Derby Recap + All Star Game Showdown
A daily automated report of what happened yesterday in Major League Baseball, along with other recent trends and further analysis
The derby had a great finish. Jordan Walker looked pretty toast in the final after Schwarber had a great round. But he homered on six straight swings to win the thing in dramatic fashion. It was exciting, especially because Walker was one of my three picks that I took. So it was a good hit for your boy.
The Netflix thing was a disaster, though. I mean if you’re going to make everybody have Netflix to watch the thing, at least make it good. The announcing was so bad, the camera angles were all over the place, they had so much dumb cringey celebrity stuff in there that I guess they thought would be cool?
Putting non sports people in charge of a sport event doesn’t often work, and we saw it last night. Chris Berman’s back back back back back thing was a little bit annoying to people at the time, but you never know what you had until it’s gone. We need the derby back on national TV with a good broadcasting duo or trio that can actually hack it.
They kept switching back and forth to two different broadcasting team. I guess they thought just Barry Bonds being Barry Bonds would work, and he was interesting to listen to but it just didn’t go well with the woman host they had there. The main broadcasting team had somebody, it might have been Rizzo, trying to bring the big yelling energy to it like losing his mind every time somebody hit a ball really far. That can work, but it didn’t work for them. I did not like it, and I felt bad about subjecting my wife to it too. Should’ve just gone back to the Mentalist. But the ending of it did make up for a lot.
Walker looked really impressive. The most impressive thing was the confidence. He looked completely unphased, almost disinterested, and then he went out there and won it in that really unlikely way. That’s a cool dude. These huge dudes have a big advantage in the derby. I remember the one that Aaron Judge won years ago, it looked like a joke to him. I was convinced he would just easily win any derby he was ever in, but I don’t think he ever accepted the invite to another one since then. Probably good because it could’ve been really boring watching him just dominate everybody.
Walker, Judge, those types of guys, they don’t have to swing hard to hit the ball 400 feet. It’s just like a flick of the wrist. They can pay attention to bat control more than others since they don’t have to put the big effort into the swing to generate enough bat speed to get the ball out of there. Awesome stuff from Walker. I have no sympathy for the thousands of Philly fans that went home sad.
And I guess it’s a win for ME over Trevor, who was on Ben Rice who did terribly. Ha Ha Haa!
All Star Game Showdown
My new friends over at Run Pure Sports are very, very into DFS. It’s been great in my few days in their Discord. They’ve even hooked us up with a discount code if you want to sign up for their stuff.
Sign up here with code “PGH25” for 25% off your first payment!
But they got me into the idea of taking the DFS Showdown on DraftKings seriously. So I’m putting together the player pool.
PITCHERS
We can get an edge just by making sure we’re not playing any pitchers who won’t pitch.
For the AL, here’s what I’ve got:
We have Ranger Suarez hurt, and Cam Schlittler coming out recently and saying he won’t pitch in this game to keep on his usual schedule after throwing just three days ago.
Joe Ryan threw 94 pitches on Saturday, so you wonder about his true availability too.
Dylan Cease is the starter, and we feel just fine about the rest of those guys being available to pitch. That makes for 10 definitely available arms.
The ownership will be higher on the SPs, because they’re guaranteed to pitch. But it’s not an advantage for any other reason. It’s been since 2021 since a pitcher threw more than one inning in an All Star Game (Corbin Burnes threw the 2nd and 3rd for the NL team). Most hitters will get 2-3 ABs, and hitters score points more quickly than pitchers do. A perfect inning for pitcher would be 8.25 (1 IP, 0 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 3 K). Plus the win bonus could get somebody into double-digits, but you have no chance of getting 15+ points from a pitcher. So the hitters are more valuable for upside, but you’ll get a bunch of goose eggs from hitters while you probably won’t get any of those from these very good pitchers.
Here’s the NL team:
They have lost a lot of arms already. Skenes, Meyer, Webb, Misiorowski, Burns, Ashcraft, and Yamamoto won’t pitch because of injury or rest. That leaves the NL with ten arms. They’ll probably slice one inning up and let all of these guys get into the game.
So then your pitching pool should be:
Aroldis Chapman
Chris Sale
Bryan Baker
Cristopher Sanchez
Eduardo Rodriguez
Foster Griffin
Cade Smith
Jesus Luzardo
Drew Rasmussen
Dylan Cease
Jhoan Duran
Justin Wrobleski
Jacob Latz
Mason Miller
Joe Ryan
Louis Varland
Raisel Iglesias
Michael Wacha
Nick Martinez
Parker Messick
Riley O’Brien
The Phillies (Duran, Luzardo, Sanchez) are almost guaranteed to pitch being at home. And it makes sense to favor the huge strikeout guys (Mason Miller, the other relievers, etc.) while fading the pitch-to-contact guys (namely E-Rod and Wacha).
Hitters
The starters are going to be massively owned, because they have the check mark in the app and they’re guaranteed to get an AB, and probably 2-3 ABs overall. But the backups aren’t at a huge disadvantage.
Last year, both managers played it pretty clean. They’d just replace each guy with the guy coming into the same position. So Gleyber Torres led off and played 2B for the AL, got 2 ABs, and then Chisholm came in and finished the game as the other 2B.
You could then really break this down by each player’s position and see which spots the all star teams only have two guys at.
I don’t see anything glaring here. A lot of the guys on the rosters can play multiple infield positions, so there aren’t any situations where one guy is going to have play all nine innings cause he’s the only one at that position. There are three catchers and 3-4 first basemen on very team, but again - one or two of those 1B can also move over to 3B (Sal Stewart, Murakami).
The Plan
I’ll give you a data sheet to mess with, but I doubt many of you are out there grinding this Showdown. I probably shouldn’t be, either, but what else is a guy to do? In there you’ll find the pitcher availability that I showed above as well a breakdown of the hitters if they’re starting or not and what positions they are likely to play.
Clearly the play to try to take the top spot in a tourney is to go more after the reserve hitters. The starters will be way higher owned. So for the captain spot, it makes sense to use only reserve hitters. A seventh inning home run hitter is very likely to be the top scoring player.
I’d probably fade the starting SPs (Sanchez, Cease) entirely just because they’re going to get ownership and end up with 5-10 points at best. They won’t throw in the second inning, and the ownership just won’t be worth their actual upside.
The approach is just to spam in a bunch of lineups leaning heavily on the backup hitters. My favorite pitchers will probably be Luzardo and Duran as the hometown Phillies who are almost surely going to pitch (but not as a starter to get the big ownership), and the big-name relievers like Mason Miller who are pretty much a lock for a strikeout or two or three.
We’ll see how it comes together. I’ll probably end up throwing in 150 lineups somewhere with this approach and see how it goes.