Below are the latest significant playing time projection changes for starters and relievers over the past week. The biggest news is Cam Schlittler‘s call-up, with his debut coming at the unfortunate cost of Clarke Schmidt’s UCL.

Below are the latest significant rest-of-season projected playing time changes for hitters, headlined by the MLB debut of Colson Montgomery and the quick return of Corbin Carroll. So quick, in fact, that I didn’t even have to change the article photo from last week!

I follow a ton of different news sources besides baseball. An article titled “Q1 AI Benchmark Results: Pro Forecasters Crush Bots” caught my eye. I’m not at all surprised by the results, as stated in the title, but I did find one part fascinating. There are generally two parts to AI predicting: the AI itself (e.g. ChatGPT) and a news source. On the news sources, this quote caught my eye.

AskNews is better than other search providers: We have found that a bot using AskNews performs better than bots that use Exa or Perplexity. The template bot was used to test this. The difference between these bots is noticeable, but is not statistically significant.

As someone who mines the news all the time, I was wondering if AskNews.app could supplement my digging. Let’s find out.

Disclaimer: People seem to be on the extreme sides of AI, either they hate or think it’s the great invention of all time. I’m probably somewhere more in the middle. The one aspect I’ve used it for more than any other is coding. I feel I getting coding answers at least 10 times faster than if I did them on my own. I’ve written an app that lets me know if there are any updates to any of the MLB.com injury/transaction pages. I’ve never used it for writing (obviously), but it has it uses.

I decided to give AskNews a test drive yesterday, and the results were interesting, with Fernando Tatis Jr. now throwing 96 mph with a new changeup.

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Happy July! Below are the latest significant projected playing time changes for position players, unfortunately headlined by Corbin Carroll’s wrist fracture, which threw a massive wrench in his All-Star-caliber season.

Below are the latest significant projected playing time changes for pitchers in the last week, with Chase Burns‘ MLB debut the big headline. As always, you can see the rest-of-season percentages for each team on the Depth Chart diagram here.

This article takes a look at baseball’s top 30 pitching prospects from a projections-based perspective now that half of the 2025 season is in the books. Jump to the bottom for the updated list!

The projections capture prospect performance across the minor and major leagues in recent years, making use of aging curves, major league equivalencies, league environment adjustments, park factors, and regression to project peak (late-20s) prospect performance. They also capture Stuff+ courtesy of Eno Sarris (only for arms with MLB experience), and, starting this season, velocity (for all minor and major leaguers). They do not capture scouting or amateur performance. For comparison and more methodological detail, you can find the preseason list here, last year’s midseason list here, and an introduction to the projections here.

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Below are the latest playing time changes for position players in the past week. Welcome back, Chandler Simpson!

Now that almost 50% of the season is in the books, it’s a good time to check in on baseball’s top hitting prospects from a projections-based perspective. You can see the preseason list here and last year’s midseason list here. Those articles also feature more methodological detail if you want to read more about the projections process. Briefly, the projections capture prospect performance across the (non-DSL) minor and major leagues in recent years, making use of aging curves, major league equivalencies, league environment adjustments, park factors, regression, and more, to project peak (late-20s) prospect performance in the majors. They do not capture scouting, defense, or amateur performance. Starting this offseason, they also capture bat speed, which was made available for a decent handful of prospects this spring training.

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

Guest: Marc Winokur

League Updates

• GDD
  • Trade!
• NFBC
  • 1st half sucesss

Strategy Section

• NFBC Overall Contests
  • When should you alter your focus from the single league contest to playing for an overall contest title?
    • Does the size of your lead matter?
    • Does format matter – FAAB vs. non-FAAB?
  • Do you alter draft strategy at all due to the overall component of NFBC contests?
• The 2025 fantasy basbeall winning strategy to date
• Are Ohtani/Judge auction bids (i.e. high priced, but high returning players) efficient?

ATC Half Season

• Hits and Misses
  • Luis Arraez value
  • The profitable range of the pre-season auction market for hitters and pitchers

Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week

Buy/Sell/Hold

• Hot Players
  • Andy Pages
    • Who’d you rather?
  • Jesús Sánchez
  • Byron Buxton
• Cold Players
  • Ian Happ
  • Rhys Hoskins
  • Jarren Duran

Waiver Wire

Pitcher Preview

Injury Update

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A couple of weeks ago, I examined four starting pitchers using a small sample of predictive data. It was a half-hearted comparison. I’m correcting that today with a simple FanGraphs download to spreadsheet comparison.

I decided on the stats to use based on work I did for The Process. Here is a look at what early-season stats are most predictive of rest-of-season stats (R-squared values).

I used the two overall STUFH values (BotOverall, Pitching+) and the top two ERA estimators (SIERA, xFIP). Additionally, I wanted to weigh the stats that immediately stabilize (Ball%, SwStr%, Fastball velocity).

One major change, I put all the values on an ERA scale for easier comparison. Three values came in an ERA format, but the others need to be calculated. Here are the formulas I used (also in the provided spreadsheet).

• Pitching+ ERA: (Pitching+) * (-0.067) + 10.815
• SwStr%-Ball% ERA: (-19.4472)* SwStr% + 9.985324 * (Balls/Pitches) + 2.672178
• Fastball Velo (FBv) ERA: FBv * (-0.1416) + 17.339

Here is a link to the values along with the pitchers featured in this week’s waiver wire column. I limited the time frame to just the past two weeks. I use a method that makes the best decision with a small sample.

Not all the values are in the download, so I created a copyable spreadsheet (File, Create a Copy) to paste the pitchers’ stats (cell L4), and then the various ERA values are calculated along with an overall value.  The average ERA can be ordered by using the promote option in cell J4.

In this instance, Brandon Walter stands out with everything looking great, except his 92 mph (4.32 ERA) fastball. He could bomb, but the goal is to make the best decision with little information.

One possible change is to adjust the weightings. I equally weighed the values. Someone can always give more weight to certain values (Pitching+) or just remove others (FBv). For me, the table allows for easy comparison of pitchers. If I were to evaluate each pitcher, I’d look at the above stats. This makes the analysis easier.

Two additions could be included: the first is to add a projection based on the preseason prospect rank (overall and team), the other one is to include the pitcher’s ERA projection (via xlookup).

Let me know if you have any questions on setting up the spreadsheet to help evaluate pitchers with a small MLB data sample.