Reviewing Eno Sarris’ Bold Predictions for 2015

This year, I went bolder. I went more precise. I tied success to specific numbers.

I’m guessing that will tank my completion percentage, which has hovered around 33-40%. Let’s check the tape. I’m nervous.

1) Anthony DeSclafani will have a season that trumps his minor league strikeout numbers.

Dang. DeSclafani has struck out 24% of the batters he’s seen since August first, and that would trump all of his minor league strikeout rates, but that’s just two months. It’s nice that the righty still had a top-twenty slider by whiff rate, and found his curve ball late in the season (13% whiffs, or above-average), and threw some changeups, but this is still a loss. His changeup gave up the most home runs of his pitches and he didn’t trust it, perhaps because he was telegraphing it with his arm speed. Most of the pitchers we found using pitch-type peripherals ended up being useful major league pitchers, but very few of them ended up aces. This is probably a lesson for us — use these things to unearth back-end starters, but still spend a penny or two on your aces.

Verdict: 0-for-1.

2) Travis Snider will be a top 60 outfielder.

Let’s look back at the list that inspired this stupidity. The list of elite batted-ball gainers from 2013 to 2014.

That’s amazing! The list is full of duds. Batted ball distance is super hard to use, it looks like. I still love Marcell Ozuna, especially if he leaves Miami. And injury was a big factor in the cases of Devin Mesoraco and Carlos Santana, at least. Perhaps we needed to add in an age bracket. 1800 plate appearances into his career, Snider was only turning 27, but that’s not that young in today’s baseball. It might even be post-peak right now. The ballpark factor wasn’t enough to gift him a late power breakout, and this is another miss.

Verdict: 0-for-2 and yuck.

3) Jason Kipnis will go 20/20.

Hey! Jason Kipnis had a pretty good year! He hit .300, scored 86 runs, and had a league average isolated power, and was healthy all year. That’s something he’s only done once before. Moral victories aren’t real in fake baseball, though. And 21 combined homers and steals isn’t getting it done. He may ride his batting average (or OBP/OPS) into top-twelve status when we count it all up at the end of the year, but that’s a far cry from going 20/20 or being one of the top three second baseman. He laughed at me a little bit when I asked him if he was sacrificing any power by going to the opposite field so much, but I think it’s fair to wonder. If you don’t have Joey Votto‘s opposite field power, maybe Joey Votto’s opposite-field approach isn’t the greatest idea. Well, in a real baseball sense, being 26% better than league average with the stick at second base is working. So maybe he just doesn’t care about your fantasy team.

Verdict: 0-for-3.

4) Shelby Miller will Garret Richards.

I said I wasn’t sure about this one, but this is my first hit. I thought a reasonable plan for Miller would be to ditch the change, tighten up the curve, throw more high four-seamers, and throw more cutters as a third offering. He’s thrown maybe 61 changeups all year, his curveball is more than a mile per hour faster this year, the average height on the four-seamer is the highest of his career, and he tripled his cutter usage this year. He ended up a top-45 pitcher even without the wins, with a 3.02 ERA, 1.25 WHIP, and 171 strikeouts. Garret Richards had a 2.61 ERA and 1.04 WHIP and was a top-20 pitcher in 2014. Uh-oh. Not good enough?

Verdict: 1-for-4 just because I nailed the how.

5) All five Indians starters will be mixed-league relevant — and bargains.

Well isn’t this interesting. Let’s look at the final Fantasy Pros pre-season rankings for the five Indians starters with the most starts, their fantasy stats, and their final Yahoo rank in comparison.

The Indians’ Five in Fantasy

Pitcher	ERA	WHIP	Ks	Wins	March Rank	October Rank
Corey Kluber	3.49	1.05	245	9	6	14
Carlos Carrasco	3.63	1.07	216	14	12	15
Danny Salazar	3.66	1.21	195	14	54	18
Trevor Bauer	4.55	1.31	170	11	150	126
Cody Anderson	3.05	1.11	44	7	161	85
Average	3.68	1.15	174	11	77	52

March Rank: Fantasy Pros Consensus Pre-Season Rank
October Rank: Yahoo End-of-season Rank

Hey look at that average line. On average, the five Indians starters were all bargains! I won’t give myself a hit on this for a whole host of reasons. It looks like Corey Kluber‘s bad fastball hurt him a bit in the final tally, Carlos Carrasco’s helium took him past where he should have been drafted, and Danny Salazar was the only true value. Also, I cheated by putting Cody Anderson in there after I spoke well of T.J. House.

Still, three starters in the top twenty, for one rotation, that’s not bad. Just not what I predicted.

Verdict: 1-for-5. Getting nervous.

6) Xander Bogaerts will be a top-five shortstop.

Heck, if we use ESPN, Bogaerts was the top shortstop in fantasy ball this year. Actually, that’s true in Yahoo, too, if you don’t count Manny Machado as a shortstop. What a putrid year for shortstops, though, if your top guy barely cracked the top 50 overall (Bogaerts was 46th on Yahoo) and didn’t crack 17 homers plus steals. 165 combined runs and RBI did the trick, and though it’s tempting to penalize him for team stats next year, he’s not going anywhere. And that offense, if anything, should get better. Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval can’t be that bad again, can they? A little extra exit velocity late in the year tells me that Bogaerts has some power upside, that and his minor league stats at least, but we’re all going to have to wait for him to add some loft to his swing to look more like your traditional top shortstop.

Verdict: 2-for-6, but somehow still disappointed in Bogaerts’ performance, while excited for the future.

7) Marcell Ozuna will hit 30 home runs.

Ten. He hit ten home runs. You know what’s really going to kill me, though? When he hits 30 home runs in a new park next year.

Verdict: 2-for-7 and what the hell were you thinking.

8) Chase Anderson will be a top-50 pitcher.

There are literally three pages of “not active” zero-stat pitchers before you get to teammates Chase Anderson and Rubby de la Rosa. Do I have to cite stats to defend these guys as better than that? I can’t imagine that there are 900 actual players that are better than Chase Anderson, position or pitching. Since I have to diagnose what when wrong for the future of Chase Anderson, I’ll say that his self-admitted focus on the two-seamer, which only added 3% ground balls and cost him whiffs and strikeouts, was a bad idea. There’s a little bit of something else going on, too, though. He showed an extra tick of gas coming off a disabled list stint, and used the sinker a little less as the season went on, and the curve more. After he came back from that disabled list visit, he had a 4.15 ERA with 8.3 strikeouts per nine, 2.6 walks per nine, 1.1 homers per nine, and a 1.34 WHIP. That’s a little batted ball luck (.321 BABIP) away from actually being relevant next year, 905 Yahoo ranking or no.

Verdict: 2-for-8 and mad.

9) Adam Ottavino or Evan Marshall will be a top-ten closer.

I bet against LaTroy Hawkins and Addison Reed. LaTroy Hawkins and Addison Reed totaled seven saves between the two of them and were summarily jettisoned from their teams. So I win, right? No, I don’t win. And this is part of the problem with going cheap on your bullpen: you have to burn up roster spots and non-zero dollars on guys that don’t have the role yet. I’m sure there are many leagues where an incumbent closer cost just as much as trying to get Ottavino and Marshall on your team. Again with the moral victories: just because Ottavino was set to be a dominant closer this year doesn’t mean I should get credit. Buy three real closers, and then put one last toe in the water with an Ottavino type. Then, if you get lucky, you have a ton of great closers. Don’t buy a full pen of Maybes because these were two really good Maybes that didn’t, and in retrospect, it just seems foolish to have been so sure of myself.

Verdict: 2-for-9 and heading into the time machine to slap February me.

10) Nathan Eovaldi’s splitter will change everything.

Wow. I mean, for so much of the season, it looked like this one would be a bust too. He was throwing the nicer splitter, but it just wasn’t showing. His stats basically looked the same. But then, talking to Brian McCann and the pitcher about it, I realized that they believed in the pitch, but were taking their time. A little fiddling, and suddenly Eovaldi trusted it halfway through the season. He started throwing it nearly 40% of the time, using it to basically hide his 100-mph fastball. Once he started really throwing that splitter, he showed a 3.67 ERA, with eight strikeouts per nine, 3.7 walks per nine, and .3 homers per nine, matching my benchmarks. That’s changing everything, or at least enough of everything to take this as a win, even if it was a little late.

Verdict: 3-for-10 by the skin of my teeth.

Maybe I counted two duck snorts as hits, but at least these were bold, and might actually have been helpful along the way.