MLB Daily Notes - March 18th
Reds outfield, rotation spots opening, an incredibly strange outing from MacKenzie Gore, and a few sleeper pitchers pitching well this spring.
I am going to try my hardest (or semi-hardest) to not make any typos in this one. I read last Friday’s and it was a disaster, so many missed words and busted sentences. I do have Grammarly running, but it doesn’t catch it when you type the wrong word but that word is a real word. I’m not going to apologize for the typos anymore though, I do so much stuff here and write so many words, and the only way I can make that happen is by working and typing quickly, and the inevitable result of that is bad grammar and typos. It’s a good trade-off, I think.
We did the home league draft on Saturday back in the town where I grew up, so that was incredible. My buddy’s dad has this crazy nice deck so we all posted up out there with multiple heaters and got the job done. Not the perfect weather, but it was good enough and it got really nice by the second half of the draft or so.
If you are interested at all in my roster, I tweeted it here. The tweet has a typo in it immediately, right there in line one, which is perfect.
I had pre-given up on getting the pitchers I really wanted, because I knew a couple of these snakes had my list and would be after those names as well. So rather than go after Ober/Greene/Miller/Pfaadt a few rounds early, I just took a different route, grabbing Corbin Burnes, Jesus Luzardo, and Blake Snell pretty early on (Snell fell a bit as expected but I didn’t let him get too far). And then I took my first chance on Shota Imanaga, the 45% spring training K% convinced me to do it (which is probably dumb).
I nearly ended up with Tarik Skubal as well, but I elected to do a coin flip (literally) on him vs. Oneil Cruz, and George Washington and his wooden teeth gave me Oneil.
Our league only allows us to roster a max of 8 SPs, which makes the SPARP (starting pitcher as relief pitcher) guys extra valuable because you can cram in a bunch of extra starts every week if you have those guys. That’s the only reason I kept Cole Ragans and drafted Michael King, and then I grabbed my heartthrob Garrett Whitlock late in the draft for the same reason. It’s a daily changes league as well, so I will be starting 11 different SPs while most of my opponents can only start eight, which helps quite a bit in wins and quality starts (although it’s a K/9 league so the strikeout stuff doesn’t matter in this regard).
So I did not get the guys I wanted, and now I have all these people DMing me sending me pictures of their teams and all these teams are just dripping in my favorite draft targets. So that’s not really helping my morale, guys. Stop showing off.
Anyways, I’m fine with the team, and the draft isn’t all that important here either since I will make about 12,000 moves as per usual and end up with a wildly different team than the one I just drafted. Let the games begin!
I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on in Spring Training this weekend, so let’s try to catch up on some of that stuff.
TJ Friedl
He broke his wrist diving for a ball. And at first, you’re like “why would you even dive for the ball? The game is meaningless!” But I imagine it’s really hard to change your mentality like that especially after a ball is hit your way. You’re there to get ready for the season, you’re playing baseball just like you have your entire life, and your brain and body are just programmed to go catch the ball. That said, dude shouldn’t have done that.
You would think Friedl would miss about the first two months of the season at least. Maybe he gets back in May, and you would think at the latest he’d be back by July. The one under the radar impact this could have is to hurt what little power Friedl had. Friedl hit 18 homers last year, which is a good amount, but then you realize he had just 13 barrels and a 92% HR/Brl.
Friedl hit six homers that were not barrels. All of them were pulled, and four of them were at home in Cincinnati.
If you want to know what a 94.2 mile per hour home run looks like, you can watch one here.
This isn’t to say that all of this is luck. Home ballpark makes a big difference here.
Non-Barrel Homers by Park, 2023
1. Cincinnati 64
2. Houston 47
3. New York (Yankees) 46
4. Boston 39
5. Philadelphia 38
So Cincinnati runs away with it. It’s very easy to hit a home run in Great American Ballpark, relative to the rest of the league, at least.
Three of the four projection systems had Friedl coming down significantly from that 18 HR mark:
Steamer: 19
ATC: 15
BatX: 15
JA: 14
Obviously that projection drops at least 30% or so just because of the missed time, but I would probably count on even more of a drop due to some temporary lost swing speed as the wrist is healing. What I am saying here is that I don’t think it’s wrong at all to drop Friedl if you have a better use for the IL spot. He’ll be a valuable runs and steals guy once he’s back in the lead-off spot, but I do think we’re looking at a potential sub-10 homer season here which hurts a fantasy lineup considerably.
The big fantasy takeaway here is that Jake Fraley and Will Benson now have solidified playing time. I suppose Fraley already did, but this does raise the PA projection a bit just because they have one less outfielder. Benson and Stuart Fairchild are the center fielder fill-ins here. I don’t think Fairchild hits enough to matter for fantasy, but both Fraley and Benson are very attractive targets right now. Fraley is extra nice for OBP leagues (10% BB% the last two years, 28 homers, 27 steals over that time - 686 PA). He’s the safer option. Benson has more upside but much less floor (31% K% in the Majors but 11 homers and 19 steals over these last two years in 390 PA). My preference is Fraley, but any 12-team or deeper league I think they’re both pretty much must-own right now.
MacKenzie Gore
My man put up one of the weirdest lines you’ll see all season yesterday:
4.2 IP, 9 H, 8 ER, 2 BB, 10 K
We will surely take the 5:1 K:BB, and that’s the most important thing here. I have no idea about ball in play luck or anything here, but I’m guessing it wasn’t good.
A reminder about what Gore did last year:
27 GS, 13.5% SwStr%, 25.9% K%, 9.8% BB%, 12.1% Brl%, .344 xwOBA
The SwStr% and K% are great, the BB% is bad but not horrible, and the Brl% is crazy high. I don’t see much of a chance he allows another barrel rate above 11%, that’s just hard to do, so that is the main reason I am a buyer on Gore this year. I like the strikeout ability, the improvement in walks, and I expect positive regression on how hard he gets hit.
But it’s also possible that he just has a problem with leaving very hittable pitches right over the plate, which would lead to bad news on contact most years.
This spring he has a 29.7% K% and 9.4% BB%, which is great. He’s only allowed one homer as well across 64 PAs, so a positive sign there as well. He’s not someone to invest heavily in by any means, just a pitcher to add to the back of your roster in deep leagues or stream early on in more normal leagues.
Shane Bieber
I cannot find much about his velocity this spring besides a report from his first start that he was hitting 94. He has not pitched in a Statcast park. But he did strike out eight Reds yesterday. His spring so far:
41 batters faced, 29.3% K%, 14.6% BB%
He hasn’t pitched very much in real games, so we can’t take anything away from the numbers, but all-in-all I would say it’s a positive spring for his fantasy value just because there is at least talk about some of the velocity being back. I wouldn’t draft him super aggressively, but I do like his ADP. Even if the velo doesn’t come back, he has the pitch mix and the command needed to still put up a good season.
Eury Perez / Marlins
We got some pretty bad news on Eury this weekend. He was previously going to miss the first week or two with a cracked fingernail issue, but now he’s also getting his elbow looked at. It’s unclear what that means for him right now, it could be nothing. But it definitely has implications on the Marlins rotation out of the gate.
This staff has just been decimated. Some of the names currently on IL or destined for it:
Sandy Alcantara
Edward Cabrera
Braxton Garrett
Eury Perez
So their rotation is looking like this:
SP1 Jesus Luzardo
SP2 A.J. Puk
SP3 Trevor Rogers
SP4 Ryan Weathers
SP5 ????
That’s four lefties, which is funny. The 5th SP will not be Max Meyer, who was jut optioned to the minors. He would have been interesting. Roster Resource has Yonny Chirinos filling in that role right now. If Eury is out long-term, you would think that Meyers would be the guy to get in there. You can read his write-up from the Marlins team preview here, but basically he was previously a top pitching prospect for them but missed all of last year after undergoing surgery in 2022. He’s someone we’ll talk about once he gets the call-up, the upside is there with him.
Gavin Stone
It took a couple of injuries, but Stone will be in the Dodgers Opening Day rotation. He was dominant in the minors last year but fell horribly flat in the Majors. We can forgive that though, and he has a great 27%-3% K%-BB% across 33 batters faced this spring. He could be speculatively added in most deeper leagues. My concern with him is two-fold:
He had a 14.5% K% in the Majors last year
He will have a tough time holding on to that job with Buehler & Sheehan coming back
The Dodgers very well could go with a six-man rotation once things get rolling, and that would help his cause. Buehler will definitely get a rotation spot when ready, but you can’t say the same with Sheehan. So if Stone is pitching well, he should be able to stay in the rotation, but he will definitely have to earn it early on.
Jared Jones
Jones threw four scoreless innings against a loaded Braves lineup on Saturday, which really puts the pressure on the Pirates front office. There is just no way to say that he’s not one of their five best SPs right now, and he’s already spent a bunch of time in AAA, so there’s no non-financial reason to not have him be in the rotation. I am thinking he’ll make it, and I think you should pick him up right now because of it. The stuff is for real, he could have a very nice rookie season here. He hasn’t allowed an earned run all spring and has a fine 24% K% and 9.5% BB%.
Luis Gil
The Yankees need SP help, and Gil is banging down the door to earn a spot. He has a 41% K% this spring (44 batters faced), and his Stuff+ is grading out marvelously in the models that are able to ingest the spring data. He has a 21.1% SwStr% on 194 pitches tracked with a beautiful 52.6% Strike%, so he's looking extremely good. It’s less clear if he can make the Yankees rotation, but I would probably add him when/if it’s announced he’s in there.
Even with Cole out, I suppose there’s still only one spot truly open with Cortes, Rodon, Stroman, and Schmidt seemingly being locks. The SP5 on Roster Resource right now is Clayton Beeter, a 25 year old who posted a 28.8% K% and 13.1% BB% in the minors last year (132 innings). Keep an eye on that competition there. Gil would be the more interesting name to add if he wins the job, but Beeter could be a worthwhile streamer as well if he can keep the K% up there and manage the walks this year.
Kyle Stowers
With three bombs yesterday, Stowers now leads Spring Training in homers with seven of them. He’s slashing .297/.316/.865 this spring, but does have a high 29% K% and 2.6% BB%. He might just be out there trying to homer his way into the lineup.
I do believe the power with him. I wrote him up last year as a sleeper because he did have a really nice minor league exit velocity & launch angle profile. Injuries cost him much of last year, so maybe now is his time to shine.
The main problem here is that the Orioles outfield is basically full, as we’ve talked about a lot in these notes this spring. Cedric Mullins is back in the lineup, so that ended any hope of an Opening Day job being available. There’s no way Mullins or Santander gives up a job while healthy, and Austin Hays is pretty locked in as well as a guy who posted a 112 wRC+ last year. Maybe there’s some DH reps available, but right now it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear enough path to enough playing time for Stowers (and company*) to matter for fantasy leagues.
*Colton Cowser is also slashing a huge .364/.488/.758 this spring with four homers of his own
Free Agents
This Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery thing is really getting out of control. There’s a clear stalemate here, so it’s not surprising that it’s taking awhile, but man Opening Day is in 10 days!
The stalemate is that both guys are
Old (they are both 31)
Seeking multi-year deals
Coming off “lucky” years
I say “lucky” for this reason:
Snell: 2.25 ERA, 4.06 SIERA
Montgomery: 3.20 ERA, 4.23 SIERA
Snell is such a weird pitcher that the normal rules don’t always apply to him, but yeah pretty much any 2.25 ERA will have a good amount of luck to it. He also won the Cy Young Award for the second time, which probably puts into his mind the idea that he should be the highest paid pitcher in the league. Teams just aren’t going to fall for that at this point.
So coming into the offseason, it was clear that both guys would be asking for a price that no team wanted to pay, and that they would have to give up some ground as things progressed. In a negotiation you want to hold off as long as you can and make the other guy give up ground first, but at the end of the day I would say that the players need the teams more than the teams need the players. Once all teams are on the same page (ish) about what kind of player is worth what kind of money, it spells disaster for those types of players that think they’re worth way more than the teams do.
Things have to come to a breaking point by this weekend, I would think. My guess is that both of these guys sign somewhere by Sunday, and the dollar amounts are nowhere near their original asking.
I begrudgingly took the discount on Snell, and I would advise you to do the same. Just be sure to add a few good WHIP pitchers around him, because he’s not going to post a single-digit walk rate this year.
And that will have to do it for the notes today. Good to be back in the basement doing my thing here. Traveling is fun and it’s great to see my friends, but man it’s like something is tugging at me when I’m not home.
And it’s not even like I am desperately missing my wife and kids when I’m only gone a day or two, like that’s not the problem, it’s just that I feel out of place. Like I know where I am supposed to be, and it’s here with these three kids. And any time away from here without them brings on some level of guilt. This isn’t an emotional thing, it’s really just that I feel I’m not performing my duty. I wonder if other people feel this way…
I am not sure what the rest of this week holds, but we will surely get out some daily notes on Thursday and Friday since we’ll have regular season games in the books! I might even be able to pull of some projections for those games, we’ll see.
Until next time!