The Relief Pitcher episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Greg Jewett

Strategy Section

• Closer Landscape
• Closer Strategy
  • Should you invest in an elite closer?
  • Is it viable to draft two top-10 closers?
• Would you rather?
• Breakout relievers

Closer Situations

• Free Agents
• American League
• National League

Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week

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Yesterday’s dominating non-closing reliever post was pretty popular, with many of you offering additional names. So, I figured I would double up on the theme by posting another group of relievers. This time, I sorted by CSW% to include those who might not be as adept at inducing swinging strikes, but have made up for it by generating a high rate of called strikes. I filtered out anyone that made yesterday’s list or is currently serving as closer.

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The Relief Pitcher episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Doug Dennis

Strategy Section

• The value of rostering a closer handcuff
• The value of middle relievers who won’t close games
• Key Middle Relievers
  • Reed Garrett
  • Bryan Abreu
  • Yennier Cano
• Timing of when to pick up closer handcuffs off of the wire
• Looking at overall skills vs. recent performance
• How much FAAB to spend on new in-season closers?
• How to deal with closers potentially being traded mid-season?
• When to drop a struggling or demoted closer?
• Decisions are context dependent
• Closers on bad teams

The Doug Dennis Strategy

• Tout Wars expert league strategy

Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week

Bullpen Situations

• Phillies
• Orioles
• Rays
• Twins
• Dodgers
• Nationals

Waiver Wire

Pitcher Preview

Injury Update

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If you play in a shallow mixed league that only cares about saves and ignores holds, you rarely, if ever, have even considered picking up a non-closing reliever. However, in deep mixed, and especially mono leagues, or those that count holds in some form (as a separate category or combined with saves), non-closing relievers can accrue fantasy value. So it’s worth perusing your free agent pool and the FanGraphs leaderboards to find the next hidden gem. Ya never know, one of these names could end up finding themselves in the closer role if the incumbent hits a rough patch or the IL.

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A vulture, according to a quick Google search is:

a large bird of prey with the head and neck more or less bare of feathers, feeding chiefly on carrion (the decaying flesh of dead animals) and reputed to gather with others in anticipation of the death of a sick or injured animal or person.

Mike Baumann, of the Baltimore Orioles, not FanGraphs.com, has been given the nickname, “The Vulture” due to his 2023 fondness for swooping in and picking up the win once the starter leaves the game. It’s a pretty badass nickname and though by literal definition may not be flattering, it’s still pretty cool. I think Bauman and the rest of the O’s bullpen leaning into it would be fun. Just imagine the reliever taking a huge bite out of a cherry snowcone right before running out of the pen. He begins his warm-up pitches from the mound, red dripping down his chin. The vulture has entered the game.

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I had so much fun uncovering some hidden reliever gems yesterday that I decided to go another round and discuss six more names.

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On a personal level, the All-Star break can be declared a success as I’ve made major improvements to my pitch result evaluator, pERA. I was supposed to do dive into it last season, but I spent most of the time dealing with the league’s new rules so this update got pushed off until now. I planned on adding Ball Percentage (Ball%), Called Strikes (CStr%), and StatCast batted ball information. I felt each add would provide a clearer picture of the pitcher’s pitches. I eventually found out I was double counting the same information with Ball% and CStr% and needed to remove one. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s jump back over to the relief pitcher fastball velocity gainers. The sample sizes here are even smaller than for starting pitchers, so I arbitrarily required a minimum of five innings pitched this year since velocities will fluctuate from outing to outing. A reminder that if I’ve already discussed the pitcher in my first review, I will not be posting comments about the pitcher again as nothing will have changed. Instead, just celebrate that the pitcher is still on the gainer list and hasn’t fallen off of it if you’re an owner!

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• 2022 pVal Check-In #1.
• 2022 pVal Check-In #2.

How do you really know how well a pitcher’s fastball will perform before the season starts? You don’t. You basically just make an educated guess. Choosing good fastballs from the previous year seems to be a good way to go. But, choosing changeups that performed well in the past can bite you. While it may seem silly to get this micro, this niche, it can be a lot of fun to make picks before the season begins, and then forget about them. There’s no IL, no waiver claims, and no bench to ride. It’s just your preseason picks and the ever-rolling season and when it ends, you get to look back and either ask yourself, “What was I thinking?”, or, you get to puff your chest out and spend the winter months assuring yourself that you are a pVal prediction wizard. Pitching coaches should really be calling you when spring training kicks off again. Let’s take a look at where each of us FanGraphs contingent pVal competition participants finished out the 2022 season. As a reminder, here are all the picks you can make, provided to us by our friends at Pitcher List.

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With just three days left of the baseball season, and all but four teams scheduled to play just three games, many starting pitchers will have already thrown their final pitch of the regular season. Rather than pick up free agent fodder expected to make a start, but who could potentially hamper your ratios and cost you prize money, you might consider dropping all your starting without a start and picking up strong relievers for some extra strikeouts. So let’s review a list of middle relivers who I sorted based on last three week strikeout rate and aren’t closers, so they should be available in your league.

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