Archive for For/Against

Last week, a trade was accepted in my home league. It nearly split the league in two. 

Jack’s Cool League, the JCL as it’s lovingly known amongst friends, is a home league that is going on 14 years of competition amongst 10 teams, conducted in the endlessly entertaining and frustrating head-to-head categories format. 

As you may have guessed by the name, I’ve been commissioner of the league since its inception. Various rule changes have reshaped strategy over the years. 

We added quality starts. Then OPS. We expanded the default Yahoo lineups to add additional IL slots and NA slots. We increased the active roster size to 25, and then to 26, to keep pace with our colleagues in the majors. We instituted a minimum weekly innings threshold. And moved up the playoffs to end the season before major league teams start resting their stars. And this year, we rebalanced the number of utility and bench slots to try and make streaming starting pitchers more of a calculation. 

The only other change has been moving from the Commissioner having discretion to veto egregious trades to having each team having a chance to cast a vote to veto within a two-day trade review period. 

It is extremely rare for a trade to be vetoed in our league, as I believe it should be, but it has happened. Teams will use their voting power and rally other managers to vote if they feel one team is benefitting so much that it dramatically shifts the balance of the league.  Read the rest of this entry »

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a great hitter. His strikeout rate is low and he hits the ball very hard. He was really, really good in 2022, but drafting him as the first first baseman in fantasy is risky.

That’s not to say that the other first basemen don’t carry risk. Freddie Freeman is 33-years-old, Pete Alonso hits in a pitchers’ park, and Paul Goldschmidt is 35. Confessedly, we’re gonna be picky with Guerrero in this space. Because of his ADP. When we’re talking about the top-25, scrutiny is a necessary part of the process. You may leave this post thinking Guerrero is worthy of being a top-12 overall pick and the top first baseman. That’s totally fine because Guerrero is fine for that draft slot. The argument here is that we can get a better outfielder or starting pitcher with that pick and wait for first base.

In 2021, Guerrero put together an excellent season. Especially for someone under 25-years-old, let alone just 22. He hit 48 home runs and the Blue Jays lineup helped him to 111 runs batted in and 123 runs scored. He slashed a godly .311/.401/.601 with a .417 xwOBA with a 55.2% hard hit rate and an elite 15.1% barrel rate.

But he came back to earth in 2022.

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Randy Arozarena is a good ballplayer. There’s no denying that. But we need those dingers and RBI and runs and rates for fantasy. Arozarena doesn’t have the rates for our purposes, doesn’t have the raw power to give us the ceiling, plays in a horrible ballpark for power, and will be in the middle of a weak lineup. These are too many red flags for him to be a top-13 outfielder.Arozarena’s .263 batting average in 2022 is fine, but he doesn’t have the big walk rate to boost his OBP where we need it. And even where we don’t score walks, getting on base is imperative toward scoring runs, says Captain Obvious.

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There isn’t a consensus number-one pick or even a consensus top-three this early, but the guy we can bank on being a consensus top-five pick is Trea Turner. And he’s worth it, as you know.

This post is more a message of affirmation than a persuasive one, obviously, but Turner just signed a huge deal with the Phillies changing a couple of vital variables in the Turner owners’ favor.

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We don’t need a post telling us that Spencer Strider is a really good pitcher, but there might be a need for one that he’s already one of the greatest in the game. And his strengths play to everything we want in fantasy.

Shohei Ohtani tops the list of pitchers for obvious reasons, but the next nine or so are more jumbled than we might think. Taking a look at where Strider ranks among all pitchers with at least 130 innings pitched tells an important story:

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Oneil Cruz is probably a superstar in the making, but we should be unsure as to whether or not he can justify his mid-70s ADP, due to his low contact rate, low launch angle, mixed with playing most of his games in PNC Park.

Cruz’ career 92.1-mph exit velocity is electric and a large contributor to his .445 xwoBACON. When he makes contact, he straight-up mashes. But when is a big word, when we speak of his contact.

Yes, it’s a strikeout league, but Cruz’ 35% strikeout rate in 2022 was way above the MLB 22% average. And striking the ball hard doesn’t always yield great results.

Cruz’ 8.3-degree launch angle was well below the MLB 12% rate in 2022. Sure, he had a 16% barrel rate despite this low average launch angle, but his 49% groundball rate is a bit scary. And this wasn’t a result of MLB pitchers pitching him better than MiLB pitching, as he had a 51% groundball rate in Triple-A before getting called up.

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Alex Sonty wrote the against case for Alex Bregman that you can find here.

Now I want to be clear that I’m not directly disputing everything Sonty said and making the case that Bregman is definitely going to hit another 40+ HR. I do, however, think he is more than a 25 HR hitter and someone worth targeting this year at a discounted price after his underwhelming 2020-21. One major point of contention that Sonty and others bring up is that Bregman’s 2019 was a luck-fueled home run barrage based on the otherwise mediocre underlying power metrics.

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Briefly taking the baton from Alex Sonty, the question of whether to draft Justin Verlander certainly isn’t a binary one, as his fantasy life in 2022 will be driven by both the quality and health of his arm. And those are some pretty big questions to answer considering he’s only pitched six innings over the past two seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Bregman is a really good real-life baseball player who should continue to hit well. In 2019, his last full season, he banged out 41 home runs for us. In the following 580 plate appearance, though, he only has 18. This includes an injury-plagued 2021 that we can excuse, but it still begs the question:

Is Alex Bregman a 40-home-run hitter or a 25-home-run hitter?

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I don’t only like sexy pitchers with double-digit strikeout rates. There are guys for whom I’ll make arguments because they’re being slightly or greatly underdrafted or I’ll pick out a guy who seems about right in Logan Webb, who readers might get a little bit of sticker shock.

Note the list of players with an XFIP- of 65 or lower in 2021 consists of:

Corbin Burnes
Logan Webb

That’s it. That’s the list.

Webb was the epitome of a bad pitch-to-contact guy in his 2019 debut and the shortened 2020 before exploding to find a lot more strikeouts, a ton of control, and continued great power prevention. We hunt down K/9 in volume for good reason, but it’s important to focus on Webb’s control improvements because control keeps him ahead of the count for strikeouts and keeps him in the game for innings.

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