MLB Daily Notes - March 5th
Hunter Greene, Christian Scott, Sal Stewart, Stories from Anderson Family Land, and more!
Draft PREP is fun and all, but it’s been like three months of me being fully into it, so I’m ready to move on to the season and start REACTING.
Been an interesting couple of days on fantasy baseball X, hasn’t it? Controversy, man!
I say it a lot. I’m not the type of dude to think that social media should all be rainbows and sunshine. It’s not that serious. We’re talking about entertainment here at the end of the day. Nobody should really be getting emotional about anything, even if somebody goes out of their way to attack you. But that’s easy to say and pretty much impossible to put into practice.
I’m certainly not blameless. I’ve been known to poke and to fan the flames. I think sometimes it’s justified, but at the end of the day, the Christian morality I subscribe to calls for adherents to be peacemakers. And it’s a tough argument to make that such a call isn’t applicable to the Internet.
If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about, good for you - you’re staying away from it. Some people have been accused of stealing other people’s work, and some people have been accused of buying followers for their accounts.
On the side of stealing people’s work, I don’t see much of an issue unless it’s egregious. This is a pretty simple game we’re all playing here in the content creation space, there aren’t all that many ideas to have. You’re going to have similar ideas to other people. And again, this isn’t high-stakes stuff. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever directly copied something I’m doing. Not sure how I’d feel if it did happen, I guess, but I’d like to think I’d be fine with it, but I’d just try to make sure my implementation of the idea is better than theirs. Easy to say now hypothetically, though.
Maybe I could say that I was the first one to put together an NFBC ADP dashboard. That’s been going for 3-4 years now, and there are plenty of other ones online now. But is that anywhere close to being intellectual property? No chance, bro. It’s not even my data. I’m just doing what the NFBC site already does, but in a better way. So yeah, I have no claim to such an idea, and it’s better for everybody if more and more competition develops to make the best tools.
And there’s more possible competition now than ever before. I was one of the only fantasy baseball coding bro’s doing it for awhile, but now pretty much anybody with a QWERTY keyboard can make some dope stuff. I have no idea why anybody would buy my Python course at this point. The $150 was a good deal two years ago, but you’d be nuts to buy that now. I should probably drop the cost down to $50 or something.
That all kinda sucks for me, I guess. But I’m able to use the AI stuff to really bulk up my stuff as well, so I’ve just gotta work a bit harder to make sure I’m offering unique and useful stuff now. That’s how it goes.
As for buying followers, I don’t really see an issue with that either. Your gut instinct is that it’s deceptive and lame, but you’re not hurting anybody and it’s probably a good business decision.
None of this stuff matters at the end of the day, right? I wish we could live in a world where we can throw out criticism and dunk on dudes online and nobody would be bothered by it. But that’s not reality. I’ll try to keep my head on straight and not contribute to it anymore. The world isn’t what I want it to be.
Hunter Greene
Hunter [Marvel] already covered the Hunter [Greene] news here:
But now I need to get on here and cry about it. Because I’ve drafted Hunter Greene quite a few times. Dude was in My Perfect Draft just this week. There’s #allegedly no UCL damage. But it’s an elbow thing, and it’s not new. He was pitching through some stuff last year.
We didn’t have any elbow strain stuff on him last year, but it was hard to ever feel confident about Greene being a workhorse. He throws a ton of fastballs with a ton of velo. Greene is one of the first dudes I can remember who came up to the Majors as a starter consistently pumping 98-100mph heat. He’s thrown more 98+ mph heaters than anybody in the league the last two years.
98+ MPH Pitches, 2024-2025
Hunter Greene 1,445
Paul Skenes 1,443
Robert Suarez 1,244
Mason Miller 1,131
Emmanuel Clase 1,126
Jhoan Duran 969
Jose Soriano 911
Aroldis Chapman 903
Victor Vodnik 787
Justin Martinez 782
How long can you do that before you have a problem? As a Pirates fan, this is pretty terrifying with Skenes sitting up there. Is elbow surgery inevitable? Can he learn to also pitch with his left hand just in case the right one goes out of commission for 18 months?
Sal Stewart
There’s too much talk about pitchers. And I feel bad for Reds fans now. Greene wasn’t even the scary one, we actually sort of expect Chase Burns to have injury trouble pretty soon as well. I’m not superstitious, so I’m okay with saying that. You can’t actually blame if it happens, that’s not how this works.
But one thing to be happy with is the potential that Stewart brings to the table this year. He’s hitting .472/.550/1.118 this spring with three bombs, a 10% K%, a 15% BB%, and a 27% Brl%.
The reason we don’t talk about hitters very much is the sample sizes. It’s useless to talk about 20 spring plate appearances. They tell us next to nothing. But you’d rather have a good spring than a bad one, right?
Or maybe not. Statistically, they’re probably about the same thing as far as regular season predictiveness goes. But good is good and bad is bad. And we liked Sal Stewart way before the spring even started. Guy looks like a legit big league hitter, and he’s an awesome target in fantasy leagues this year. He could be very expensive next year.
Christian Scott
The Mets righty is back from Tommy John. He had the surgery in the fall of 2024. So he’s a year and a half removed and ready to pitch again. This was one of the big pitching prospects we were anticipating in 2024. It didn’t go super well:
9 GS, 47 IP, 4.56 ERA, 1.20 WHIP, 19.8% K%, 6.1% BB%
I remember him well cause I had him on the home league team. The fastball dominated in the minors, but Major Leaguers did not have much trouble with it. So this is one of the cases where I think the Stuff+ business is useful. And I’m an MLB Pitch Profiler subscriber, so here you go:
NEVERMIND! HA HA I went to get the Pitch Profiler chart but it’s not there. Probably because the game was an exhibition against Israel. You’ve gotta open up the game_type filter to accept “E”, Pitch Profiler guy!
A guy named Christian beating Israel…
But I do believe that Pitcherlist had a card. Let’s grab that:
Give that account a follow if you’re into these pitcher cards. I do have to say, those are excellent-looking cards. By far the most pleasing to the eye. And I also really like that they’ve taken out a lot of the numbers that other people use that most people don’t know or care about.
I still don’t care that much, personally, but maybe I’m getting there. You can’t deny the importance of iVB. Or can you? I don’t even know. But enough people talk about it where it must be legit.
Scott’s fastball kinda sucked, then, right? It’s his first start back, so yeah - grain of salt or whatever, but we do really prefer high stuff marks on four-seamers. Stuff+ on other pitches, I don’t really care about. It’s also a constantly moving target. Hitters are getting better against pitches they used to be really bad at, and that causes Stuff models to mislead. But it’s still useful stuff, especially in these specific situations where you have a guy with very little recent data, and you’re trying to make some educated guesses.
Here’s the arsenal results table from my spring dashboard:
SwStr% doesn’t mean anything until at least 100 pitches, so it’s hardly worth looking at. But whatever, man, I’m contradicting myself a lot here today! I say it doesn’t matter right after going out of my way to show you the numbers.
It’s March, we’re all starving. Let us live. Better to get six whiffs on 21 pitches than zero!
I need to take a cold shower or something what a mess this all has become.
Side note, I have two boys of ages five and three. And they are the best. We’ve been playing driveway hockey and Hot Wheels race tracks and Mario Kart Wii. Those two are like best friends now. They share a room. So they do this thing every morning where they wake up in their beds and start throwing stuffed animals at each other. I came in there this morning thinking they’d want to get up and come downstairs, but they were like mad I even came in the room. They’re like, bro, we want to keep throwing animals at each other. I’m like yeah, I get it. That sounds awesome.
Girls will just never understand.
My daughter also played Mario Kart Wii (we just got it) for the first time yesterday. She’s the oldest, and she’s a bit of a perfectionist. She does not like to lose. So obviously they’re all doing terribly, because they’re all young kids and have never played this game before - and the game requires a level of coordination.
But the boys could not have cared less. The five-year-old boy was in his glory while finishing 11th (he beat the three-year-old who was going backwards for most of it). He was just so amazed that he could control this thing on the screen with his remote. While my daughter knew what the objective was, and she was frustrated that she couldn’t meet the objective. She didn’t get that from me; I can lose with the absolute best of them. I’m the best loser you’ll ever meet, bet.
And I remember that feeling as a kid. Boys want to explore and manipulate the world. Video games are fake, but it’s kind of their first foray into that world.
Having kids is so great, man. And having multiple is a stone no-brainer. Get busy, boys.
Richard Fitts
I was also going to talk about Fitts, but Hunter covered that too! That dude’s looking sharp this spring, and I think the Cardinals should put him in the rotation. I can absolutely see myself a couple months from now playing a $6300 Richard Fitts on DraftKings at home against the Marlins with full confidence.
Here are some spring stats on the guys competing to be in the bad Cardinals rotation:
Liberatore, Mathews, Leahy, Fitts, and Pallante. That’s the way to go.
Ceddanne Rafaela is tied for the spring lead in dingers with four. That Vance Honeycutt dude is the only other one with four, and he hit them all yesterday. Will that be Honeycutt’s eternal claim to fame? He had a 41% K% in 101 games in A ball last year. So yeah, probably. Shout out to you, Honeycutt. You’ve got some tape to show your grandkids.
Rafaela is also swinging less this spring. He has a 45.6% Swing% in his 24 PAs. That’s not long enough to be stabile. Maybe he’s just been seeing a bunch of junk. But it couldn’t hurt that dude to take it freaking easy in the box. #SOMETHING #TO #MONITOR
And hey it’s World Baseball Classic time, right? I was curious about America’s chances, and now I’m not, because I looked:
USA -110
Dominican Republic +340
Japan +380
Venezuela +900
Puerto Rico +2200
Is it wrong to bet against your own country? Kinda seems like it, right? I’m a born and raised American Evangelical, bro. I’ve gotta be careful. But DR +340 is pretty enticing. That lineup is crazy, and this is a hitter’s tournament, right? The pitchers are all getting ramped up for the regular season. Skenes and Skubal probably won’t see the 5th inning, and they’ve already said that McLean would be the guy for the championship game.
Should be fun - we get to watch some meaningful baseball starting today. Who can complain about that.
So that’s it. Feels great to be back on the daily notes keyboard, completely emptying the tank on you guys.