The New Fantasy Baseball: Anybody Can Be Anything

Once upon a time, we basically knew who everybody was prior to the season. Sure, that’s not a foolproof statement. Pitchers are always inconsistent. Some hitters decline due to age or injury. Others rebound due to a dead cat bounce or better health. Rookies are random number generators. But the point stands – players mostly played within the confidence intervals of their projections.

We’d talk about finding the Ben Zobrist or the Jose Bautista as your big opportunity on the waiver wire. You basically had a couple chances at rostering a waiver wire savior – plus some of those random rookies. In recent years, supply has increased. The 2017 campaign featured more free studs than I care to list. We had a new toy every week.

Dave Cameron basically already wrote this article over on the main blog. If Charlie Morton can transform from mashable sinkerballer to a borderline ace, any journeyman pitcher could suddenly see the light. Then again, it’s not that crazy for a few pitchers to spontaneously improve each season. Morton’s just a little unusual due to his age and long career. Without doing any statistical analysis, this felt like a normal year for pitcher breakouts.

The hitter breakouts are where things got a little crazy. Chris Taylor, Yonder Alonso, Logan Morrison, Justin Smoak, Ryan Zimmerman, Marwin Gonzalez, Tommy Pham, Zack Cozart, Avisail Garcia, and Tim Beckham all turned in surprisingly valuable seasons. And that’s just scraping the tip of the iceberg (I already said I don’t care to list them all). With the possible exceptions of Cozart and Zimmerman, these guys weren’t drafted.

When undrafted players comprise a huge proportion of the top 100 hitters, you know something weird is happening. We called it the Fly Ball Revolution featuring Juiced Ball. Conditions for home runs blossomed. We have this ball with reduced drag which means it flies farther and possibly breaks less.

Hitters like Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner have turned into superstars by hitting more fly balls. Now they’re proselytizing. J.D. Martinez used an outside consultant to reinvent his swing. So too did Taylor. More fringy players like Taylor and Turner are going to try reinventing themselves. It’ll work for a bunch of them too.

Pitchers have been slow to adapt to this new trend largely because they’re constrained by their own strengths. For my entire life, everybody has talked about the importance of the lower edge of the strike zone. That’s where you get ground balls, and those are almost never extra base hits. Ground balls are good. Except, now low pitches are being converted into fly balls at unprecedented rates.

Fly ball hitters love low pitches. The problem is, teams have invested a couple decades into teaching everybody to throw sinkers and work down in the zone. Take a journey over the Brooks Baseball. Pick a starting pitcher at random. Unless you selected a rare, elite sinker specialist like Dallas Keuchel, your guy’s worst pitch is probably his sinker or two-seamer.

At least half of all starters with a sinker/two-seamer should almost never throw the pitch. Morton reinvented himself by moving away from his signature sinker. The fly ball revolution won’t lose steam until pitchers stop consistently using crappy low pitches.

High pitches can be a problem for these low ball mashers which is why we’ve had the emergence of Rich Hill, Dan Straily, Drew Pomeranz, and a few others. They’re doing things differently. More nobodies will become somebodies by working high in the zone and messing with spin.

There’s a lesson here, and I cleverly hid it in the title – anybody can be anything. Morton brushes 100 mph with his fastball, a reminder that velocity can suddenly surge. Oh look! Alex Wood is waving hello. A gain in velocity can just as quickly become a loss of velocity. Execrable hitters with dubious upside can turn into top fantasy stars. And if a Taylor can find the promised land, you better believe a mutant athlete like Byron Buxton can solve for X too.

We’re living in a brave new world for fantasy owners, one where it’s increasingly important to execute a draft plan and dominate the waiver wire. The most active owners have always been the likeliest to win. Their advantage has only increased in recent years.