MLB Daily Notes - June 18
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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We got some rain and a little bit of wind yesterday, but basically nothing happened. It was almost disappointing. I really went big on that tornado bit yesterday and I have nothing to show for it. My recycle bin didn’t even get knocked over.
Check out STARTS & SITS that Hunter published last night:
And for the PRO subs, check out the new GAME SIMS page on the web app. It uses the daily projections (which got a big upgrade last night as I’ve really refined the base level player skill projections) along with some other data I have to let you simulate each game and see what happens.
Here’s an example:
We have the Yankees winning by an average of 6-5 against the White Sox tonight, so that tells you that the projections like the game for some run scoring. And then you can see the fantasy point scoring distribution from each sim:
There’s a bunch of other features in there. You can simulate entire DFS slates and see the top plays that come up from the sims. It’s not all that much different than just using the projections, but it gives you a better idea about ceiling/floor and what could happen.
If you have any trouble with it or see anything weird, or have any ideas for improving it - let me know.
If you want access, upgrade to PRO today to get the full access. Your price will be prorated based on what you’ve already paid this year.
Pitchers
Kyle Bradish and Nolan McLean showed the upside yesterday. Those were two of the trendy high-upside breakout picks for 2026, and mostly this year they have disappointed. But they both flashed it yesterday.
Bradish: 7.2 IP, 5 H, 1 ER, 12 SO, 2 BB
How do you do that bro? Look at the game log:
It had been more than a month since he had a big whiff start, and then rips off an 18% SwStr% with a 12 strikeouts against a team that just saw him last week.
Plenty of people recently dropped Bradish, I think. He’s at 84% owned on CBS, but I wouldn’t really have blamed anybody for abandoning ship in like a ten or 12-team league with how bad he had looked for awhile there.
The whiffs came from the curveball and slider as usual, but he did actually get five strikeouts with the sinker. You can track individual pitch performance on the Pitcher Profile tab, just select a pitch from the dropdown.
Doing that here, we see a pretty nice Strike% on the sinker in back to back starts. It hasn’t been hit hard lately and the called strikes and fouls balls are plentiful. So there’s some hope for Bradish. If the sinker can continue on that pattern, he’ll strike a ton of dudes out with the elite breaking balls he’s always had.
You wonder if it’s
As for Nolan McLean:
→ 7.0IP 3H 0ER 1R 9K 1BB
Nine strikeouts on just TEN whiffs. That’s a McLean special. Called strikes, baby.
There’s a nice plot for this on the main dashboard. It compares swinging strikes with called strikes. You can see how guys are getting their strikes, and for McLean’s career, he has lived in the bottom right, the FOURTH QUADRANT if you will:
And you see his is the only red dot in that square. The redness of the dot represents the strikeout rate.
The problem for the called strike bros is that called strike rate doesn’t correlate with K%:
The lesson to learn is that you can’t trust a guy to continue to get strikeouts if a lot of their strikes are from called strikes. Called strikes don’t stick. Swinging strikes do.
In Pirates land, we saw this with Mitch Keller that year he was an All Star. He had a high strikeout rate without getting whiffs. So we were banging the drum that he was massively over-performing, and that proved to be very, very correct.
And we’ve already seen that with McLean this year. He was striking guys out no problem at all early on in the year without getting many whiffs. And then he goes through that spell we just got out of where he wasn’t getting results.
If the command isn’t perfect, the strikeouts don’t follow because hitters are able to make contact on him when they’re swinging. You need to get those in-zone swings and misses to really dominate consistently.
McLean is going to be up-and-down and a frustrating pitcher at times.
We can break down each pitcher’s strikeout total by called and by swinging:
McLean has 37% of his strikeouts on called strike three. That’s the second-most for pitchers with at least 50 strikeouts:
Will Warren is the top guy. 38% there. I’ve never trusted these guys, and that general strategy works to our benefit.
There are some exceptions. Max Fried and Ranger Suarez have always been very good at this. It’s not impossible that it becomes a reliable skill, but you need a few years of seeing it before you can really start trusting it.
Check out that full data file here.
The lesson to be learned here is that you can’t suddenly count on McLean to be great every time out. You’re going to continue to get clunkers. But he proved yesterday that he will still have these spike games where he’s dominant.
Sandy Alcantara - 6.0IP 8H 2ER 4R 6K 1BB
It’s just waves, man. Sandy is on a good run now with 20+ (rounding up) fantasy points in his last four. He handled the Phillies yesterday with six innings of two-run ball. He did have to strand dudes to get there with the eight hits and a walk.
This is the good version of Sandy. He’s never been a high strikeout guy, he just lets the ball get into play, mostly on the ground, and hopes for the best. He’s super dependent on variance and his infielders making plays - and we know the result of that. A lot of times it’s terrible, but sometimes it’s good.
Andrew Painter - 2.0IP 6H 6ER 6R 3K 2BB
Goodbye, Andrew Painter. He had his last chance and now he’s back in AAA. The injuries from 2023-2024 just sucked the life out of his fastball, I guess. He still throws it hard, but the SHAPE was broken by the injuries. And velo isn’t enough in the Majors. Tim and I were on top of this offseason, he was a clear fade for me - I never considered drafting him. And the reason we were on that is because we saw that his fastball just didn’t work last year in the minors.
And we had access to that data through the MLB DW Prospect Analysis Dashboard. This is the minor league version of the “Statcast” dashboard, and it’s crazy powerful and useful for evaluating minor leaguers.
You can go in there and see pitch-level results for the minor leaguers. Here are the AAA SwStr% leaders on four-seamers:
It’s such a valuable skill to be able to get whiffs on the fastball. So if you see a guy coming up to the Majors who doesn’t do this with their primary fastball, it’s reason for pause.
We see Gage Jump at 15.6%, and he’s having a decent time in the Majors so far.
You can see overall SwStr% rates as well for all levels of play:
So Lucas Gordon leads the pack. He’s a White Sox prospect in AA with a 25% K% and a 12.5 BB%.
Khristian Curtis is a bit of a breakout prospect in the Pirates organization. That’s definitely not how you spell Christian though, so I’m a little suspicious.
He got the call up to AAA a couple of weeks ago and debuted there with ten strikeouts on June 12th. So we have some of that pitch level data from the AAA start. Probably nobody cares, but I like the Pirates so I’m going to look at it.
Big old iVB on the four-seamer. That’s a sweet sign. I checked that via Pitch Profiler and we see it at 18 inches. You can see the 10.7 inch mark in vertical movement on my dashboard. I’ve never quite figured out how to calculated iVB from the vertical movement column in the data set. I think they’re the same thing and it’s just a constant you multiply it by or something.
Back to Andrew Painter though. Let’s make a weird connection here between him and Curtis. Painter’s iVB is 16.3 inches. I believe the elite marks in the league at like 20 inches. And vertical “break” is a good thing. So it’s a good stat to know, but I wouldn’t be building your house on it.
Keep an eye on KHRISTIAN CURTIS coming up through the Pirates organization. They seem to generally know how to develop some Major League talent, although the results this year haven’t been what we were really hoping for besides with what Ashcraft is doing.
Ashcraft - 6.0IP 4H 1ER 2R 7K 3BB
Nice start in Sacramento. The Athletics games have been runfests. The Pirates put 12 on the board last night which led Ashcraft to easy win. He’s very good.
The other guy we see on that minor league SwStr% leaderboard is Carson Whisenhunt. And that’s convenient because he debuted in the Majors last night! It wasn’t his career debut, just the season debut.
→ 5.0IP 6H 2ER 2R 2K 2BB
He’s on the Giants and got an easy win as the San Francisco bats went to town on the Braves. The wizzenator had a 26% K% with a 10% BB% for a 3.65 ERA in the minors this year.
He made five starts in the majors last year and it wasn’t good with a 16% K%, 12% BB%, 5.02 ERA, 1.46 WHIP, and a 2.3 HR/9. His fastball averaged 92.8 last night and didn’t get a whiff on 34 pitches. So I don’t think there’s anything to care about there for fantasy leagues.
The Braves have to figure something out with this fifth rotation spot at least until Schwellenbach gets back. JR Ritchie has been a disaster and got another try last night:
→ 5.0IP 5H 5ER 5R 4K 3BB
With Strider on the shelf, they might want to look to Didier Fuentes again. He’s been in the bullpen and doing a really nice job with a 2.25 ERA in the Majors this year. But he’s been throwing just 1-2 innings all year now, so it’s going to be tough to get him ramped up. And he does profile like a reliever to me with that near 70% fastball usage. But he’s freaking 21 years old so it’s definitely too early to conscript him to a lame reliever role. Relievers aren’t cool, man. If you’re a reliever, you’ve already kind of failed in a way. That’s harsh I guess, but how many currently dominant relievers actually came up through the minors as relievers? Most of the time they tried to be a starter and it didn’t work, so they just transitioned their elite stuff in to a short role.
Mason Miller was a starting pitcher! Remember that? April 19th through May 7th of 2023 he was starting and doing a decent job (3.38 ERA, 0.98 WHIP, 26% K%, 8% BB%). But then he got hurt bad and never tried the starting thing again. I suppose he never will again. With the way he’s pitching right now, he’s probably just as valuable as like a solid SP4 for a team.
That’s an interesting question. Is 65 innings with a 1.50 ERA more valuable than 180 innings with a 3.50 ERA? I guess that’s just a math question that we could figure out. But I don’t care to try right now.
Nick Lodolo - 4.67IP 11H 7ER 7R 2K 2BB
I guess it’s time to quit on Lodolo. He’s had eight starts now and it’s been a disaster. How much longer can afford to take these bad results?
A 16.3% K% with an 8.7% BB%. The 10.1% SwStr% and 35.9% Ball% are really, really bad. His fastballs have sucked so his good curveball is out there completely naked. I still think he can figure something out and get it going eventually, but it’s tough to hold on to him right now if there are decent arms available.
Jake Bennett - 5.33IP 3H 2ER 2R 5K 0BB
15 whiffs for Benny. But that’s probably fake.
A 12.2% SwStr% is about league average, and his fastball has been pretty decent iwth a 15% SwStr% on 100 pitches. He might be into streamer territory in good matchups, but that’s about all I can say. The Stuff+ looks bad. We need more strikeouts - but maybe that was a start of something last night with those five punchies.
Hitters
I’m low on time again… and there’s day baseball to get to and another work meeting. So I’ve gotta breeze through this, which I hate doing.
Luis Arraez with the swipe and pipe! Wow! If my count is right, that’s just his third career game with a homer and a steal. He has 39 career homers and 37 career steals in 911 games. His 162-game average is seven homers and seven steals. Congrats, I guess!