Since both Shohei Ohtani and Drew Rasmussen got an internal brace in their elbow instead of the full Tommy John surgery, I decided to see how other pitchers who got the brace performed … and the study didn’t take long. With fewer than a dozen samples, there is no study.

Using Jon Roegele’s Tommy John surgery database, the following five major league pitchers got the surgery and returned to the majors. The surgery failed with Matt Bush and he eventually needed a full Tommy John surgery.

Again, with a sample size of just five, I’m not going to draw zero conclusions from the list.

Additionally, these four guys got the brace and never returned to the majors.

No analysis from me but the information is here if anyone wants to break out their Jump-to-Conclusions mat.

A few years back, I created pERA (pitch ERA) to help give each pitch a grade based on its results. For each grade, I never included any kind of walk rate until the final value when I added it in BB/9. It was never included in the individual pitches. A few months back, I looked into Ball% and immediately knew I needed to add it to the pERA formula. On top of that, I added a weak contact element. After a new finding, I needed to go back and tweak the batted ball numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

2022 was the worst year I have ever had as a fantasy player. I played in 16 leagues and did not cash in a single one. The hard part is that I didn’t even know what went wrong. I had teams I really liked coming out of the draft and some that were doing very well throughout the season. I could have easily brushed it off as a bad season or beaten myself up over it. However, I worked my butt off to get better.

Getting better started with my 2022 Apology Tour. I broke down each one of my leagues in depth to see the common strings between each team. It was an extremely illuminating exercise that helped inform my decisions in terms of my prep and drafting in 2023. It was a fruitful endeavor. I cashed in eight of my 20 leagues this season, including my biggest money leagues which led to a very profitable season.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be covering my teams that did well in this series, dissecting what I did right and what I did wrong in order to continue to improve heading into 2024. I will also be covering my teams that did not go so well in another Apology Tour series to examine why they were not as successful.

In my second article in the series, I will look at my first draft of 2023, my First Pitch Arizona Draft Champions League. The first 23 rounds of the draft happened on November 5, 2022 at the First Pitch Arizona Forum at Arizona Fall League, which I highly recommend people go to if you have never been, and the rest of the draft is a slow draft resuming in January. This is a 50 round draft and hold league. It is 5×5 roto with 15 teams. The league had a number of great industry players in it and I finished first.

The Draft
With the league being a draft and hold, the draft is clearly the most important part of the league. I got my first choice of draft pick in KDS and chose the last spot because I wanted the first pick once the draft resumed in January to the player whose value might have raised a ton with news over the month and a half in between the beginning and the resumption of the draft.

Here was my team:

My hope was that I could get at least one of the top tier starters with my first pick as they tend to not go as high in early DCs and if both of my top two fell, I could try out a pocket aces strategy. This worked out well when both Cole and Burnes fell to me at the end of the first round. This gave me a huge advantage in the pitching categories especially with the additions of Logan Gilbert in the eighth, Kodai Senga in the 18th, Eduardo Rodriguez in the 19th, and Dane Dunning in the 48th. Adding in Devin Williams, Clay Holmes, and Tanner Scott to help get me enough saves to dominate the league in overall pitching points is really how I won the league. In some ways I was lucky. I only had one real major injury to my starting pitchers in Chris Sale and I was still able to get 98 good innings from him. However, I led the league in innings while winning both ratio categories which was part of the strategy of starting with pocket aces.

I made a lot more mistakes in my hitting. Mullins in the third ended up being a reach, but for the second year in a row, I couldn’t pass him up. Tim Anderson was a huge bust in the fifth round. I didn’t get great returns from Alex Verdugo or Ryan McMahon. I got absolutely nothing from Matt Mervis, who was the talk of the AFL and very little from Jo Adell and Wil Myers. This meant that seven of my first 14 hitters were busts or underperformed.

I did have big hits in my later round that carried my offense. Whit Merrifield in the 17th, Triston Casas and Ha Seong Kim at the 20/21 turn, Spencer Steer in the 25th, TJ Friedl in the 27th, Geraldo Perdomo in the 39th and Zack McKinstry in the 43rd were are vital parts to my offense being able to be great in stolen bases and runs scored which was enough with the strength of my pitching to win the league. One of the common threads of those players was the positional flexibility. Drafting so many players that were eligible at multiple positions meant I didn’t take many zeros throughout the season. When I was hit with injuries in my offense, I had a number of guys to fill in. I was also able to optimize my lineups with good matchups because my team was so flexible. While I had some breakouts, I mostly had guys that played a lot and it was the boring players like Merrifield and Perdomo that ended up really saving me when the risky bets like Adell and Mervis didn’t pan out. Draft and hold leagues are won by these kinds of bets mixed with the breakouts. Take too many gambles and you risk too many zeros. It is a strategy I prefer in these formats and will continue to employ.

I will be heading to Arizona in about a week to defend my title. If you are there for FPAZ or the World Series, make sure you say hi.

10/23/23

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to our Patreon!!

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2H HITTING STUDS

• Royce Lewis MIN
• Triston Casas BOS
• Nolan Jones COL
• Seiya Suzuki CHC
• Will Benson CIN
• Zack Gelof OAK

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American League

Blue Jays

• Alek Manoah has not requested a trade and will be fighting for a rotation spot next year.

The GM also said Manoah hasn’t requested a trade. Realistically, the Blue Jays might explore deals for the starter, but his trade value is at an all-time low, so the return may not be better than the upside of hoping he can rebound in 2024. Odds are, Manoah will be competing for a spot in Toronto’s rotation next spring.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you, thank you. Welcome back to the next round of fantasy baseball awards that nearly no one was asking for! I’m talking, of course, about the Firsties! The Firsties first came into our lives over 40 years ago and we here at the Academy would like to thank all of you for continuing to care super, duper, deeply about these fake awards. But before we get into these hotly contested awards, the committee would like to make one small announcement, as there seems to have been some earlier confusion about acceptable levels of shenanigans.

Just so we’re crystal – we are currently operating at a 0% Shenanigan Level. Not 10%, not 5%, not even 1%. Zero. Anyone not adhering to said policy will be asked to go inside and stop letting the sun warm your face for a minimum of one month because it’s time to get cereal. Super cereal.

Let the show continue – it’s the Firsties! Read the rest of this entry »

Bigger bases in 2023 allowed for more stolen bases overall this year. More players reached the 20+ stolen base mark than ever before in the Statcast era. In fact, the 51 players who reached 20+ SBs in 2023, more than doubled last year’s mark of 24. The increase in stolen base output is explainable, MLB changed a rule. The flux of home runs in the past few years, however, is not as explainable, though many have tried to explain it with an analysis of the make-up of the actual baseball. But, both of those statistics are up individually and in combination.

Read the rest of this entry »

• Yuki Matsui is considering signing with an MLB team.

Star closer Yuki Matsui looks to be interested in a potential move to Major League Baseball, as a Yahoo Japan report (Japanese language link) indicates that Matsui has exercised his international free agent rights, as well as his rights to freely negotiate with other Nippon Professional Baseball clubs.

• Here is a full list of all players with some form of an opt-out that must get decided this winter.

• Rich Hill plans on signing after the season has started, hopefully with a contending team.

Hill might not sign over the winter, however. While he’d previously expressed an intent to play in 2024, the 43-year-old (44 in March) now tells Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune he’s giving some thought to waiting until midway through the campaign before joining a new team.

…

There are a few reasons behind Hill’s decision-making. The most straightforward one is health. MLB’s oldest active player, Hill conceded to Acee he has “a pretty good gauge and a monitor on my body” and considers “half a season … much more palatable than a full season.” Hill also pointed to a desire to spend more time with his family, noting that he’d like to watch his 12-year-old son play during his final year of Little League baseball next spring. By waiting until midseason, he’d also have a chance to survey the competitive landscape and look to land a spot with a playoff contender.

If a contending team signs Hill, they won’t be contending for long. Read the rest of this entry »

*Small smattering of applause that sounds a lot like my wife imploring our kids to “please just clap for Daddy doing his dumb thing”.*

Thank you, thank you – and welcome back to the nation’s most premier(est) fantasy baseball award ceremony! We’ll be starting our offseason festivities off with the tools of ignorance – and no, I’m not talking about my projection methodology (awkward pause)…

*obviously canned audience laughter*

There it is! Now, please, just sit back, relax, and get ready for more bad jokes and lots of talk about the grown men who play on our pretend baseball teams.

It’s the Catchies!

Read the rest of this entry »

The following Asian player comps came about because I was tired of not having a reference when a player signed in the stats from Japan or Korea. The projections seemed off as either being too enthusiastic or just hated the player. This is my solution.

First off, this method is far from perfect. It’s not even close. The main problem is that the largest group to make the jump, pitchers from Japan, only have a sample size of 50 players with most of them being bullpen arms. Those who make projections are using the same sample. I wanted to know who was in that sample. One fact I fact I found while compiling this list is that any projection will have wide error bars so being close is a major achievement.

To create a reference I could use, I took all the players who made the jump from Japan or Korea. I took their single-season stats before the jump to their major league stats. I grouped similar players using z-score on a few core stats. Read the rest of this entry »