runs in his first 600ish professional plate appearances, but boasting the minor leagues’ best plate skills, bar none.
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On Friday, Tout Wars’ mixed salary cap (auction) league completed its draft. It’s a 15-team league that uses a 5-by-5 rotisserie scoring convention, except it replaces batting average (AVG) with on-base percentage (OBP). I transitioned into this league last year—and got absolutely eviscerated (I finished 14th of 15). I can make excuses—it was my first time playing in an OBP league and also my first time participating in a 15-team salary cap draft—but at the end of the day, the blame falls at my own feet. I planned very poorly for last year’s draft. In fact, I planned very poorly for all my drafts last year. I was a new stay-at-home/work-from-home father navigating parenthood and a pandemic. I was burned out! Fantasy baseball was not the reprieve it should’ve been; it felt like a chore.

I am rejuvenated this year. I didn’t want to embarrass myself again. I studied and wrote unique comments for more nearly 350 players (I wish I could have done more in time). I recalibrated my internal encyclopedia of player knowledge to better understand players’ OBP tendencies rather than their AVG tendencies. I was as prepared as I could possibly be given the limitations and constraints of daily life.

I will say up front: my draft went OK. I feel a lot better about it than I did last year, but I’m still not thrilled. I think that is a side-effect of drafting in a 15-team league. The pool of worthwhile players exhausts itself at just the right time in a 12-team league. In a 15-team league, you feel like you’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel. It feels… not great!

An eternal pessimist, I may be underselling the quality of my team to myself, not allowing me to get my hopes up, lest I implode gloriously for a second year. ATC projections like my team, and I drafted guys I like because I think they are projected accurately or even slightly bearishly, allowing for upside. I didn’t really draft anyone who left a bad taste in my mouth. That’s a minor victory in and of itself. Of course, if my team sucks, then maybe the lesson learned is not that my team didn’t leave a bad taste, but that I simply have bad taste.

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Recently I published my Peripheral Prospect hitters for 2021. In a perfect world I would have published my thoughts on a wider array of hitters periodically throughout the season. Alas, this is not a perfect world, so I settled for a year-end catch-all post.

Rinse and repeat for pitchers. The rules: (1) They pitched in the high minors (Double-A or Triple-A) but not the MLB level, and (2) they cannot be featured on any prominent top-100 list. Top-100 updates count (and all due respect to those updated lists, because revising your priors is not a bad thing!).

Brace yourselves: I’m kicking this off with three Cleveland farmhands with whom I implore you must familiarize yourself. Eight Peripheral Prospect pitchers for your fine Wednesday:

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In a former life, I had the time and energy to keep up with Peripheral Prospects on a semiweekly basis. That dream hibernated in 2020 when the pandemic killed the minor league season and died for good this year when I simply failed to uphold my end of the bargain.

But I love Peripheral Prospects and the inexact science/exact art of digging up breakout fringe and non-prospects with potential to make waves at the big-league level despite lacking the requisite hype. These breakouts make for feel-good stories, but for fantasy baseball purposes they’re market inefficiencies that can change the trajectories of dynasty (or even redraft) teams.

So, I want to spill at least a little bit of digital ink in honor of my favorite Peripheral Prospect hitters (and pitchers, coming in a separate post). A year-end catch-all post loses the dynamics of the ebb and flow of player performance; I benefit from these slash lines being etched in stone. But that hindsight should make the selections here a bit tighter than might have normally been picking five fresh names every other week for six months.

Anyway, here’s my list of top-8 Peripheral Prospect hitters from 2021 (because 10 was too many—this is rarefied air, y’all). The only rules: (1) They played in the high minors (Double-A or Triple-A) but not the MLB level, and (2) they cannot be featured on any prominent top-100 list. I’m going to rank them loosely from favorite to least-favorite. Let’s go!

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Back in 2019, Brad Johnson and I co-authored a weekly series called “Peripheral Prospects” that was extremely fun to write and (in my opinion) dropped some genuinely good nuggets on unloved fringe- and non-prospects. Because many of the players featured throughout the series did not debut in 2019 or even in 2020, I wanted to publish a post dedicated to keeping an eye on some of those circa-2019 peripheral prospects this past season.

That’s pretty much it. In the coming weeks, I’ll post lists of my favorite peripheral prospect hitters and pitchers for the 2021 season. Until then, let’s review how some of my favorite peripheral prospects from 2019 performed in 2021.

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It’s cliché to say “you know the drill,” but you do! You do, indeed, know the drill! The one thing about bold predictions that gets me up on my soapbox every year is what it means to be bold. There’s bold for shock value, bold to be bold. (Or, not bold enough—its own problem.) And then there’s sufficiently bold (per market sentiments) but readily achievable.

Much of this is qualitative, so “sufficiently bold” and “readily achievable” are eye-of-the-beholder types of descriptors. But we can at least measure sufficient boldness using average draft position (ADP) data. All fantasy baseball websites use them; I use National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) data because it involves high-stakes players. (Let it be known that high-stakes does not always equal high-talent, but that’s altogether another soapbox.) Moreover, we can filter NBFC ADP by date range, so I can leverage ADP specifically from the final week of spring training by which time ambiguous spring training storylines have solidified.

I’m proud of my success this year. I hope a few of these picks were worthwhile for you, if you happened to heed them exclusively because of this post. That’d be quite brave of you!

(“Year-end rank” courtesy of Razzball’s player rater.)

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Hi! Disclaimer: In this post I use raw Statcast data to calculate expected batting average (xBA). Evidently the raw data do not include the sprint speed adjustment that the Statcast folks said they made. That adjustment only shows up on player pages and in the search. This explains why it seemed to me an adjustment had not been made! The xBA values on player pages are much closer than the raw values and look similar to what I have presented below, and it explains my confusion herein regarding the matter.

Thanks for reading!

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It has always seemed rather obvious to me that Statcast’s expected batting average (xBA) failed to properly account for a hitter’s speed (“sprint speed”). It seemed like fast hitters routinely outperformed their xBAs while slower hitters underperformed. In looking at a Statcast-era leaderboard (2015-21) of differentials between actual and expected batting averages on ground balls, obvious names rise to the top: Delino DeShields, Dee Strange-Gordon, Eduardo Núñez, Billy Hamilton, Jose Altuve, Jonathan Villar, Norichika Aoki, Mallex Smith, Jean Segura, Adam Eaton, Starling Marte… the list of players who have historically outperformed their xBAs by the widest margins are (were) all elite speedsters. At the other end of the spectrum, post-prime sluggers: Justin Smoak, Chris Davis, Logan Morrison, Jay Bruce, Kendrys Morales, etc. etc.

I thought this exact phenomenon, which is not a revelation by now, had once nudged the Statcast team to apply a sprint speed adjustment to xBA. Apparently, this happened sometime between the 2018 and 2019 seasons. Here’s the original snippet, which I very lightly edited for clarity:

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Here is a disputed fact: MLB changed the ball. League brass, on the record, wanted to make the ball livelier but also raise the height of the seams, which would increase drag. The two changes — more bounce, but also more air resistance — would, more or less, offset each other.

The fact is disputed because some of the game’s most intelligent minds — namely, renowned baseball physicists, the very people most capable of determining if the ball is, indeed, different — doubt the ball has changed. It’s imperative I tell you this because they may be right, which would make me (and MLB, for the umpteenth time), well, wrong. Everything that follows assumes the ball has changed. Maybe this meshes with what you’ve witnessed, maybe it doesn’t. This is simply one stupid man’s interpretation of the data available to us thus far.

Early returns suggest MLB accomplished what it set out to accomplish. We can use weighted on-base average on contact (wOBAcon) to describe hitter production on balls in play, aka batted ball events (BBE). The average hitter is slightly less productive in 2021 than in past years, but not egregiously so, as shown below. Also, it’s only April; as the weather warms, so should be the bats. It’s reasonable to expect 2021’s league-wide wOBAcon value to climb a few ticks before year’s end.

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