Ottoneu: Chad’s Keep or Cut Decisions at MI

Yesterday, Lucas Kelly went through some tough keep or cut decisions at for his Ottoneu teams. Today, I’ll do the same. Before diving in, I’ll note that Lucas and I have slightly different values on middle infield.

If you look at Lucas’s replacement level article, you can see that he assumes 72 MI above replacement level. I have a lower number. If varies a bit year-to-year, but it typically sits closer to 60. Both of us use sound logic, just different logic. He is effectively assuming three 2B and three SS per team; I am assuming five total MI per team. I am not sure it is easy to determine who is right and who is wrong – it likely varies by year, by league, and by manager – but the result is that I don’t value MI eligibility quite as highly as he does. That may show in our respective decisions. All P/G projections are from Steamer.

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Willy Adames SS
Salary: $14.00
Average Salary: $13.10
2023 P/G: 4.51
Proj 2024 P/G: 5.11

Adames put up 6.2 P/G after being traded to Milwaukee in 2021 and then 5.22 P/G in 2022, so it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that his 2023 was highly disappointing. That track record also explains why his 2024 Steamer projection looks so much better than his 2023 season.

Adames became a more aggressive swinger in 2023, posting a career-high chase rate and tying his career-high swing rate at pitches in the zone, resulting in a big jump in his swinging strike rate (to 14.1%) compared to his 2022 season (12.9%) but not so big compared to his prior track record. That increase in swinging strike rate can also be attributed to what appears to be a concerted effort by pitchers to stay away from Adames. Among hitters qualified for the batting title, he had the 35th-highest O-swing and saw the 3rd lowest percent of pitches in the zone.

When you look at his rolling swing rates, though, it doesn’t look like there is a big red flag here – everything seems very much within his career norms. And, despite the uptick in the final days of 2023, the trend over the second half of the season is that as pitchers came in the zone less, he chased less.

This helps to explain why his strikeout rate fell (25.9% vs. a career rate of 28.2% coming into the year) and his walk rate climbed (11.1% vs. 8.9%). Yes, he was more aggressive, but the increase in aggression was relatively small and he improved on it as the season went out. By the end of the season, he was making better decisions and I don’t think it is a coincidence that he put up a 129 wRC+ in September.

So what dragged down the season line? Walking more, striking out less, this is all good! The culprit is his HR/FB rate, which dipped to 13.6%, a new career-worst. The thing is, he was still hitting the ball hard – his barrel-rate was still a strong 12.4%, second-best of his career. His HR/Barrel dropped from 59.6% to 49.0%. League-wide, that rate was 58.6% in 2023 and has ranged from 56% to 62% the last three seasons. Adames pulled the ball more, as well, which should have helped, not hurt, his HR/FB rate.

Keep or Cut?
All of that is enough to get me to buy into that projection – Adames was still himself in 2023 and I expect his results to return to form. But that doesn’t really answer the question, because that projection, per Justin Vibber’s Surplus Calculator, is worth $11. Once you account for inflation in the area of 20-30%, Adames at $14 is just about right. So my answer, for now, is that I am planning to keep Adames, pending what my MI situation looks like come January. He is a guy I could trade and if my roster looks better without him, I’ll cut him. But I think this is a solid, keepable price.

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Corey Seager SS
Salary: $51.00
Average Salary: $40.54
2023 P/G: 8.31
Proj 2024 P/G: 6.86

A quick note on projections: In his Wednesday intro to the 2024 ZiPS release, Dan Szymborski talked about how projections are a mid-point and we should expect some percent of players to do far better or far worse. As an example, he wrote,

ZiPS gave .300 batting average projections to three players in 2021: Luis Arraez, DJ LeMahieu (yikes!), and Juan Soto. But that’s not the same thing as ZiPS thinking there would only be three .300 hitters. On average, ZiPS thought there would be 34 hitters with at least 100 plate appearances to eclipse .300, not three.

This same logic can be applied to fantasy P/G projections. Steamer has only projected one player to put up a full season of PA with over 8 P/G (Ronald Acuña Jr.) and only five more (Yordan Alvarez, Juan Soto, Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts) to be over 7. In 2023, four hitters were over 8 P/G (Acuña, Seager, Betts, and Freddie Freeman) and another six were over 7 P/G.

Seager’s projection is #9 in all of baseball. He and Betts are the only two SS over 6 P/G. So while 6.86 sounds “great, but not elite” at first glance, that is a pretty elite projection, making him one of just a few players projected for over $40 in value, pre-inflation.

So, Seager is a star and if any SS is worth keeping at $50, it is Seager (or Betts, I keep forgetting he counts at SS). Simple case, right?

But on this team, I have two $50 bats ($51 Seager and $50 José Ramirez), two more $40 bats ($47 Manny Machado and $43 George Springer), and two $30 bats ($35 Matt Olson and $31 Kyle Schwarber). Machado and Springer are likely cuts while Olson and Schwarber are likely keeps, leaving me to determine if I can hold $167 in four bats and still build the roster I want around Ramirez-Seager-Olson-Schwarber.

Keep or Cut?
This comes down to a roster construction question – do you want to hold one or more $50 plus bats pre-auction? And for me the answer is that it depends on the rest of my roster. If I find myself deep at MI and needing money to spend elsewhere, I would begrudgingly cut Seager.

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Trea Turner SS
Salary: $44.00
Average Salary: $48.53
2023 P/G: 5.79
Proj 2024 P/G: 5.72

Given how horribly he started the year, it is kind of amazing that he ended up at 5.79 P/G, just a small(ish) drop from 5.97 P/G in 2022. He put up a 165 wRC+ in the last two months of the season and it looks even better if you are willing to just ignore the 1-for-16 with a walk he posted to start August. Which is all to say, on July 31 (or even August 4), the idea of keeping a $44 Turner seemed indefensible and now it seems, well, at least defensible.

From what I can see, there are two graphs that tell something of a story for Turner. First, you can see that as the season goes on, he is chasing a bit less and swinging in the zone a bit more, and his contact rate is going up.

The next graph uses Pitcher List’s PLV data, which looks at pitch-by-pitch decisions and results. This graph focuses on decision value, which Nick Pollack defines in that article as:

Modeled value (runs per 100 pitches) of a hitter’s decision to swing or take, minus the modeled value of the alternative.

It is basically a measure of whether a hitter swung or not vs. whether they should have swung or not, based on things like velocity, location, count, etc.

Even without a ton of knowledge of this stat, the graph is pretty clear – he was making much better decisions, not just in vs. out of the zone, but about what pitches he could do damage on. His 2022 graph shows more up-and-down, but his season average for 2022 was just below 1.0 – worse than 2023 overall, but far better than that ugly stretch to start the year.

It’s possible Turner started the year out of sorts, pressing to justify his new contract or to impress new fans or just to get off to a good start with the team that will end up defining his career. Or it was just a rough stretch at a highly visible time. Or a million other explanations. I can’t really say. What I can say is that he had an issue, he adusted, and he excelled.

Keep or Cut?
Given Turner’s track record, I am in on him and confident he’ll put up another season that pushes up near 6 P/G. The thing is, I am not sure that is worth $44. His 2023 P/G was 8th best among SS and I don’t think I want to pay $44 for a guy to be bottom-half of the top 12 in a 12-team league. He probably isn’t sticking around.