Daily Notes: February 27th
Starting Pitcher Standouts!
All eyes are on starting pitchers early in the baseball season. They’re the quickest to tell us that they’ve improved. It takes several weeks to figure out if a hitter is really a different guy, but with pitchers, the signs show up in just a few outings.
So we always focus closely on SPs in the first couple of weeks during the daily notes. And that’s mainly what we’re looking for in spring training as well. Here are some of the most interesting performances of this first week of spring.
Ryan Weathers
We shouldn’t be surprised that Weathers got the pitch modeling bros all hot and bothered on Wednesday. He has that kind of wicked stuff when he’s healthy. He also has the advantage of being left-handed. There aren’t too many left-handed starting pitchers with 98+ in the bag.
Weathers came out ripping in his spring debut with a bunch of red everywhere on five different pitches.
And he threw 49 pitches. The Yankees like him as a starter, and we’ll certainly see him in this rotation at the beginning of the year. We’re singing the same tune as last year. This isn’t new. The issue with Weathers really hasn’t been ability as much as injury, but to me that’s even more reason to take some shots on the dude this year. What if he stays healthy? Can somebody with this type of stuff not smash?
I’d buy the crap out of him right now and just hope for the best. The cost isn’t something you can’t flush and clean out with a waiver dude. This is exactly the kind of guy we’re looking to draft after pick 250. All profit - and potentially HUGE profit.
Mick Abel
Abel went pretty hard in his spring debut. He racked up 12 whiffs with a sick 39% CSW%, a 26.1% Swstr%, and a 37% Ball%
He threw six different pitches, which is maybe the most interesting thing. The fastball was awesome, and that’s nothing new. In the Twins preview, we picked out Abel as a potential breakout because of that good fastball.
We’re not going to pretend to have learned anything real from NINE curveballs thrown or eight changeups, especially in spring. Abel is interesting for fantasy leagues this year not because of this spring start, but because of the Pablo Lopez injury. With any sort of decent showing in spring, Abel will be in the Twins rotation, and that makes him someone to know for your fantasy league drafts. I would definitely put him in that category of guys to consider in the final rounds of your draft just to “see what happens”. He has enough upside to justify that, for sure.
Shota Imanaga
His fastball velo was up in his first spring training appearance. And they say the SHAPE was improved as well.
This is potentially big news.
I did find out the other day that spring velocity gains aren’t super sticky. It’s basically a 50/50 shot about if the SP will maintain their increased velocity. But that percentage does come up when you’re talking about huge gains like this (+2.2mph in this case, albeit on just one outing). If we see Imanaga ripping off 93 again the next couple of spring outings, I’d be moving him up the board a little bit. A 93mph is significantly different than a 90mph thing, and we already liked him a bit for THE WHIP STRAT.
Chase Burns
Burns now leads the spring leaderboard in whiffs with 14 in his start on Thursday.
There are no questions about Burns ability. He’s going to post a crazy high strikeout rate this year. The stuff is among the best in the game. Tim has been making the point during our podcasts that way more people would have been heavily on Burns if not for being overshadowed in recent years by Paul Skenes. And I think that’s right. People are catching on now, but the general public still doesn’t quite seem to understand how good this guy is.
He did have the scary arm strain stuff going on last year, so I wouldn’t go 100% exposure to the guy, but if you’re looking for SP1 upside pitchers that you don’t have to pay an SP1 price to get, Burns would probably be #1 on that list.
New Pitches
Garrett Crochet threw a splitter! Just one, but a splitter!
I wouldn’t count on that sticking around, but man, imagine a top three pitcher in the league ADDING a splitter. Sickness.
Sandy Alcantara threw a sweeper. The pitch classification model did separate it from his slider, so it would seem that it’s a new pitch.
We saw a sinker and a cutter from Roki Sasaki.
He was only four-seamers, splitters, and sliders last year.
Jack Leiter may have added a cutter. You never know for sure since the classification stuff can be confused sometimes. Last year, we had him with a four-seamer, slider, changeup, sinker, and curveball. Here’s his spring start:
Leiter’s issue is mostly command, and introducing a cutter won’t necessarily help that. But it’s always interesting to see a dude throwing three different fastball variations. I’ve always been a fan of that. So keep an eye on Leiter’s pitch mix.
Logan Henderson definitely has a new curveball. This is not a modeling mistake.
It was just one curveball! So we have to watch that. There’s a good chance it just won’t be good enough to take to the regular season. But this is a young pitcher who really needs another pitch or two. He was 47% four-seamers and 40% changeups last year, and his fastball isn’t anything all that special (it’s good, but at 93mph there’s only so far it can take him). So a curveball addition would be nice.
A new sweeper from Cade Povich took his pitch mix depth to seven different pitches in his spring debut.
Last year, he was FF (38%), CU (22%), CH (16%), SI (12%), ST (11%), FC (1%). This probably isn’t anything different, and the depth of his pitch mix hasn’t been the issue anyways. But he’s a free start with more upside than I think we give him credit for. So he’s someone I’m watching. He could be a nice streamer in good ballpark against teams who struggle against lefties.
Speaking of the O’s, Chayce McDermott averaged 96.3mph on 15 four-seamers in his spring outing. That was up from 94.3 last year. A huge increase, and something to watch! He was putting up some massive strikeout rates in the minors before last year when he dropped to 23% with a disastrous 16.5% BB%.
So he’s probably not going to be a thing, but that’s a huge velo bump, and crazier things have happened.
We got our first look at Tatsuya Imai yesterday:
So a 93.3mph sinker, a splitter, and a slider. It looks like he’ll be sinkers + splitters only to lefties. He didn’t get a single whiff on his splitter, so he’s totally cooked obviously.
That’s a joke! I think the dude can be fine. My take on him (which is mosty guesswork, I’ll admit) was that his upside was like an MLB SP3, which puts him at like SP5/SP6 in a 12-team fantasy league. Definitely worth knowing and drafting in most leagues, but I don’t think the dude has much upside. This is not a potential Yamamoto situation.
But I’m wrong all the time. Talk to you next time!