Author Archive: Jeff Zimmerman

General Information

• These may be the two most impactful sentences for season planning.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Dalbec said that his first positive test was on June 8 while in Arizona. Fortunately, he was asymptomatic the entire time.

Bobby Dalbec returned was cleared to play on July 11. He was asymptomatic but it took him over a month to get a negative result to play again. For the players who are currently on the ‘vague’ IL, they could be their a while.

American League

Angels

• Shohei Ohtani will not hit before he pitches on Sundays.

Ohtani homered while serving as designated hitter on Sunday, but Maddon said that he doesn’t see Ohtani hitting the day before he pitches. Ohtani remains slated to start once a week — most likely on Sundays — and serve as DH roughly three to five times a week.

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There is no argument that if two position players would be guaranteed to produce the exact stats, the one with multi-position eligibility should have more value. The added flexibility would be helpful while drafting or setting lineups. The question of how much value does it add remains unanswered? Todd Zola and I have attempted to answer the question with Todd coming to the conclusion of “adding $3 or $4 to each player in mixed formats, and a couple bucks in single-league formats.” That’s fine in theory but I wanted to see how the market values the flexibility in this short season by matching similar players with and without extra positions. In the end, the results matched up with Todd’s findings.
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American League

Astros

• In an interview, Justin Verlander points to why he changed his delivery and what can be expected going forward. First from The Athletic’s take.

If he planned on playing only a couple more years, Verlander thinks he could’ve stuck with his 2019 mechanics and withstood the strain they put on his body. But that, of course, has never been his plan. He set out to fix the issue. “It was almost like plugging holes in a roof when it’s raining,” he said. “I would fix one thing and another thing would pop up.” On Thursday, he pitched three no-hit innings on 43 pitches in an intrasquad game at Minute Maid Park. As he spoke to reporters on a Zoom call shortly afterward, he described the outing as a culmination of a two-to-three month process. He also noted that his mechanics aren’t exactly where he wants them yet, but they are close.

“I changed a lot of stuff that some people would think was unnecessary,” he said. “But I thought it was necessary, especially if I want to play eight, 10 more years.”

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General Notes

• I’m not going to publish any COVID reports or speculation. It’s not that they aren’t important, it’s just that I’m trying to dig a little deeper for information. And the news seems to change every hour.

• I’m continuing to collect Summer Training fastball velocity reports and hopefully, I can clean up the information later today.

• To maintain the COVID protocols, teams will have limited access to video rooms.

With the Brewers and other clubs adopting what manager Craig Counsell called an “outside is better than inside” approach to avoid the spread of COVID-19, players’ access to the tight quarters of the video room will be closely controlled or outright prohibited this season, Haines expects. That will require an adjustment for those who jog the 30 yards or so from the dugout to the video room to watch an at-bat that may have just concluded moments ago.

“We’ve talked a lot about how that will challenge them in a good way — more discussion with teammates, more time watching from the dugout, just being more engaged,” Haines said. “I don’t know if they’re going to be in the dugout. They may be in the stands. I don’t know. … We’re just going to have to do it differently.

Putting aside all the Astros jokes, I wonder if certain players will be affected more than others by not being able to immediately review their swings.
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I usually don’t worry about schedule specific details during a regular season since so much can change in a month or two. This season is only going to last a couple of months, so it has some importance. I dug through all of the National League teams trying to find some stretches to stream players. I didn’t find a bunch of one to two-week stretches but I did come to some overarching themes.

I tried to digest as much of the information as possible and I’m sure I’ve missed something obvious. I started the analysis hoping to find a list of week-by-week targets to stream and came away with a new perspective.
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General

• I’m back to collecting fastball velocities. I’ve created a tab for Spring Training and one for Summer Training.

• Jon Becker has created a spreadsheet with all the COVID Cases and players who have opted out. Just remember that he’s one person donating his time, so always check the news for the latest updates. And thank him.

• The Cubs are trying to have several options in place for the season’s starter.

“We’re trying to front-load all our starters,” Hottovy explained. “In a normal Spring Training, you’d be lining guys up. This guy would be your Opening Day starter. Ideally, here’s Day 2. Right now, in my mind we have seven Opening Day starters, because [we want to] get everybody healthy through a Spring Training like this. You can’t space them out too much, in my opinion, just because we can’t take that chance.”

I could see teams have two to three potential starters for each game in case a pitcher can’t go for some reason.
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With most teams planning to limit the innings their starters throw, there are going to be a few middle relievers who bridge the gap to the seventh to ninth-inning guys. Because most starters will not go five innings, these bridge relievers will have the chance to accumulate a few Wins while hopefully providing decent ratios. Here are some targets.

Every season, some middle relievers go off accumulating half dozen Wins and Saves, great ratios, and over 100 strikeouts. They are more valuable than most starters and closers. The deal is that no one has a clue which middle reliever it will be, but whoever rosters them will be loving it. I decided to query a target list.
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American League

Angels

• Sounds like there is a slim chance Jo Adell makes the Opening Day roster.

It seemed in March that Adell’s chances of making the opening day roster were slim. Returning to triple-A to iron out his approach might have been the more prudent move.

After months of speculation, the minor league season officially was canceled Tuesday, so Adell won’t have the luxury of closing gaps in his development in a normal game setting. But the Angels hope the competitions they organize within their player pool provide Adell the opportunity to make strides.

“That’s what we’re hopeful for … There’s some upside to the intrasquad format,” Eppler said. “We’ll just have to keep getting him at-bats. There’s going to be talented pitchers over there for him to face and we’ll go from there.”

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