3/3 Spring Training News & Analysis
Quinn Mathews goes down, Max Scherzer comes up, and a few more spring storylines analyzed for fantasy baseball draft season.
Until five years ago I lived the young professional big city life. I worked downtown Pittsburgh in a normal corporate office environment. One of the flags I planted in that life was to be anti-weather talk. I have never liked small talk. I prefer to cut right to the chase. Get right down to business. It’s Monday morning and we’re at the coffee machine - what are your views on politics and religion?
Instead, it was always just talk about the weather and what the Steelers were doing.
But as I get older, I find myself bringing up the weather more and more. So I am really trying to fight that.
Thank God January and February are over, though. Every month and every day is a gift, and I think I’m in the 90th percentile or higher in contentment. But man, those two months are terrible.
Happy March!
The sale is over; we’re back to $12/month and $99/year. I understand that it’s a little heavy for the casual player who restricts their fantasy baseball play to one or two leagues that cost $20 or so. Why pay me five times the league fee to help you win it?
If this Substack were just my notes and thoughts and analysis, I’d probably keep it to $6 a month or something. But the presence of the dashboards, the daily projections, and all of the stuff that flows from that make this $12/month price way under market. You’re paying a ton more than that for quality daily projections, and that’s just one little thing I do here.
So it’s a tough needle to thread. I can promise the price won’t be going up any more in 2025, and we’ll probably do some kind of midseason sale.
That $59/year sale brought in a bunch more people, so thank you, and welcome to all of you new paid subscribers!
Like I mentioned last week, there are going to be major additions to the content this year. I’ve been learning how to make Python web applications lately, and that has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. I also have Tim Kanak (@fantasyaceball on X) joining in. He’s given me the go-ahead to use his fScores and publish out his top 150 prospect ranks. That will come soon.
And there will be daily Projection Powered Prop Picks (PPPP) during the season. From myself and at least one other writer.
Very little will be completely free, but I’m doing everything I can possibly imagine to make your money go a long way without neglecting my real job and family too much.
Weekend Developments
I could almost start calling these posts the daily notes, but I won’t. If you are totally new here, you should know about the daily notes! That’s the post that started this whole freaking thing! Every morning, I run a script that gives me an automated report of what happened the previous day in the fantasy baseball world. It also looks back a few weeks to find standouts and trends and whatnot. I also spend whatever time I have each morning writing up in detail the things that stuck out most to me.
Here’s a sample from last year so you can see what we’re talking about.
There are only so many hours in the day, so I have to restrict myself each time. I typically just sit down and let my fingers go to work. There are many typos, and often times, I’ll say something that isn’t the whole way thought through. But I did buy a Grammarly subscription. Most of the time it’s more annoying than helpful because it just yells at me for stuff I think is acceptable. But it does help me avoid some major blunders.
You can’t always have quantity and quality at the same time. But I’m going to open up the flow here and give you some thoughts from what happened over the weekend.
Quinn Mathews Reassigned
The Cardinals second best starting pitcher will be starting the year in the minors. I was surprised at how early they made that move, there is still a long way to go in camp. But clearly the Cardinals are wanting to save the year of control on him.
This certainly knocks him down a little bit in the ranks, but I was never drafting him with much hope he’d be in the rotation in April anyways. He’s still an excellent draft target in leagues where you have a minor league spot or just a super deep bench where you can afford to the zeroes for the first 4-5 weeks. It will not be long before he’s in the Major League rotation, and he’s clearly very good.
Max Scherzer is Healthy
Mad Max has made two spring appearances now and has thrown 34 and 47 pitches. He has eight strikeouts and no walks with a 17.3% SwStr%. It is hard to imagine him throwing 170+ innings this year, but his L7 ADP is 304.
If you can actually bag Scherzer after pick 250 in a league where you have IL slots, I’d be doing that 100% of the time. This price (along with the IL slots) takes away all of the risk. He is still a very good pitcher (16.0% SwStr%, 31.2% Ball% last year). If we’re ranking SPs just for that first week of the fantasy season, the guy is probably a top 25 arm. The longevity is a completely different question, but there are league types where Scherzer is a total steal.
Twins Rotation Update
No matter how many times you tell yourself SPRING DOESN’T MATTER, in your brain there is still a compartment
Zebby Matthews:
71 pitches, 41% K%, 0% BB%, 14.1% SwStr%, 33.8% Ball%
David Festa:
93 pitches, 35% K%, 5% BB%, 17.2% Swstr%, 32.3% Ball%
Chris Paddack
51 pitches, 8% K%, 0% BB%, 9.8% SwStr%, 29.4% Ball%
Simeon Woods Richardson
72 pitches, 18% K%, 12% BB%, 8.3% SwStr%, 41.7% Ball%
Throw out the stats for a minute. Go back three weeks. I have no idea how the Twins front office was looking at these four names and not realizing that Matthews and Festa are clearly the two best pitchers.
And then you watch them on the mound and look at the numbers they’re generating, and it makes it so clear. The Twins’ five best starting pitchers are clearly:
Joe Ryan
Pablo Lopez
Bailey Ober
David Festa
Zebby Matthews
That does not mean that will be the Opening Day rotation. Paddack seems locked into a starting job (and he’s said he wants to make 35 starts this year which is hilarious), so at least one of these guys (barring injuries) will start the year in AAA. But I still want to draft them both. They’re both so good.
The Forgotten Nick Nastrini
This is for super deep leagues. Nastrini was one of my favorites to draft super late last year. And that ended up hilariously poorly.
MLB: 8 GS, 36 IP, 14.9% K%, 20.7% BB%, 7.07 ERA, 1.91 WHIP
AAA: 18 GS, 85 IP, 25% K%, 13.3% BB%, 5.29 ERA, 1.59 WHIP
That should probably be enough to make me not write this section. But look at 2023:
25 GS, 115 IP, 27.9% K%, 10.8% BB%
That’s pretty good stuff. He’s come into the spring with more velocity, and he’s throwing strikes.
I think the ceiling for 2025 is a streaming option in good matchups, but that evaluation is miles ahead of where he’s being drafted, which is nowhere. I have 307 drafts logged in the NFBC ADP Dashboard (50s and Draft Champions drafts). Nastrini has been selected in ONE of those (at pick 682).
Do not draft him, and it’s perfectly fine to forget about him entirely - but if he breaks out this year, please remember I wrote this and give me a ton of credit and money for the call.
Brady Singer’s Cutter
In case you hibernated through the winter, Brady Singer is on the Reds now. He is throwing a new cutter. Although, he’s all of 3% usage so far this spring.
He is a very logical cutter candidate as a pitcher with a good slider and a ground ball sinker. The thing that has always kept him away from being very good is the lack of a good fastball. His four-seamer last year put up just a 6.9% SwStr% and got bombed (.443 xwOBA). Anything he can do to earn a few more strikes with a fastball would be beneficial, so it’s very interesting to see the cutter coming into play.
We’re Doing the Casey Mize Thing Again
If you read the notes last year, you know I’m a big-time Casey Mize hater. And it’s not even his fault. The guy is a bad pitcher, and he’s never hinted that he’s anything other than that. But he did trick the iVB bros. He has one of those fastballs that looks good by the pitch models but doesn’t actually work that well, and the rest of his arsenal is brutal.
But hey, he’s got increased velocity on the four-seamer this spring and a very early 13.2% SwStr%. I don’t expect anything, but he is a guy with a potentially good fastball at a price after pick 450. Maybe the pitch mod bro’s will get some redemption and Mize will have a decent year. There’s nowhere to go but up!
He teaches us a good lesson about the advanced data. Just because something is new and fancy and uses a lot of data and processing power doesn’t mean it tells you anything useful.
Shane Baz Hits 100
I have been a Baz hater this year. That’s because I see two problems
The injury history
He wasn’t a good pitcher last year
He finally got healthy for a season last year, but then all of the enticing numbers that made us like him so much went away.
He hit 100.6 miles per hour with a fastball yesterday. That is interesting because his max on the four-seamer last year was 99.2.
You know what, I don’t even believe that happened. His next highest velo of the spring on the fours-eamer is 97.4.
Am I really to believe that he just one time cranked up three miles per hour on a fastball? Is that more likely than the idea that a spring training ballpark’s radar gun might have been on the fritz? I don’t think so!
Some people say the earth is flat, some say that vaccines cause autism, but you know what - I’m saying the triple-digit Baz is fake news. And I’m fading him in drafts even harder now.
Junior Caminero Double Dingus
I have a lot of different terms for a home run, and you’ll see all of those throughout the year in the daily notes.
Caminero went yard twice yesterday, and he’s been doing a lot of that this winter. He played in winter ball and was crushing homers left and right. Even without the exhibition game homers, he was going to be a guy who gets bumped way up the draft board because of the power ceiling he possesses.
I’m not super opposed to it, to be honest. I’m on the train, but the price is trending towards being a top-five round pick. He has surpassed Jordan Westburg in ADP since February 1st.
I don’t think he’ll be a guy to wreck your team, but you could quite likely be dealing with a guy who is just “fine” in reality this year, and taking him inside the top 80 would be an overpay if that happens.
I view Caminero pretty similarly to how I view Jake Burger. The difference is upside. I could see Caminero being a .290 hitter with 40 bombs, while I don’t think Burger has that kind of batting average upside.
But the median projections on them are pretty similar. They’ll both be pluses in homers and probably RBI without hurting your team’s batting average. And you’re getting Burger 4-5 rounds later than Caminero.
And look at the freaking time! It’s 10:10am and I did not expect this to go past 9:30. We’re fully back, baby! I will talk to you next time.