Archive for bold

I have a spiel I recycle each time I make bold predictions. It goes something like this: bold predictions should be bold but actionable. They should be founded primarily in logic with a little bit of wish-casting. A bold prediction made blindly is worth nothing. It’s all about the process.

Often my success with bold predictions is indicative of my success during the season. I am mostly in keeper/dynasty leagues, and my indifference to fantasy baseball the previous two years proved costly. Still, I had my best season since 2021 and turned a positive return on investment. It’s hard to ask for much more than a positive ROI, except for an even bigger one.

So, let’s see how I did here. I use Razzball Player Rater (12-team) values as my primary source of dollar values because it’s widely known, but I actually prefer my Pitch Leaderboard values (also 12-team; subscriber only). To me the scaling is more realistic and reflective of actual roster construction. To be clear, though, the difference is primarily the scale. Ryan O’Hearn, for example, despite being worth $7 according to my model, is the 131st-best hitter; for Razzball, at $2, he’s 137th-best.

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One bold prediction for each position, in order (except there’s two each for outfield and starting pitcher). No preamble. Just go.

1) Jake Rogers is a top-12 catcher.

Rogers does not boast an especially unique skillset among catchers: he hits for power and not much else. To Rogers’ credit, however, he hits for a lot of power, definitely for catchers and even relative to non-catchers, too. With his strong pulled fly ball tendencies his path to 20-plus home runs is relatively frictionless.

Carson Kelly, a former 2nd-rounder and top-100 prospect, watched his blue-chip prospectdom expire long ago. Aside from breaking out during 2019’s juiced-ball season and a decent showing in 2021 he has unquestionably disappointed. He figures to fulfill the shallow side of a possible platoon with Rogers, one that would net him the usual one-fourth of the available plate appearances. That leaves perhaps 450 PAs, rather than the 360 PAs he’s projected for and that he accumulated last year, to push Rogers over the top as a catching option.

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When I first started writing eight years ago, it felt necessary to provide a garrulous prologue about bold predictions, their meanings, the ethos behind the endeavor, et cetera, et cetera. Years went on, and that prologue grew leaner and leaner until we reached last year’s respectfully concise quip:

No prologue, just bold predictions. Bold, but not stupidly bold, and actionable in a way that can tangibly affect your fantasy season (for better or worse). Let’s go.

That still applies here, but I do want to say something: I am disappointed that I don’t have this year’s ________. Last year, it was Steven Kwan; the year before, Josh Rojas; before him, Jake Cronenworth; Jeff McNeil; José Ramírez; the hits keep on coming. No one stands out to me that way this year. That makes me sad. Disappointed, too, especially in myself. It’s not for lack of talent. It’s for lack of my time. I wish I had more time to immerse myself in the depths of the minor leagues.

I could probably rattle off a name or two that have a similar chance as those aforementioned. But it wouldn’t carry the same conviction. And conviction is the name of the game. So, sadly, there is no This Year’s Steven Kwan for 2023. I expect to remedy this issue next year. Please forgive me in the meantime.

OK, housekeeping’s complete. Let’s get into it, for realsies. (Note: the order here does not indicate preference or confidence. I randomized it!) Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the original post. No dilly-dallying, let’s dive in.

1) Steven Kwan is a top-30 outfielder.

Kwan walk more than he stuck out, and while he only hit six home runs, he stole 19 bases and slashed .298/.373/.400 (124 wRC+). Only five qualified hitters had a better strikeout-to-walk ratio (K/BB), and only Luis Arraez had a lower swinging strike rate (SwStr%). Ultimately, Kwan finished the season 19th among outfielders on Razzball’s Player Rater. The haters will point to volume (he accumulated 622 plate appearances) but Kwan finished 20th among qualified outfielders on a per-game basis—that is, ignoring volume.

You may remember Kwan started the season scorching hot, then predictably fell back to earth, which entailed a somewhat grueling slump. Da Haters pointed to this slump as an indication of Kwan’s lack of viability as a Major Leaguer rather than simple gravity. The slump actually cost Kwan some starting time—he could’ve notched 700 PA if the Guardians didn’t lose faith in him in May, like everyone else did—but he rebounded by showcasing his tools. More excitingly, his counting stats increased as the season wore on, and he compiled three home runs, seven steals, and a .309 average in September alone.

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No prologue, just bold predictions. Bold, but not stupidly bold, and actionable in a way that can tangibly affect your fantasy season (for better or worse). Let’s go.

1) Steven Kwan is a top-30 outfielder.

The marquee peripheral prospect hitter for 2021, Kwan comes from a long line of peripheral prospects who boast elite contact skills (José Ramírez, Jeff McNeil, Jake Cronenworth, Josh Rojas) and a smattering of other fantasy-relevant skills, be it a little bit of power, speed, or both. Kwan looked David Fletcheresque, hitting only three home runs in his first 600ish professional plate appearances, but boasting the minor leagues’ best plate skills, bar none.
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It’s cliché to say “you know the drill,” but you do! You do, indeed, know the drill! The one thing about bold predictions that gets me up on my soapbox every year is what it means to be bold. There’s bold for shock value, bold to be bold. (Or, not bold enough—its own problem.) And then there’s sufficiently bold (per market sentiments) but readily achievable.

Much of this is qualitative, so “sufficiently bold” and “readily achievable” are eye-of-the-beholder types of descriptors. But we can at least measure sufficient boldness using average draft position (ADP) data. All fantasy baseball websites use them; I use National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) data because it involves high-stakes players. (Let it be known that high-stakes does not always equal high-talent, but that’s altogether another soapbox.) Moreover, we can filter NBFC ADP by date range, so I can leverage ADP specifically from the final week of spring training by which time ambiguous spring training storylines have solidified.

I’m proud of my success this year. I hope a few of these picks were worthwhile for you, if you happened to heed them exclusively because of this post. That’d be quite brave of you!

(“Year-end rank” courtesy of Razzball’s player rater.)

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Ah, yes — that time of year already. If I had more time recently (which I hadn’t) and if I were more consideration (which I’m not), I would have published these bold predictions sooner so you, the reader, could act decisively on them in drafts as you saw fit. But, alas — draft season is over. I gotta squeak in these predictions before or, uh, on Opening Day.

I say something like this every year: a bold prediction is worthless if it is either too bold or not bold enough. In my opinion, the perfect bold prediction is very bold but also achievable. Often it is bold because it features someone who is, to some extent, an afterthought in fantasy drafts, and often it is achievable because of (what I perceive to be) a gross market inefficiency.

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At this point, when it comes to bold predictions, you should know the drill. Yet it feels increasingly cliché to lead with, “you know the drill.” Nevertheless: you know the drill. We make bold predictions before the season and we review them after the season.

One thing I make a point of highlighting I try to make my predictions sufficiently bold while also actionable. “David Fletcher will hit 50 home runs” is a certifiably insane prediction, but it is not actionable because what do you do with this information? You over-draft him, sure, but by how much?

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These hallowed pages have borne (bore? beared? how am I even a writer?) witness to many bold predictions — some good, most bad. Last year’s hits and near-hits include Kirby Yates, Jeff McNeil, Mike Tauchman, and Domingo German; previous hits include Jose Ramirez, Madison Bumgarner (not being an ace), Matt Chapman, and Miles Mikolas, among others, as well as other near-hits not worth repeating.

Sometimes, bold predictions aren’t entirely so. I try to make my predictions legitimately bold (bordering on impossible), actionable, and strategic. It’s not helpful for someone to boldly predict Giancarlo Stanton will hit 25 homers in a 60-game season, however fun a prediction that may be.

It’s (less than) half a season, so you get half the predictions, although I’ll include some less-bold low-hanging fruit at the end, for posterity.

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If only my fantasy teams performed half as well as my bold predictions this year.

Not that I had an entirely awful season in 2019. I entered my first two National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) Online Championship leagues (12 teams, 30 rounds, standard 5-by-5 rotisserie categories) and won one of them. (I came last in the other.) I won a second league (a 12-team auction) and had good but futile runs in several others. Still, 2019 felt like a bit of a letdown.

So, again: at least I have my bold predictions to fall back on. Over the years, I find I’ve become increasingly adept at late-round draft strategy (while becoming increasingly inept at early-round strategy, or something like that). My bold predictions are honest assessments of guys I love. Moreover, I intend for them to be actionable; that is, Ronald Acuña Jr. goes 40/40 would have been an extremely impressive prediction, but he was already a 1st rounder. How much does that move the needle?

As in past years, I have forgotten half my predictions, so I’ll be just as curious to find out what they were as I will be to find out if they’ve succeeded. Let’s dig in.

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