On Monday, September 5th, Labor Day, I sat in parking lot traffic in Baltimore, trying to make it into Camden Yards by the first pitch. This was a first in a long time. I wasn’t clogged in a traffic jam trying to leave the parking lot, I was trying to get in. As a Maryland native, Camden Yards has been the place where I’ve taken in the majority of my live baseball action and I could tell, as parking lot attendants waived me on to the next lot around the block, something was in the air. When I got to the stadium, there was more energy, more talk in the crowd about the actual team, and though the nose-bleed seats in left-field remained empty, there were more fans. Baltimore has always drawn an excellent, engaged fanbase to the stadium. But as you can imagine, the past few years have been a little quieter. On Monday the fans piled in to watch a pivotal matchup against the division rival Blue Jays and in the top of the eighth, the Orioles held the game at a one-run deficit.

O’s reliever Bryan Baker was throwing when this happened:

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Making trades is fun for fantasy managers, but it’s tough. It’s really tough. You always feel like you’re getting tricked when you get an offer and you likely only make offers that look like tricks. There’s a better way. Now that the trade deadline has passed and closer roles have shifted, there are still opportunities for saves in your league and you can get them right off the wire. Here are a few key role changes that are likely to take place now that the trade deadline dust has settled. See if you can take advantage of a few.

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•Félix Bautista, BAL: Takes over for Jorge López. | Roster Resource

Bautista may be a large part of the reason the Orioles were willing to trade Jorge López. He is a must-add in all formats as he’s expected to take over the closer role right away. His Steamer rest-of-season (ROS) projection for saves is now at 10. Before López’s departure, Bautista had three saves and one blown save. While López did get nearly all the chances, Bautista has been the next man up for the majority of the season. It’s possible he may not be able to go as often as a closer given his max-effort style of throw. However, he has appeared in back-to-back games 11 times so far in 2022. It’s still likely that Dillon Tate and Cionel Pérez get opportunities to save a few games and their value has increased because of it. In addition, they should be given more opportunities to record holds, as they move up the pecking order.

•Scott Effross, NYY: Slots into a set-up role. | Roster Resource

Effross has been very impressive this season but he’ll still have to compete with Aroldis Chapman, the returned from injury Jonathan Loáisiga, and newly acquired Lou Trivino. He may be worth rostering in holds leagues, but he’ll be sharing a lot of those opportunities with some really good relievers. Our bullpen chart has him as the next man up for now, but we’ll just have to keep an eye on how the Yankees utilize him. He’s worth an add in deep leagues for sure.

•Jorge López, MIN: Takes over the closer role. | Roster Resource

Previously the closer role had been split between Jhoan Duran and Emilio Pagán, but López should be the main man now. While Duran still holds value with a steamer ROS save total of three, he’ll likely also be a very strong set-up man recording holds and wins. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see him collect more than three saves the rest of the season, but regardless, his 2.15 ERA and 11.35 K/9 are valuable on their own.

•José Quijada & Ryan Tepera, LAA: Join a committee. | Roster Resource

Tepera now has a steamer ROS save total of 10 and if that’s the case, he needs to be added to fantasy rosters now. However, take caution as we have Quijada listed as a “Reliever on the Rise” and he was the first reliever to get a save opportunity after Iglesias was traded away. Was Tepera unavailable? Well, he did not pitch the previous day. Quijada’s ERA sits at 3.15 but his xERA is only 2.10, whereas Tepera is sporting a 4.26 (xERA of 3.59). Do you have two roster spots open? Probably not. This one is a gamble.

•Raisel Iglesias, ATL: Slots into a set-up role. | Roster Resource

I’m sure many fantasy managers who drafted high on Iglesias can agree that this is a bummer. Kenley Jansen will remain the closer in Atlanta. Will Smith had recorded five saves along with A.J. Minter before the trade deadline, so there is opportunity there. However, Iglesias has been shakey this season with his 4.04 ERA and limited chances for saves. I’m not dropping him, nor should you, but his steamer ROS save total is down to two and I would say there’s a two-save error bar on either side of that prediction.

•Mychal Givens, NYM: Slots into a set-up role. | Roster Resource

Drew Smith has 14 holds and he is one of 21 relievers with at least 14 holds on the year. Adam Ottovino and Seth Lugo are right behind him 12 apiece. The Mets are just about middle of the MLB pack with a total of 56 holds on the season. Oakland, of all teams, leads the MLB in holds with 75. I write all of this to make the point that Givens is a quality arm to roster in holds leagues. But, he was that way before the trade to New York so maybe this was all pointless to write.

•David Robertson, PHI: Joins a committee. | Roster Resource

Steamer’s ROS save total for Robertson is seven and that seems like a very reasonable mark. He’s probably going to get the lion’s share of opportunities, but Seranthony Domínguez and Brad Hand have been holding down the fort all season as Corey Knebel struggled and went through injury. Robertson was most likely rostered in your league but if he wasn’t, pick him up. Domínguez and Hand are also worth rostering until there’s more clarity in that committee.

•Rowan Wick, CHC: Takes over the closer role. | Roster Resource

With Robertson and Givens traded away, Wick is really the last man standing. His 4.36 ERA (4.93 xERA) is a little worrisome, but steamer’s ROS believes he’ll record another 12 saves! That likely has a lot to do with the fact that he’s clearly the man for the job, but I would take caution in believing he will get all 12 of those saves. The Cubs are projected for 28 more wins, but it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if they start testing out roles to see what they have in their younger arms. I would take the under, but I’m also running to the waiver wire to pick him up.

•Devin Williams, MIL: Takes over the closer role. | Roster Resource

Williams has been a closer quality reliever for a long time and now he gets the chance to prove he can handle the full-time role. Both Taylor Rogers and Matt Bush went through demotions from the closer role this season and need to find themselves again to be competitive for the job. If Williams is not already claimed in your league, who are you playing with? Pick him up now.

•Josh Hader, SDP: Takes over the closer role. | Roster Resource

Those who ran to the waiver wire to pick up Luis García upon Rogers’ demotion were probably elated for about 12 hours. Hader is a sure shot to take over the full-time role and fantasy managers who are not in holds leagues can probably drop García and Nabil Crismatt. As much as I wish Crismatt would close out a game or two on nothing but changeups, I don’t think it will happen.

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Ever since the opener became a thing in MLB, I have been wondering if I should be aggressively targeting openers among my RP corps in Ottoneu. I typically like to carry 6-8 RP on a roster, and having the option to extend my bullpen by locking in an opener on occasion seems like a nice way to get some extra pen innings. But opener innings aren’t exactly relief innings. Yes, they are pitched by relievers, and they are short-burst outings like relief appearances, but they don’t offer any hope of a save or hold, and they are often not as short-burst as they would be from the pen.

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Who has the highest Pitch Info, Pitch Type Value (pVal) on a slider this season among all pitchers? Andrés Muñoz. Ok, same question but a changeup instead of a slider and third place instead of first? Nabil Crismatt. Unfortunately, neither Andrés Muñoz’s slider nor Nabil Crismatt’s changeup was drafted in the 2022 FanGraphs pVal competition. In this draft, each participant selects a number of specific pitches trying to maximize the sum of their pVals. There’s a little more to it than that, in our version of the pVal Competition that a few of us FanGraphs/RotoGraphs writers inherited from the Pitcher List staff, participants must choose pitches from this list:

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At the start of the 2022 season, the always gracious Nick Pollack and friends at PitcherList lent the FanGraphs staff the pVal draft template and a few of us conducted a slow draft of all slow drafts. It was great! Tweets were tweeted, points were tallied and now, it’s time to take a look at how we’re doing. If you want a little pVal background, you can read my previous posts, Highfalutin pVals or Sweet Swirlin’ Secondaries. Or, you can read our glossary explainer, or just head over to the 2022 leaderboard and click around.

Before we get into the results, here’s a quick rundown on how this works. Each participant drafts an individual pitch and your goal is to maximize the sum of your pitch pVals. Just like a traditional fantasy manager must draft certain positions (OF, SS, SP, RP, etc.,) the pVal drafters must choose different pitches:

Luke Hooper, Nicklaus Gaut, Paul Sporer, Alex Chamberlain, and I are all part of this year’s FanGraphs contingent. We’re off to the races and Luke Hooper has taken a quick lead:

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Participant: Lucas Kelly
Current Place: 3rd
Best Pitch So Far: Michael Kopech’s four-Seam fastball
Worst Pitch So Far: Walker Buehler’s four-Seam fastball

3x Fastballs:
Walker Buehler’s four-seamer was my first pick and I thought I had taken candy from a bunch of babies. The pitch earned a pVal of 17.9 in 2021 and with his 207.2 innings pitched that season, I thought it was a guarantee points getter. This year, however, opponents are hitting .377 against the pitch and slugging .638. It’s being hit hard 51.6% of the time and has a very low 8.6% K%. The pitch has been used only 33.1% of the time, a career-low, and he’s increased his cutter usage to 25.1%. While the cutter is performing better than the four-seamer, the effective combination of both pitches led to success for Buehler in the past. Nicklaus Gaut wrote about Buehler’s spin rate decreases in his latest post. He did a great job of analyzing what has been going wrong with the pitch.

Zack Wheeler‘s four-seamer is right where I want it to be. Its usage is in the low 40% range which is right in line with where it was when it earned 16.7 pVal points last year. It has a 36.7% K%, a career-high, and hitters are getting to it with a .215 batting average. It is being hit hard 47.4% of the time which is a little concerning, but just a little. Alex Cobb’s splitter is being used at a career-high 40.8% and has an xBA of .149! That’s great. We’ll have to see if his health can keep him throwing the pitch. He’s currently on the IL with back trouble.

2x Sliders:
Max Scherzer, please come back!..and wear mittens when you’re helping injured dogs. Scherzer’s slider has a very nice 32.5% K% on the year so far, but it’s well below his career-best 50% in 2017. While I don’t expect it to reach career-level marks, the pitch didn’t seem fully refined at the start of the season and I think there’s room for improvement once he’s back. I’m not sure what to make of Cristian Javier’s slider. He’s only thrown 235 of them so far this year, but it has a 44.9% K% and a .182 batting average against. In 2021 the pitch accumulated 12.0 pVal points in 101.1 innings and this year, Javier is on pace (GP%) for 126.0 innings. I think there’s room to grow here as well.

1x Curveball:
I think I did it! I think I picked a good pitch. Corbin Burnes‘ curveball is currently a league leader with a 7.5 pVal. He’s closely followed by Framber Valdez (6.4), Shane McClanahan (6.3), and Kyle Wright (6.3). It has been Burnes’ best secondary and he’s using it a career-high 19.7% of the time. It has a 47.1% K%, hitters are batting .080 against the pitch, and it is hard hit only 15.4% of the time.

1x Changeup:
Yikes! Lucas Giolito hasn’t found the changeup yet and its usage is down. Its K% is still high at 41.5% but hitters are likely laying off (.371 wOBA) and getting to it (.267 BA, 21.7% Hard-Hit%) more than what the man with a fantastic first name would like.

1x Secondary:
I have a thing for splitters and I really just wanted to take a Shohei Ohtani pitch so that I have even more to root for when I watch him pitch. As of now, he’s only thrown the pitch 25 times and it has been hit with a .333 BA. I’d say it’s too early to tell, but he’s got some catching up to do if he wants to get back to the 14.2 pVal points he earned with the splitter in 2021.

1x Negative pVal:
This one is fun. The idea is to draft a pitch that had a negative value last season and bet that it improves this season. Last season Yu Darvish’s cutter earned -2.8 pVal points. To be honest, I saw a GIF of a dirty Darvish cutter from the past and thought, “There’s no way that pitch is negative in 2022.” So far, I’ve been wrong. He’s still using it 32.7% of the time but it’s getting hit hard with a .337 xBA and a .533 xSLG. He’s putting the cutter in the zone (57%) more than the MLB average (45.8%) and that could be part of the reason for the high xBA. Darvish’s PitcherList player page shows a .321 BABIP on the pitch vs. the .295 MLB average on cutters, so perhaps there’s still some hope.

1x Negative Regression:
Matt Harvey’s changeup earned 4.7 pVal points in 2021. I didn’t think he could replicate that again and it looks like I might be right, just for reasons other than what I had in mind at the time.

2x Util:
Cool fact; Hanser Alberto and Liam Hendriks have the same wFA pVal, -0.1. Go figure. In one way, this shows how pVals really need to be understood before they’re used to make any grand statements at your local watering hole. In another, it goes to show you that Liam Hendriks has struggled with the pitch in 2022. It’s just getting hit too often and too hard; .349 wOBA, .277 BA, .462 SLG, .578 xSLG. Kopech’s fastball on the other hand is my money maker and currently sits 3rd best in the MLB according to pVal.

2x Reserves:
Last but literally not least are my reserve picks. Lucky for me, the rules of the pVal competition allow me to drop the two worst performing pitches and replace them with my reserve picks. Alek Manoah‘s four-seamer is bringing my total back up and as long as he keeps utilizing his three positive pVal pitches (6.4 wFA, 2.6 wSI, 4.7 wSL), he’ll likely be replacing another pitch all season. Hunter Greene’s slider is the only of his pitches holding positive pVal this season and that’s fine with me. Baseball fans everywhere were excited to see Greene’s 99th statcast percentile fastball velocity on a more regular basis in 2022, but the pitch has not been effective from a pVal standpoint at -12.8. It’s being put in the zone a little too much and getting hit (.352 BA) a lot too much. The slider, however, is only getting a .112 BA and has been impressive thus far with a 40.4% Whiff rate.

Time will tell if my squad will be able to reach Luke Hoopers pVal leaders. What I do know is that this pVal draft was a lot of fun to conduct and has been a lot of fun to score. If you can find a few friends to participate in one, do it. It’s another great way to interact with the game. Thanks again to the PitcherList crew for sharing the rules of the game with us and stay tuned for more updates throughout the season.

Using my Pitch Leaderboard, I identified every “new” pitch* thrown during MLB’s glorious first weekend. Then, using my Pitch Comps tool, which uses pitch specs (like velocity, spin rate, movement, and release points) to compare pitches to one another, I wanted to see if I could make any quantifiable declarations about the quality of these pitches in small samples. I can’t write about everyone, so I’ll select the most interesting ones (in my humble opinion).

(*Including existing pitches from rookies for whom we now finally have MLB statcast data as well as existing pitches thrown by players who missed all of 2021 due to injury. It will be interesting to see if the latter group looks measurably different post-injury than they did pre-injury.)

At the end of the season, I’ll revisit to find out these comps were actually indicative (i.e., “predictive,” in a sense) of quality, but it’s also strongly possible the comps will change as samples grow. This is very experimental, but it’s something I’ve wanted to try in the past but hadn’t found the motivation to do.

Why pitch comps? I know I am prone to bias watching a handful of pitches from a pitcher. I can’t scout because I can deceive myself into just about any conclusion (and I think the same can be said for most of us, whether we like it or not).

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Earlier this week, I shared and discussed starting pitcher velocity gainers on Monday and Tuesday, and then relievers yesterday. Now let’s flip to the fastball velocity decliners. My level of concern for the pitchers on this list, and for those who missed the cut but have also suffered declines, is lower than my excitement for the velocity gainers. Given the abbreviated spring training, it’s understandable if some pitchers are still building up their arm strength, and we’ll see their velocities gradually rise closer to what we expected. Surprisingly however, leaguewide velocity is actually up! During the same date range of Apr 7 – Apr 12, 2022 fastball (four-seam, two-seam, sinker) velocity is actually up from 93.4 MPH in 2021 to 93.6 MPH in 2022. So it’s hard to use the blanket short spring training as an explanation, but I’m sure every pitcher is affected differently. Bottom line is while this group is certainly worth monitoring and a trip to the IL with an injury shared could certainly be announced, I wouldn’t panic just yet.

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We’ve got lots of guys to talk about, so let’s get right to it. Check out the start of last week’s article for an explanation of what we’re doing and how we do it. The pitchers are listed in descending order of likelihood that they’ll do what the stats we’re looking at suggest they’ll do. In other words, we list unlucky guys in ascending order of our pessimism about our optimism, and lucky guys in ascending order of our pessimism about our pessimism.

UNLUCKY STARTING PITCHERS

Kyle Freeland: Hesitant as we are to recommend, and for that matter to draft, Colorado pitchers, we are making an exception for Freeland, whose 2018 was unquestionably the best single season ever by a Rockies pitcher. The only thing that went wrong for him last year was that he was suddenly unable to get left-handed hitters out. Since he’s never had that problem before, we envision that he won’t have it again, at least not this season.

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• Volume 1
• Closer Podcast

The end of the lockout hasn’t cleared things up quite as much as we were hoping, especially with Kimbrel still not traded and unlikely to be by Opening Day at this point.

I’ve got the Closer Chart for you with my Next-In-Line and Darkhorse candidates so you can see every bullpen at a glance and then there is a straight ranking of the relievers after that where you can see that I favor some of the Medium stability closers over some of the High stability guys. It is admittedly hard to be super confident in a reliever ranking after the 10-15 just because who you already have will then dictate where you go later in terms of handcuffing or dipping into other bullpens with lottery tickets, etc… so don’t be too locked into the exact order of the ranking sheet.

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

Guests: Greg Jewett & Eric Samulski

Strategy Section

• General 2022 closer landscape & draft strategy
• FAAB capital vs. Draft captial for closers – which is more efficient?
• Holds / Saves+Holds leagues
• Closer Handcuffs for 2022
  • Giants
  • Padres
• Reuven’s Closer Questions
  • Should you choose closers that are on good teams?
  • Pick closers based on skill?
  • Avoid closers who could be traded?
  • Avoid closer by committee situations?
  • Avoid certain teams all together with lousy players?

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