After only about a week and a half of the season, I decided to peruse the average fly ball + line drive exit velocity (let’s just call it EV in this article) leaderboard and compare the then-current marks to 2019. Even though the sample was tiny, perhaps we could get an early read on some breakout hitters by identifying the early surgers. So let’s review the original list of surgers and find out how these hitters performed the rest of the way. Did their EV remain at those elevated marks, rise even higher, or regress right back down to or toward their 2019 marks?

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Today, I continue reviewing my early season velocity change articles to see how the starting pitchers with the biggest gains and losses versus 2019 ended up performing the rest of the year. I’ll move on to the velocity decliners I posted on July 30, which were velocities as of July 28. Did these pitchers regain their lost velocities over the rest of the season or not?

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On Monday, I reviewed my first starting pitcher velocity surger post. However, since it was so early in the season, not every starter had actually pitched yet. So I posted another one two days later, which I’ll review now.

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Yesterday, I reviewed how the starting pitchers that increased their fastball velocities the most after their first start fared over the rest of the season. Today, let’s check in on the velocity decliners. Since the article was typed on July 27, that means it includes velocities through July 26. Did these pitchers rebound off their first start declines?

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Performing backward looking analysis with the intention of using it for forward looking actionable advice is only as good as the success of the advice. So I always make sure to look back on the season and review all the analysis I performed and the advice it drove. We know that fastball velocity is very important for pitchers and that it also stabilizes pretty quickly, meaning we don’t need many pitches to learn valuable information. So early on in the season, I posted several articles highlighting fastball velocity surgers and decliners. Let’s now review the first I posted on July 27, which was after just one start and through July 25. Did these pitchers sustain their newfound velocity levels or were they one game wonders, regressing right back to 2019 marks?

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For the shortened 60 game season, I wasn’t in the mood to post 10 bold predictions, so I settled with six. The upside of the fewer games is greater potential for the random and unexpected to occur, which means a higher rate of bold prediction hits…hopefully. Let’s see if that turned out to be true.

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With two ratio categories as opposed to one for hitters, a shortened season is an even better opportunity for me to get a bold pitcher league leader correct! Let’s see if I did.

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Every year I take the bold and daring adventure known as bold league leaders. I rarely get any of these right, but it’s fun to decide on the names, and might give you the little nudge you need to roster a chosen player. In a shortened season, it’s a little easier to get one of these right since more luck is involved, which I need a lot of if I’m not picking the obvious choices. So let’s see how I did with my 2020 Bold Hitter League Leaders.

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Over a shortened 2020 season, I suggested it might be a good idea to discount ratios, such as batting average, and buy more stable counting stats, like home runs. As such, I identified and discussed seven cheap power buys worthy of buying. The thinking was that you would get your homers, while the projected low batting averages reducing their costs would be volatile and might not necessarily finish at a negative value. Let’s see how the players ended up doing.

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The season has ended (boy was that quick!), which means it’s now time for me to go review crazy. I like to look back at all the articles I posted proclaiming this and speculating that about the upcoming season and reviewing the players discussed and my thoughts. In mid-July, a week before the season began, I published Five Starting Pitchers to Buy Cheap. Over a shortened season, I posited that the already volatile ratio categories were going to end up at surprising levels for many starting pitchers. So perhaps it might be prudent to focus more on strikeouts and almost entirely ignore ratio projections since 12 or so starts isn’t nearly enough of a sample for ratios to settle where we expect them to. That was the basis of this post, and of course taking ADP into account and targeting cheapies.

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