Half a week in the books. How’s your team doing? I wanted to write a SELL, SELL, SELL!! piece but that seemed a tad premature. So instead, let’s check in on Dallas Keuchel, a divisive player entering 2016 and once again in 2017. With concerns swirling around the Houston lefty given last year’s undeniable decline in both performance and health, I was eager to see him pitch the Astros’ opener against Seattle.

Coming off his 2015 Cy Young campaign, Keuchel was a polarizing figure. A ground ball pitcher with impeccable command, detractors fretted about his lack of velocity. Well, if his cheddar was in short supply to begin with, the fromagerie was flat out barren in 2016. Keuchel lost a tick on the gun, averaging 88 mph on his fastball through his first 10 starts. But that wasn’t all. His pitches were down nearly across the board.

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Yesterday, I unveiled my bold hitter league leaders, with the acknowledgement that these are a lot tougher to hit than the generic Bold Predictions. The pitching side of the ledger is a bit easier, but still difficult, of course. Given that there is more luck and factors outside the specific pitcher’s control involved that shape his surface results, it’s more conceivable that a non-favorite leads the league in a category.

In an effort to avoid double dipping and naming the same pitcher in two categories, there may have been a slightly better bold choice for a particular category. I opted to come up with different names in each. Also keep in mind that it is difficult to balance boldness with realistic. I eliminated many names that I didn’t think were bold, but maybe you do. I also eliminated names that have no real chance at leading in the category.

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With the season starting, new useful information will finally become available. Let me know if I can provide any hard to get information in which other analysts aren’t providing. I will continue trying to notice injured players, provide Quick Looks at new/suspect pitchers, give velocity updates, and prospect comparisons. Other writers can provide normal group-think information. Let me know where I can provide that early edge.

The principal shareholder in the Rays, Stuart Sternberg, discussed how finding and developing the new frontiers provides competitive advantages.

Maybe, Sternberg said, it’s by falling behind, taking a lead from companies that follow Starbucks into good locations, copy Apple electronics or make generic drugs.
“I think where the advantage for us is going forward — and it’s going to sound crazy — is to try to allow all, and I will say all, these other organizations to devote enormous resources, and that’s not just money but thinking, brain power and devotion, to things that will have very little payoff, while those resources, brainpower and money might be better spent somewhere else,” he said.

“You build it, you invest all the (research and development), you devote everything you can and like a drug company, I’ll do the generic version for nothing, and I’ll undersell you. And while you’re doing that, I’ll worry about some other stuff over here.

“Everything I’ve seen, it’s an arms race right now, and guys are using elephant guns to kill mosquitoes.”

No matter what the target, the Rays have to find a way to get back ahead.

“There’s always going to be new frontiers,” Bloom said. “If we don’t find them, somebody else will.”

Let me know which frontiers we can explore together.

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Tom Verducci once wrote about how a 30% increase in innings pitched could lead to injury in young pitchers. Since he wrote that, many people have objectively determined that this is not the case (Carleton, 2013). Not all innings are created equally, and not all pitches put the same amount of stress on the human body.

As we have learned in many different ways that are not a lot of fun , both relief pitchers and starting pitchers can succumb to the effects of pitching (also read as, getting injured). This makes the Pitcher Abuse Point scale not appropriate for relief pitchers (see this article on Baseball Prospectus – (Jazayerli, 1998)). Other research has pointed to measures like innings pitched as being a poor determinant of workload in pitchers (Karakolis et al., 2016). Pitching on consecutive days, high velocities, and total pitches have been identified as risk factors for injury (Whiteside et al., 2016). Read the rest of this entry »

Roster moves are continuously happening. I know I’ll miss a few but here is some information on the more fantasy relevant moves. As more news comes out over the weekend and I find time, I will add to the list any information I find useful.

• Adalberto Mejia is the Twins fifth starter.

Early this offseason I stated:

A pitcher I am keeping my eye on is the Twins Adalberto Mejia. No one has reported any of the lefties pitches as plus but he may have four average pitches with above average control. He throws his lowest rated pitch, the curve, hard. Hard curves (80 mph plus) are more successful than slow curves so even his worst pitch can be useful. If he continues to post good minor league strikeout and walk numbers, he could move into a bad Twins rotation quickly.

He isn’t immediately rosterable in most leagues. I will though try to catch his first start and see what’s behind the 9.5 K/9 in AAA.

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Spring Training Velocity Extravaganza

After my Tout Wars weekend, I found time to update the spring training velocities. Here are some pitchers seeing significant changes.

Cole Hamels

Hamels’s fastball average 91.5 mph on the 21st and down to 90.8 mph on the 26th. Last season it averaged 92.6 mph. I would be diving in more on Hamels but his velocity starts low every season.

While he starts slow, owners should closely monitor his velocity to make sure it starts ticking up.

Jake Arrieta

I am less optimistic on Arrieta. He is seeing a similar drop in velocity to Hamels at ~2.0 mph.

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This post was inspired by Trey Baughn’s Bargain Shopping: Five for $5 from December. With just days remaining before the start of the 2017 baseball season, most fantasy auctions and drafts are completed. However, since some will take place this week, and since most fantasy owners are always interested in making savvy moves to improve their rosters, now is as good a time as any to talk about fantasy bargains. To qualify for this list, players must simply cost less than $6 on the Ottoneu Average Salaries page (sorted by “All game types”) and be beyond rookie status. Getting right into the list: Read the rest of this entry »

Alas, we have reached the end of the Pod’s Picks and Pans series. We conclude with a look at starting pitchers. Since there are just so many differences of opinion, I didn’t strictly go down the line of pitchers with the largest gaps, but rather cherry picked a bit that would be the most insightful.

Starting Pitchers March Rankings Update

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I updated my starting pitcher rankings in the latest update to our group rankings and there were plenty of movers and shakers, so I’m just going to cover a whole bunch of them here. I’ll be covering the big risers in this first piece, then a separate one for the fallers. There won’t be any sort of unifying theme among the pitchers mentioned, just some free-form stuff. Sound alright? Let’s do it.

Jacob deGrom (+9 spots to SP10): I’ve been eyeing deGrom all offseason to make sure the ulnar surgery recovery was progressing as expected. All along we were told it wouldn’t cause any major issues and it has certainly played out that way thus far. His velocity is there and he has a 17:2 K/BB ratio in 15.3 spring innings. His performance hasn’t gone unnoticed and paired with concerns for some others originally slotted just ahead of him (David Price and Carlos Carrasco), he’s shooting up draft boards.

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Alas, it’s finally time to wrap up the Pod vs Steamer Projections series, which pitted my Pod Projections against the Steamer projections in several fantasy categories, discussing which players I’m significantly more bullish and bearish on. Last week, I identified 13 pitchers I was far more bullish on than Steamer for ERA. In doing this exercise, I realized I was actually forecasting lower ERAs for the majority of the pitchers we both projected. So now turning to the pitchers I forecasted a higher ERA for, there was literally only 21 to choose from, most of which were within 0.10 runs of each other, which is, like, nothing. But here are seven fantasy relevant pitchers I’m a bit more bearish on than Steamer.

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