Over the course of a 162-game season, many casual fans may be surprised by how much a hitter might adjust their stance and setup. Often, the assumption is that once any athlete reaches the pinnacle of their sport, there is resistance to change, particularly mid-season, and any major mechanical changes are reserved for the off-season. But it turns out hitters are constantly tinkering with parts of their stance, particularly when looking to find some form.
For many of us, our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season.
In doing that, part of the process is looking back at the season to see some of the emerging young players and ascertain whether or not their emergence was real and repeatable. One of the classic ways to do this is by looking for comparisons of these young players to established major leaguers to serve as proof of concepts.
Scouts have done this forever and it has worked in the recent past. Hunter Brown’s association to Justin Verlander foreshadowed the former’s rise to ace status. Many in the industry connected Parker Messick’s arsenal and style of pitching with Hyun-Jin Ryu, and Messick has had similar results so far. Chase Burns’ reliance on the fastball and slider was compared to a young Spencer Strider’s prior to the former’s debut, and Burns has been just as good as the vintage version of Strider.
Over the course of the next few months, I’ll provide a handful of potentially instructive comps we can make to help illuminate this growing crop of young starting pitchers.
For Part 1 of this series, where I find comps for today’s young emerging aces, I took a look at the Mariners’ Kade Anderson, comparing his arsenal, arm slot, and potential prospect arc to that of perennial All Star, Max Fried.
Welcome to the final two weeks of the season. Or close to it, anyway. When games wrap up Sunday afternoon and evening, we will officially have 14 days remaining before the regular season wraps up on September 27.
With the end so near, sit/start calls for your rotation have changed. Maybe in your head-to-head league, things are pretty normal – you max out innings and games played; if you have a limit on games started by your pitching staff, you try to identify the best starts that fit under that limit. The stakes are higher, but the process might be the same.
But in season-long leagues, there are some nuances that should change your typical thought process.
In the immortal words of Sugar Ray, sometimes, all we need is to “turn tomorrow into yesterday.”
For many of us, that time is right now. Our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season.
Which of your waiver wire adds will you want to bring back next season? Who were you envious of that you want to target in drafts next year? You’ll spend the offseason asking yourself these questions. So will I, and it will be my goal to help you answer some of these questions.
But before the season ends, I want to slow down just a hair, to enjoy the rest of this season. Late Wednesday night, I found myself falling asleep to highlights of Kade Anderson’s first truly successful outing for the Mariners, holding the Rangers to one run over six innings and collecting his first win in the majors.
Sitting here in early September, with papery leaves beginning to find themselves underfoot and with the A’s and Angels getting ready for next season, things really do feel pretty normal.
There have certainly been some surprises, like the oddly Tucker-shaped hole in the Dodgers’ lineup, but for the most part, it’s been a season that has largely matched our expectations.
But there was a time, not all that long ago, when many of us were panicking. When our early round picks were faltering and our “sure thing” sleepers were seemingly still sleeping. Let’s call this time by a cute and breezy name, something deceivingly blissful and carefree like “May.”
In this article, I’ll look back at some of the hitters whose starts were so rough that fantasy managers may have overlooked them as they have rebounded this summer and may still undervalue them heading into next year’s drafts.
I want you to be sure to look at these players favorably when doing your draft prep. If you really trust me, maybe even bookmark this page to come back to during draft time, so that you don’t take one look at Rafael Devers and get a sour unripe picked-in-April-but-ripe-in-August orange taste in your mouth (I know this isn’t the citrus timeline, please forgive me).
OpenCommand, introduced by Doyoung-Tom Kim, is an absolutely incredible open-source dataset that offers a new way to track pitch locations based on target-miss distance, how far a pitch landed from where the pitcher was actually trying to put it, estimated from the catcher’s setup and camera tracking. Without going too much into detail about the workings of OpenCommand, I would highly recommend checking out his work and the great lengths he went to account for camera angles, plate depth, etc.
If you’re a nineties baby playing in the majors, I think your time has passed. Make way for Gen Z. The 2000’s babies. Even the 2005 babies are starting to make a real impact.
So many of our favorite young stars from the last five years have aged out of rising stardom and seem to be either plateauing or, even worse, skiing down the final hill, and fast.
Here’s a quick collection of players I’d consider consensus picks to become generational stars a few years ago who are currently between 27 and 29 years old. To me, this captures the players many of us would have confidently said were entering the primes of their careers as recently as two years ago. Not yet on the hill, and surely not over it. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re just one day away from the final month of the season! As we head into the final four weeks, the impact that any individual player will have on your place in the standings, particularly the ratios, will continue to diminish. We’re also likely going up against imminent trade deadlines, so your chances to dramatically improve your team is quickly dwindling.
I sat down to write this article at the start of the Cubs-Reds game on a sunny Sunday afternoon. It matched my disposition. Earlier in the day, I’d clinched an enviable first round bye in my home league. But the final game of the day was a game of consequence for a few of my league mates in a less privileged playoff position.
Their two teams were separated by just a game in our head-to-head categories league.
Both were in matchups where Cubs hitters had the chance to make or break their seasons. A run scored by Michael Busch or Nico Hoerner would send a surging Cinderella story packing and let a team that looked to be a shoo-in a few months ago limp into the playoffs. A stolen base by Ian Happ would have had the same effect, but was not really much of a consideration.
Aug 5, 2026; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA; Credit: Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images
Earlier this week, some of you joined me on a jaunty little trip down through Fantasy Seasons Past, stopping to admire some of the plucky league winners that never seemed to amount to much afterwards.
From Nolan Jones who burned you the next year to Shed Long who you can only remember fondly, there have been league winning hot hands for as long as there has been fantasy baseball.
This year, shouldn’t you be the one to add the league winning Joe Schmo? Or should I say, “Schwindel”?
