Fastball velocity changes may be getting beat to death but they are one of the few stats in which stabilize early in the offseason. I’ve created a couple tools which I use during the season to help find which pitchers to evaluate further using velocity. I have one which grades fastballs and a new pitcher injury finder.

Fastball Grades

This tool simply gives an ERA and 20-80 grade to a fastball based on its projected results from its velocity and spin. The velocity component is simple to understand. It’s hard to hit fast flying small objects. It’s even harder to hit faster flying small objects. Understanding the spin component is a little tougher.

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Last week I wrote about a few lesser known opportunities within Ottoneu to maximize salary cap space, which is important to understand before your fantasy season begins.  However, by the time you read this post the fantasy season will have already begun, so I want to focus your attention today on strategies that will help you in-season as you attempt to squeeze every bit of value out of your team during what is sure to be a long but very fun Ottoneu season.

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A plethora of information is available to fantasy owners with most just a repeat from one season to the next. For this reason, it’s tough to find anything new or helpful. Joe Rosales has stepped forward this year to provide six pages of useful injury nuggets in the Bill James Handbook, especially relating to catchers. Here are some of the highlights

1. Baseball Info Solutions is now collecting detailed injury information

Finally, and good luck. Building a comprehensive database is the key component to really understanding injuries. From personal experience, it’s just a pain-in-the-ass to track in-season injuries and also compile the end-of-season database. While, I’m sure the information is not going to be free to the public, at least the information is being collected for someone like Mr. Rosales to compile.

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This means we’re actually getting close to official baseball, right? It’s bold prediction season and you know the drill (with an Ottoneu context), so let’s get started.

1. Freddie Freeman achieves 8.0 WAR

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Alex Reyes was considered to be a top-5 prospect coming into the 2017 season. Then his elbow gave out and he eventually needed Tommy John surgery. He’s nearing completion of his recovery and the Cardinals are considering when he’ll return and his role.

Wanting to protect their top prospect as much as possible, the Cardinals have set a soft target of May 1 as a likely return date for Reyes. What hasn’t been so explicitly defined, though, is what role he’ll fill upon that return.

Long term, the Cardinals have every intention of using Reyes to anchor their rotation. MLB Pipeline recently ranked Reyes as the seventh-best right-handed pitching prospect, and he likely would have been higher on that list had he not just missed a full season.

But given the recovery process Reyes has undergone over these last 12 months, the Cardinals intend to be cautious in 2018. Their preference, as stated multiple times this offseason by president of baseball operations John Mozeliak, would be to have Reyes first come out of the bullpen.

For fantasy owners, they could take a chance on having an elite arm as a starter or reliever. With so many possible unknown outcomes, the following is a breakdown of 2018 value.

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Well, I used to be able to create starting pitcher disabled list (DL) projections with the average chance hovering around 40%. Until this past season when DL estimate was off by 18%.

Even though the rates have climbed the past couple of seasons, it was nothing like the jump this past season and I 100% blame the 10-day DL. All my work to this point is moot.

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• Strikeouts = Shoulder Injuries?

Lindsay Berra discussed the increased risk of a shoulder injury to Ohtani because he hits.

As a left-handed hitter, Ohtani’s pitching arm, his right, is his front shoulder when he is at the plate. In recent memory, we’ve seen several players battle injuries to their lead shoulder — Aaron Judge and Michael Brantley included.
…
When a batter makes contact, the counterforce from hitting the ball activates the stabilizing muscles around the shoulder. If he misses, the lack of counterforce means that all the forces generated by the swing are absorbed by the shoulder. And as Ohtani adjusts to Major League pitching, it is likely he will swing and miss more than he did in Japan.
…
“Imagine a left-hander swinging out of his shoes and missing,” says Eric Cressey of Cressey Performance in Hudson, Mass. “The right arm continues to come back, and when the arm goes into external rotation or horizontal abduction, the ball tends to fly forward in the socket, which can irritate the front of the shoulder and cause anterior shoulder instability.”

Ohtani will put slightly less stress on his front shoulder, because he has a two-handed finish — at least at the moment — but there will be stress on his pitching shoulder nonetheless.

First, go read the whole article or at least this section. I listed just some highlights but there are more details on hitter shoulder injuries in the full reading.

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The projection systems love Miguel Cabrera. To them, he’s a hitter who performed decent in the first half and struggled in the second half. The projections don’t know that he has two herniated discs in his back. Because of the injury, his wOBA dropped from .339 in the first half to .274 in the 2nd half. Using projections, he’s the 54th highest ranked player but owners have pushed his ADP closer to 100th. It’s time to determine why the disconnect.

It was definitely a tale of two halves for Cabrera.

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Pitching blisters were an afterthought just two years ago but the reported instances have jumped the past two seasons. Detailed accounts were written by Eno Sarris here at FanGraphs and Ben Lindbergh at the Ringer.

Throwing a curveball may be to blame according to Sarris:

But we can’t dismiss that chart completely. The players who have gone down with blister problems have thrown curves 14.9% of the time, far above the 10-11% baseball as a whole averaged over that timeframe. The players who ended up on the list more than once averaged 18.9% curveballs. Enough to say there’s some smoke here.

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I’ve finally compiled the 2017 Disabled List (DL) information. The main change from the last few seasons is the transition from the 15-day DL to 10-day DL and the subsequent increase in DL trips. With the total trips up, the number of days lost is down which makes it tough to draw any major conclusions. It’s time to dive into the numbers.

First off, I collected the information from MLB.com’s transaction list. I like to use this list because it is easy to go back and check. I waded through it and it wasn’t pretty. It took me twice as long to compile the data compared to previous seasons. I would just like to give a big thank you to ProSportsTransactions.com for having most of the missing data.

With my venting out of the way, here is how the days missed for pitchers and hitters compare over the previous 4 seasons.

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