MLB Daily Notes - July 8
A daily automated report of what happened yesterday in Major League Baseball, along with other recent trends and further analysis
Check out yesterday’s box scores here
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It’s easy to start with a Pirate today. Ryan O’Hearn hit three homers. A grand slam and two three-run jobs. That was ten RBI. Just the 17th time in baseball history that’s happened.
Truly a wild thing to happen. It’s probably super rare to even have the possibility to drive in that many runs. To do something like this, a lot of stuff is out of your control. You have to come up three times with multiple men on base.
O’Hearn’s had a very good year for the Bucs. Their offseason moves have been impressive.
The guy really struggled through his Royals days, and then had a late-career breakout with the Orioles a few years ago. At age 29, he had his first .800+ OPS season. And he had a very good showing with them last year before being moved to the Padres.
But this year has been his best work at age 32. Knocking on the door of that career high in homers he set last year, just one away from that after hitting three last night.
So that was pretty fun for us hopeless Pirate fans.
AJ Ewing is really developing. Big game for him and the Mets offense last night. Hilariously, 12 runs wasn’t enough to win, they still lost by four.
Nice little outing there from some dude named Seelinger. Three different pitchers giving up 4+ ER! The Mets, man!
But they have a nice outfield now. Ewing and Benge seem to have bright futures alongside Juan Soto in that outfield.
Ewing is probably the more interesting prospect for fantasy than Benge, although they both look quite good. Ewing has the better skills, you could say. YOU COULD SAY IT. That expression is dumb, but I use it all of the time. Of course YOU COULD SAY it. You COULD say anything. It’s America!!!!!!!!!
Ewing now has nine steals in like a third of a season’s worth of PAs. And he has power. 110.5 max EV this year, 7.9% Brl%, 104.2 EV90. It’s not like elite power by any means, but it’s definitely enough for this guy to go 20-homers, 30-steals pretty soon, and the power could develop into a 30-30 type guy.
The big league fScores:
The K% for Ewing is at 25%. But we like to forgive the first 100 PAs here while these young guys get their feet wet. Ewing has 200 PAs, so that’s easy to divide by two! Ewing’s last 100 PAs:
→ .292/.376/.528, 19% K%, 11% BB%, 8.6% Brl%, .268 xBA, .355 xwOBA
He’s a must-own! He’s found his way into the lead off spot for the Mets. He’s done that three times as they’ve moved Lindor back to clean-up in some spots. Jorge Polanco is back, so we’ll see how they handle this. But their top preferred top six looks like Soto, Lindor, Benge, Bichette, Ewing, Polanco.
Once/if Lindor gets going and if Ewing and Benge continue to develop and do what they’ve been doing for the last month or so, the Mets lineup will be very tough.
How about Tyler Tolbert? This guy just had back-to-back five-hit games. That’s another thing that I doubt has happened more than a couple handfuls of times. And Tolbert added a 2/2 game on July 4th. So he has 12 hits in his last 13 ABs with a double and two homers.
This is a 28-year-old, so that’s a red flag. But his MLB stats are awesome going back to last year:
→ 94 G, .337/.376/.459, .853 OPS, 19% K%, 4.5% BB%, 3 HR, 30 SB
Take out his last three games and the OPS drops to .608. So this was unexpected, YOU COULD SAY.
The next thing we wonder is what his minor league performance has looked like. Going back to last year:
→ 201 PA, .263/.350/.357, .707 OPS, 3 HR, 19 SB
Lots of steals, but not much else. The Royals have a lot of these speedy outfielders who can steal bags but not do much hitting.
Tolbet has a max EV of 106..8 in his 54 PAs with a .326 xwOBA. His contact rate isn’t great (86.5% in zone) and his bat speed is well below the league average.
So this is probably just total randomness. You have to be a certain level of athlete to have 12 hits in the Majors, but Tolbert isn’t likely to do anything else useful for fantasy league the rest of the year.
That’s the game we’re talking about. There are thousands of events on any given day. If you flip a coin a million times, somewhere in there you’ll find ten heads in a row. It doesn’t mean anything.
Not to poo-poo Tolbert's week. I mean he’s done something very few others have been able to do, but I’m trying to give you fantasy advice here. Do not start thinking this is a breakout Royals prospect stud.
Luis Lara and Cooper Pratt helped the Brewers beat the Cardinals twice yesterday. Lara hit #2 in the second game and had a hit and a walk.
But Pratt had the big day. A double, a triple, four runs, two RBI, and three walks in those two games. He has a very high .296 xBA this year now in 73 PAs. But a .265 BABIP has the batting average down at .217.
Some bad luck there. He’s patient at the plate (42% Swing%) and that has him with a 15% BB%. Both of these guys look pretty similar. They’re fast, they don’t strike out much, and they like to wait for their pitch and are happy to take a walk.
Jordan Walker ding-donged one off of Misiorowski in a three-hit day. He joins the list of nine hitters who have managed a homer against Misiorowski.
You can see hitter stats by the pitcher they faced on the main dashboard like this:
You can even filter to pitch velo or pitch type and various other things. I do not understand how Tableau can handle this much data, but it’s amazing, and my dashboard SMACKS.
There will be more and more baseball dashboards hitting the market. It’s all very easy to figure out now with AI. I doubt anybody else uses Tableau, which might be for the better, I don’t know.
I can’t even claim I’m the MLB Tableau guy. I copied the idea from Alex Chamberlain a few years ago. But mine is the best, for now. And I refresh it every morning. Anyways, only five hitters have homered off of a Misiorowski fastball this year:
Ivan Herrera
Sal Stewart
Yandy Diaz
Chase Meidroth (first pitch of the year!)
Andres Gimenez
It’s real tough to hit homers with high velo. Here’s a plot of HR/Pitch by velo:
After you get above 97, you’re basically not giving up homers.
Justin Foscue is playing for the Rangers with all of the injuries they’ve had. He’s hitting .284/.355/.537 now with six homers in 41 games.
Foscue is 27. He hit .287/.407/.426 in the minors (30 games). He now has an 86% Zone-Contact% with a .273 xBA and a .369 xwOBA. The EVs are pretty good (104. EV90, 105.5 EV90 on fly balls, 111 max). The Rangers might have something decent with Foscue, and he could be a deep league add right now if you’re searching.
Pitchers
Taj Bradley had 25 (!) whiffs. A 10:0 K:BB.
→ 7.0IP 3H 1ER 1R 10K 0BB
That was against the Guardians, who are a very bad offense. Bradley’s breakout season has maintained. The Twins did a nice job with him. He has an 18% K-BB% now with a 12.8% SwStr%. So the K% seems a little too high to believe in (28%), but he’s good!
The fastball is questionable, but not bad enough to have made my pitchers with bad fastballs post yesterday.
Tarik Skubal - 5.0IP 5H 1ER 1R 9K 2BB
If you wanna get picky you could complain about him only getting through five innings here. It took him 96 pitches to get those 15 outs, which isn’t great. But a 9:2 K:BB and 22 whiffs. Skubal looks back to normal. EXCEPT his fastball velo kinda came down:
But it’s actually be up on average from after the IL compared to before. So it seems the Skubal first-round drafters dodged a bullet with that injury.
The micro needle is the real MVP. I’m wondering if they can microneedle Konnor Griffin’s broken tendon in his finger? I know that doesn’t make any sense at all, but I mean it’s worth a try, right? Just jab him with that micro needle in the finger and see if it helps.
Zack Wheeler - 7.0IP 4H 1ER 1R 14K 0BB
There’s a lot of grumpy pitchers out there these days. Cam Schlittler was all mad about the math nerds saying he was regressing and he struck out a bajillion Rays. And Wheeler was mad about not making the All star team and he went out and struck out 14 Reds. 20 whiffs to give him back-to-back 20+ whiff starts. He has 24 strikeouts in his last two, looking fully back to Cy Young caliber. I didn’t see that coming this year.
But I thought this guy was kinda cool. He was already planning his retirement out and doing that the right way (in my opinion). He didn’t wanna be a Verlander/Scherzer who finishes their MLB career with a few terrible years to put a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. And then he had this surgery that basically ended Stephen Strasburg’s career, but he’s back to being a mega-ace.
But now he’s ruining it by being whiney about the All Star team. You’re 36, shouldn’t you be over the All Star thing? And you’ve only made 14 starts! He missed the first month of the season, which is like a third of the first half. Is it really that crazy that somebody who is five starts behind the league leader wouldn’t be in the All Star game? Doesn’t sound crazy to me. Obviously he’s a top five pitcher in the game and it wouldn’t be crazy at all to put him in there, but it’s just not a huge snub in my book.
But thanks to him for last night because I played in DFS cash and absolutely crushed with the lineup.
I mean I’m ripping hot in DFS. The projections are so good. And 50% of people didn’t play him!?
Look at that lineup! Am I the greatest DFS player in the history of the world? My career performance would say NO. I’d be below $0 in profit if not for that one $50,000 lineup. But I’m feeling really good about myself right now. I’m an all star in my book too, Zack.