Curiosity Shop: The Birchwood Brothers’ 10 Bold Predictions

We’ve been stat geeks virtually since the moment of our respective conceptions, and we were thrilled by both the stat revolution ushered in by Bill James and the analytics revolution ushered in by we’re not sure who. (We view “statistics” and “analytics” as two separate but related disciplines, and someday we’ll get around to explaining why, but not today.) But we feel as if we’ve come about a quarter-circle away from our initial position and now, in designing our baseball drafts, have moved significantly in the direction of what you might call the anecdotal.

Don’t get us wrong. We haven’t regressed to the time when a player’s announcing he was coming to spring training in the best shape of his life mattered to anyone but  his agent, or when “pitching coach” was a synonym for “manager’s drinking buddy” rather than “kinesiologist.” We’re perfectly comfortable with au courant things like Heat Maps and Tunnels, even if they do sound more like driving directions than baseball statistics. We admire enormously, and often learn from, the folks who write deep-dive two-thousand-word articles exploring, for example, every possible aspect of Michael Wacha’s pitch tunneling. But in identifying the players we think might outperform the Fantasy market’s expectations, we frequently rely on some isolated and intriguing piece of information or cluster of information, sometimes narrative, sometimes statistical, sometimes a hybrid. In other words, oddities. Anomalies. Curiosities.

Which brings us to our Ten Bold Predictions. Below you’ll find a list of players we think will outperform their projections, along with a short blurb focusing on some discrete piece of information or node of information that required some digging to unearth, but not the kind of digging that produces an exhaustive analysis of, for example, a particular hitter’s “barrels.”

We offer five hitters and five pitchers. The numbers in parentheses are the players’ Average Draft Positions, as calculated by the National Fantasy Baseball Championship on the basis of the 15 Draft Champions (15 teams, 50 players) drafts held since March 16th. We hope those of you with drafts or auctions still to come will find it useful. But don’t thank us; we’re just trying to help the team win.

Ty France (172): We think there’s a decent chance France leads the AL in batting average. Why do we think this? Because he already sort of did. France suffered a debilitating wrist injury on June 23rd    and while he missed only 2 weeks, it clearly affected him, since his slash line from then on was .232/.285/.395, which is pretty awful. But over the calendar year from July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022, France played in 151 games, and in 665 PA hit .316/.387/.468. The only AL batter with a higher BA last season was Luis Arraez, who now toils in the NL for the Marlins as one of their 47 infielders.

Jace Peterson (493): No, not Joc Pederson. Jace Peterson, 33-year-old journeyman going from a hitter’s park to a pitcher’s park with a career slash line of .231/.321/.343. We like him for several reasons. First of all, he’s locked as an everyday player at 3B and in a good lineup spot– Roster Resource has him  batting fifth, but we think that he’ll spend a fair amount of his time batting cleanup. And when you look hard at the guys who figure to wind up batting ahead of him—Esteury Ruiz, Ramón Laureano, and Seth Brown—you see a lot of on-base upside and good speed, which should produce some additional RBI chances for Peterson. Plus, Peterson’s fast himself. In 630 PA over the past two seasons, he’s stolen a base on 22 of his 23 attempts. And now he’s moving to the A’s, a team that runs about as much as his old team did, except what with their power deficiency, a ballpark where fly balls go to die, and the new MLB rules, they figure to run a lot more. And Peterson also has some power. In his 3 years as a Brewer, he hit 16 HR in 692 PA, which isn’t all that much, but maybe that’s because he hated hitting in Milwaukee, where he hit .185 with 3 home runs in 286 AB. Away from home, he hit 290 with 13 HR in 307 AB. So 20 HR, 20 SB, and 110 R+RBI looks like a distinct possibility.

Kerry Carpenter (429): We are aficionados of weird stat lines, and Carpenter has one of the weirdest we’ve seen. At Home In Detroit: .113/.161/.151 with no home runs in 53 at bats. Everywhere Else: .400/.456/.840, with 6 home runs in 50 at bats, including 5 in 38 at bats against right-handed pitching. As you might surmise from the foregoing, Carpenter is a left-handed power hitter, but he can hit home runs in any direction. He couldn’t have done worse in Detroit last season if he’d tried to, so we figure he’ll have to do better, and his record on the road shows what he’s capable of. And now the Tigers have moved in the center field fence at Comerica and lowered the fences in center, right center, and right.

Jared Walsh (325): Walsh is to 2023 as Christian Walker was to 2022: a slugging first baseman coming off a disappointing season with a doctor’s note. In Walsh’s case, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome was the culprit, ending his season in August and ruining it long before. Although, as we’ll explain in a moment, Walsh’s stats appear to tell a tale of sudden trauma, Walsh says the TOS had bothered him for several years, and you know how it is with repetitive-use sports injuries: you cheerfully ignore them for a while, and then some boundary gets crossed and suddenly you can pay attention to nothing else. In Walsh’s case, you can see clearly when he crossed the borderline. Through the end of June, he was hitting .260/.303/.462 with 13 home runs in 290 plate appearances. Thereafter, it was .133/.207/.213 with 2 HR in 164 PAs. Walsh had surgery last year and now says he feels great, and his spring stats suggest as much. He’s a left-handed hitter who’s not terrible against lefties, but he may wind up in a platoon nonetheless. So let’s be conservative, assume that’s what happens, and project his 2022 through-June stats to 450 PAs. Same slash line, obviously, but with 20 home runs and 60 RBI—worth, we think, getting him about two rounds earlier than the market does.

Jesse Winker (254): This one’s easy. At his best and healthiest, Winker hits about .300 with about 20 home runs, mostly because he destroys right-handed pitching, though he’s generally been helpless against lefties. Historically, he’s often been good but seldom healthy. Last year, he was (relatively) healthy but awful. Yet something unprecedented and good happened to Winker last season: he started to hit left-handers a bit. His career record against lefthanders through 2021 was .188/.305/.295; last year he hit .244/.357/.437 against them. So let’s try something: merging Winker’s stats against righthanders through 2021 (.313/.405/.556) with his 2022 stats against lefthanders, and assuming he has 500 plate appearances, of which 400 are against righties. He hits about .300 with about 25 home runs. But, you protest, those pre-2022 stats are suspect because they were compiled while he was playing for the Reds, and the Great American Ballpark is a hitter’s paradise. True, we riposte. But now he’s moving from Seattle, where T-Mobile Park treats left-handed hitters rudely, to Milwaukee, where American Family Field is kinder. And where Winker’s career record, in 109 plate appearances, is .344/.440/.591 with 5 home runs.

Jose Suarez (375): To the naked eye, Suarez is an adequate SP4 or SP5. But we think he’s a lot better than that, because a lot better is what he was in the second half of last season. Normally we don’t place too much stock in first half/second half splits as indications of change, but in Suarez’s case there’s a clear explanation. First half: 1.80 HR/9. Second half: 0.70 HR/9. The explanation: First half: 0.77 GB/FB. Second half: 1.41 GB/FB. In other words, a guy whose main weakness is giving up home runs learned how to get opponents to hit the ball on the ground. One reads various explanations for this—he had a new slider, he threw his sinker more and better—but whatever the cause, he evidently figured something out, and there’s no reason to think it won’t stay figured out this year.

Joe Ryan (133): Ryan pitched well last year, and the market seems to think he’ll do about the same. We think he’ll be even better. Return with us, painful as it will be for Ryan’s 2022 owners, to July 29^th, 2022 in San Diego. Ryan’s having a bit of a tough time against the Padres, and now it’s 4-1 Padres in the bottom of the 5^th, man on second, two out, Manny Machado at bat. And Machado hits a home run that, if it were possible ever to describe a home run as “feeble,” would be accurately described as a feeble home run. In most other parks it’s an out. Now it’s 6-1, and Rocco Baldelli leaves Ryan in the game. The Padres proceed to go single-double-walk-home run before Baldelli puts Ryan out of his misery. Now let’s assume that Machado’s home run is a lineout instead. Ryan’s 2022 ERA is 3.18 rather than 3.55, and his WHIP is 1.07 rather than 1.11. In other words, in an alternate universe, and we predict in 2023, Ryan isn’t Ryan, he’s Joe Musgrove.

George Kirby (93): As you know, Kirby had an excellent rookie season, and the market makes him a top-30 starter. But we’re thinking Cy Young. Kirby’s 2022 looks less good than it was for two reasons. First, there’s the trouble he had with right-handed hitters, which was (a) unprecedented and (b) straightened out in the second half. Second, he stumbled a bit in his last three starts, which is understandable, since he’d already pitched 144 innings and the most he’d ever pitched in college or pro ball was 111. Between the All-Star break and those last three games, he made 10 starts, producing a 26.3 K-BB%, 0.98 WHIP, 2.03 ERA, and (this one is otherworldly) 1.33 FIP. If he comes anywhere close to replicating those numbers, he’s a top-5 pitcher.

Brady Singer (192): He’s in something like the same situation as Ryan’s in—the vicissitudes of a single game make him look worse on paper than he was or figures to be. The situation: It’s Singer’s last start of KC’s dismal season. It’s the bottom of the sixth, KC at Cleveland. Cleveland’s ahead 3-1, and Singer’s had a shaky fifth inning, giving up two hits and a run. Now he’s facing the top of the Guardians’ order, to whom he relinquishes three singles, a double, and a home run, whereupon Carlos Hernandez comes in and finishes the job by giving up a single, which allows another of Singer’s runs to score. Singer’s first start of the season was also pretty bad. Remove those bookends and in 23 starts, Singer goes 10-4 with 8.77 K/9, a 2.80 ERA, and a 1.11 WHIP. If he can reproduce those numbers, Singer’s 2023 will look a lot like Shane Bieber’s 2022.

Lucas Giolito (133): As we noted a few weeks ago, Giolito was perhaps the unluckiest pitcher of the 2022 season, and thus figures to produce better fantasy-relevant stats this season merely by the operation of chance. But that’s not the only reason we like him. We think the market is underestimating the beneficial effect of La Russa extraction on the White Sox as a whole, even though the evidence is there in plain sight: under La Russa, they were 63-65, whereas post-La Russa they were 18-16. So even if they match that post-La Russa record, they win about 86 games rather than the 83 or so that’s the consensus over-under. No one figures to benefit more than Giolito, whom even by La Russa’s own reckoning the manager mishandled. And in fact, that’s approximately what happened last year: Giolito with La Russa, 128 IP, 5.27 ERA, 1.50 WHIP; after La Russa, 33 2/3 IP, 3.48 ERA, 1.19 WHIP.  A full season like that puts him in the same neighborhood as Logan Gilbert, who’s going two rounds earlier.