Three nights before the first game of the 2025 MLB season in Tokyo, the Cubs played the Angels in a Spring Breakout game in Arizona. Those in attendance got to see Angels top pitching prospect Caden Dana struggle to make it out of the first inning, Cubs outfield hopeful Kevin Alcántara slug a home run, and 21-year-old catcher Moises Ballesteros leg out a double. Matt Shaw was not there.
The splitter’s usage among starting pitchers reached a 14-year high in the 2024 season when it hit a 3.2% usage league-wide. In the past four seasons, no qualified pitcher has taken the top splitter usage trophy away from Kevin Gausman who averaged around 36% usage from 2021 to 2024. Taijuan Walker came close in 2023 when he threw his splitter 33.2% of the time, yet it wasn’t enough to top the king. 2025 seems like the year in which Gausman will lose his crown. Roki Sasaki will be one of the most-watched pitchers in 2025 and according to some, will showcase one of the best splitters in the world. How often he’ll use that pitch remains to be seen. Shota Imanaga (30.6% usage) came close to King Gausman’s mark in 2024. In Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s 90 innings pitched in 2024, he threw his splitter 24.2% of the time. What will happen in 2025? Dare I suggest the league-wide splitter usage continues its growth and finishes at 4.1%? It’s possible. Only 12 qualified pitchers threw splitters in 2024. In this edition of “Know Your Averages”, I’ll bring in any pitcher who threw at least 45 splitters and compare their plate discipline metrics.
Are you a hitter who can’t time up the fastball? Feeling over-powered? Not having your best day? Just wait it out, the hook will come eventually. Keep that weight back and search for that little bump, that little loop, as the pitch comes towards the plate. Wait on it, wait on it, wait on it….strike! It’s not as easy as it sounds. Of the 115 starting pitchers who threw at least 100 innings in 2024, 76 threw a curveball. Some of them got blasted; Miles Mikolas, Pablo López, Jameson Taillon. Some of them did the blasting; Framber Valdez, Seth Lugo, Max Fried. Take a look at some finer details below and see if you can find a few pitchers with positive curveball metrics for the back end of your fantasy rotation.
Google’s AI Overview on the search “what is inflation” (proper grammar not necessary) is:
Inflation is when prices of goods and services increase over time. It’s a broad measure of how much more expensive things are becoming.
In Anthony Clark’s Economics Through Everday Life, he writes:
The presence of inflation simply means that prices on average are rising.
This time last year, Chad Young wrote:
Inflation is simply the increase or decrease in average player price you can expect as a result of the relationship between amount of money spent on keepers and the amount of value those keepers represent.
Let’s use a few of the FanGraphs Staff II keepers as examples of how this all plays out to cause inflation in Ottoneu fantasy baseball. Read the rest of this entry »
Fastball! Fastball! Inside-fastball!….changeup. It’s almost soothing, isn’t it? The hitter gets some relief from the loud, scary, onslaught of heat to a nice, easy, soft-dropping cambio. But don’t be fooled, that soft-cuddly change of pace can be absolutely devastating. It can send you right back to the dugout looking, and that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you just whiffed so hard a little snot came out of your nose, you made a loud grunting noise and possibly pulled a muscle in your lower back. Some pitchers utilize the changeup by only throwing it to opposite-handed hitters when they need it. Some throw it with regularity, lulling hitters to sleep. There’s no perfect way to use it, but a decent changeup in a pitcher’s arsenal can be a difference-maker. Let’s continue the “Know Your Averages” series with a pitch that’s thrown in the zone less often, rarely called for a strike, and chased like a rat terrier going after a….well…let’s just get to it.
Toward the end of the 2024 season, I aggregated fastball performance metrics with “Know Your Averages 2024” and wrote about the pitchers near the minimum, the maximum, and the average. For example, Aroldis Chapman’s sinker still rules the SwStr% category (maximum, 17.8%), while Jake Woodford couldn’t buy a swinging strike (minimum, 0.9%) and George Kirby was perfectly average (6.0%). Below, you can find links to those posts. You may find them useful when contextualizing the statistical vomit coming from any baseball podcaster’s repertoire. I needed to do it for myself:
But now we move beyond the fastballs and attempt to digest all those other pitches. There are tremendous differences in the fastball swinging strike rates around and below 10% and the 15%’ers of sliders and splitters. We’ll begin with sliders.
Breaking and Offspeed Pitches: Sliders | Changeups | Curveballs | Splitters | Sweepers Read the rest of this entry »
Two things can happen when your opinions differ from the fantasy baseball internet majority. One, you prove to be right and get to “Nah-nah, nah-nah, boo-boo!” all over the place. Or two, you look foolish in front of all your computer friends and have to live with them, not being mad, just disappointed. This time last year I wrote the first episode of The Market and Me and will forever have to live with being higher on Patrick Wisdom than most. He finished 2024 as the 75th-best third baseman at -$32.40. Wisdom wasn’t the only one. Anthony Rendon finished even worse at -$35.40, the 88th-best third baseman in 2024. I was “higher” on both of those players than the market, but the market didn’t have to “rank” 40+ third basemen. I wasn’t necessarily high on Wisdom and Rendon, they were at the very bottom of my ranks. Still, they fell far outside of the imaginary line you can draw through the blue points that make up the relationship between ADP and my rank order, like the way Matt Shaw and Justin Turner do below. The “Market and Me” is an exercise in analyzing my own rankings, looking for where I may need to correct, where I may need to erase and re-order, and where I may plant my flag in the ground.
Real-life general managers face economic pressures of all kinds. It must be stressful to be in charge of it all; managing revenue, navigating relationships with the owner(s), the coaches, the players, the fans, deciding whether a player is “worth” the money he’ll likely win in an arbitration hearing, trying to figure out if you can fit in some greens to your diet. Ottoneu managers can face economic pressures too. For some reason, we actually enjoy fabricating the economic stressors that those real-world GM’s face. Why? Well, it’s fun to pretend. But also because we think we might actually be able to do the job ourselves. Be careful what you wish for, you may have to justify cutting a player like Freddie Freeman from your team because you thought it would be a good “economic” decision. Get your speaking notes ready for FanFest, prepare yourself for the press conference, ditch the greens, grab whatever’s still sitting under the heat lamp at the closest “Grab N’ Go!” It’s time to justify the offseason decisions you “had” to make. Read the rest of this entry »
One Ottoneu manager’s cuts are another Ottoneu manager’s auction bids. But take heed pretend baseball general manager! These pitchers were cut for a reason. Maybe their signature pitch no longer fell out of the zone at the last split second like it used to. Maybe injury has the general public concerned. But, maybe those criticisms will be your opportunities. This article provides some context about the pitchers who were dropped the most at the keeper deadline, using “% of leagues with a cut in the last 7 days” as the starting point. Read the rest of this entry »
Part one of my starting pitcher keep/cut articles had me diving deep on pitchers who have shown major league success but hadn’t yet instilled themselves in any major league rotation with consistency yet. That’s what we’re really after. But it takes time for pitchers to get there and you have to decide first, how long you’re willing to wait, and second, at what price. Read the rest of this entry »
