• Here is the average age (per batter faced) for all the pitchers in the league. The age went up even with several high-profile rookies being promoted to the majors. I suspect even more prospects to be promoted to bring the average age down some.

American League

Astros

• Jake Meyers made some mid-season swing adjustments.

Meyers made some swing adjustments during the season, but still slashed just .227/.296/.382 in 341 plate appearances. His average exit velocity dropped to 86 mph — in the fifth percentile among major-league hitters — and he didn’t make enough contact to allow his speed to shine.

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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. 

Read the rest of this entry »

10/30/23

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

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer – Host
• @justinmasonfwfb – Co-Host/Producer

PATREON

• Join our Patreon for live video feeds of each show
• Watch the video feed replay on YouTube

ON THE RISE HITTER DUOS

• Parker Meadows/Jace Jung
• Brett Baty/Mark Vientos
• Garrett Mitchell/Joey Wiemer
• Alek Thomas/Geraldo Perdomo
• Miguel Vargas/Michael Busch

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There are all kinds of ways to measure the effectiveness of a pitch. Pitch Values (pVals) or “Pitch Type Linear Weights” give us a sense of, from the glossary, “…the changes in average run expectancy from one count to another”.

while the changes in run expectancy between an 0-0 count and a 0-1 or 1-0 count are obviously very small, when added up over the course of the season, you can get an idea of which pitch a hitter was best against.

pVals are not predictive and they don’t explain the true talent or raw characteristics of an individual pitch the same way Stuff+ or other pitch models can, but it does tell us what actually happened. Now, imagine that! You can dig into the specifics of pVals on the glossary page but for now, let’s celebrate this season’s greatest pVals.

Part one will look at four-seam fastballs and cutters. Part two (coming soon) will focus on sinkers and splitters.

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Attention! Attention! All seat fillers need to get up and please move outside to the concourse. Immediately. We’ve made it through the Catchies and the Firsties but we’re about to get going again and we just can’t have any of you normies accidentally getting on camera and making everyone at home feel sad.

Thank you for your service and please collect your payment from the front – which may or may not be a swag bag filled with all of the Kylie Jenner lip glosses that were banned by the FDA because the test animals started sprouting extra noses she really wanted to donate for all of her loyal fans.

It’s the Secondies!

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Note: I’m reading through some articles on certain players that were published right before the season ended and I didn’t have time to process them at the time. I know the articles are dated but the info is still useful for next season.

American League

Athletics

• Ken Waldichuk believes he can come back next season with better velocity and control.

Even with my [velocity] being down this past month, I think if I come back with better stuff next year, I think I’ll see some success.”

…

One area Waldichuk will look to improve for next season is limiting walks. Entering Friday, his 4.5 walks per nine innings was fifth-worst in the Majors this season among pitchers with at least 130 innings.

“Being in the zone is the biggest thing,” Waldichuk said of his takeaways from the season. “Know how to attack guys and figure out what they’re looking for based on reading them and knowing what to throw them based off that.”

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10/27/23

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

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer – Host
• @justinmasonfwfb – Co-Host/Producer

PATREON

• Join our Patreon for live video feeds of each show
• Watch the video feed replay on YouTube

2H PITCHING STUDS

• Nick Pivetta
• Grayson Rodriguez
• Kyle Bradish
• Yusei Kikuchi
• Freddy Peralta
• Tyler Glasnow

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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.