MLB Daily Notes - March 9
Some draft talk and then some Strider/Painter/Twins SPs looks
I have four drafts left to do.
15-team snake Draft Champions slow draft I’m currently in
16-team H2H categories auction for MLB DW paid subs (March 16)
15-team NFBC Online Champion snake draft (March 20th)
10-team home league snake draft w/ keepers (March 21st)
I’ve done a handful of NFBC leagues and best ball so far. My issue is that I like the content creation game and my home league more than I like playing in other leagues. I’ll typically be pretty uninterested in my NFBC teams by the middle of the season.
Hopefully, I can put a good team into this Online Championship, though. That will be the most expensive league I’ve ever played in. It’s $350 a team. I didn’t have to pay that fee, I got a comp, so I couldn’t pass that up.
The DC I’m in currently, I’m picking 9th, and I’ve done this.
1st: Garrett Crochet
2nd: Kyle Schwarber
3rd: Bryce Harper
4th: Mookie Betts
5th: Josh Hader
Skubal went #4 in this one, which was wild to see, but I don’t think that’s ridiculous at all.
AUCTION VALUE CHECKING
I was curious about the top of the draft board. How much above the field do the top guys sit? One way we could start figuring this out would be to get some auction values and then compare each guy’s projected value with the position average for that league type. I took a 12-team league with pretty large rosters and then used The Bat X projections to get the projected values. And then I compared each guy’s value with their position average (three positions used: hitters, starters, relievers).
We look at the top of the board:
Tarik Skubal: $46 projection, $10 SP average, 4.476x OA
Shohei Ohtani: $50 projection, $12 H average, 4.054x OA
Aaron Judge: $44 projection, $12 H average, 3.535x OA
Bobby Witt Jr: $43 projection, $12 H average, 3.465x OA
Mason Miller: $18 projection, $6 RP average, 3.254x OA
Paul Skenes: $31 projection, $10 SP average, 3.012x OA
Those are the only six guys 3x above their position average by projection.
I’ll add that starting pitcher projections are worse for auction value creation. At least in my opinion. I guess I can’t prove that. But I’m a projection bro, so I’ve been in the weeds, and you can just kinda tell that it’s true. It’s really hard to project wins, and it’s pretty hard to project ERA. And with a starter in a standard roto league, that’s half the battle with WHIP and strikeouts being the other two you’re projecting. And even with strikeouts, that’s hugely dependent on innings, which can be really hard to project accurately because of the injuries that happen at the position.
I use projections heavily when drafting hitters, but not nearly as heavily when drafting pitchers.
That was a total sidebar. You can check the auction values with those “above average” calculations here.
Back to my draft:
1st: Garrett Crochet
2nd: Kyle Schwarber
3rd: Bryce Harper
4th: Mookie Betts
5th: Josh Hader
The hitters available in the first round were J-Rod and Carroll. Those were the guys I was considering. And maybe I should have gone with one of them. It looks like Carroll will be in the Opening Day lineup, so the ADP should come back up a little bit?
But right now, as shown in the plot above, he’s firmly a second round pick since the hamate bone rather than a first rounder. So he was off the board. I think J-Rod is a perfectly good first round pick (32-30-.268 last year), but he does fail to separate. Judge, Ohtani, Witt, Soto - they all have stupid ceilings. Those guys could do stuff you almost don’t believe. We haven’t seen that with Julio.
So I went with the strong SP start with Crochet. I’m trying to get a pitcher who can separate and run away with a Cy Young type season.
I also came into this draft ready to try the Chandler Simpson strategy. I hope nobody in my league is reading this. I’m going to draft Simpson in this one as long as nobody goes out of their way to jump him over me. If they do, I’m screwed, I guess. If I get Simpson and he doesn’t steal 50+ bases, I’m screwed, I guess. But I’m leaning into this lottery-ticket type season that he could give us. If Simpson plays 140 games, I’m pretty sure he’s going to hit .285 with 60+ steals.
So that should explain my Kyle Schwarber selection in the second round. I typically don’t like using a second round pick on a DH-only guy who could hit .230. But I’m going for later-round batting average and steals “cheat codes”, and that fills in exactly what Schwarber doesn’t give.
Two of my favorite veteran price tags this year are Bryce Harper and Mookie Betts. Harper + Schwarber gives me a little bit of boost juice (#boostjuice) if the Phillies have a monster year. And Betts might just go for 240 R+RBI.
I probably reached one round more than I needed to for Hader. It was an auto-pick while I was asleep (one hour clock is rough when you’re typically going to bed at like 10:30pm), but it was set up that way so it wasn’t really a mistake. I intended to get him after I missed on the first couple of tiers of closers. Hader would be a 2nd-3rd round pick in these if he were healthy, and he’s already on the mound throwing. So we could very well see him miss like two weeks and then come back and get 90% of the saves for Houston. I’m leaning into that discount.
So it’s a draft where I’m betting on some angles, you could say. It could very well fall apart and be a miserable team. But if I hit on these three early bets I’m making:
Big year for the Phillies
Chandler Simpson plays a ton
Josh Hader gets and stays healthy
I’m off to a really big start.
Spencer Strider
One of the big names we’re watching this spring is Strider.
He’s a unicorn of sorts. Two-pitch guy who had two of the best pitches in the league for starting pitchers before his injury. His four-seamer was high-90s and devastating, and he had a sick hard slider with it as well. But he’s lost velocity over time, especially after the internal brace thing in his elbow. I came into 2026 needing ot see 96-98 from his fastball before I’d consider drafting him.
The problem there is that we’re not going to see his true velocity until he needs it. They’ve been clear that he’s easing into it. Because, why wouldn’t he? The first start, he averaged 93.1 on the heater. The second, it was up to 95.0. That’s very good news. If that’s just step two on his way back to 97, then we’ll be fine. But if 95 is the max, there’s probably some trouble ahead. But I’m more confident with Strider now after seeing that +2.
I’ve added FF velo to the spring pitch game logs tab in the spring google sheet:
Andrew Painter
Another high upside NL East pitcher we’re keeping an eye on this spring is Andrew Painter. He’s one of the game’s top pitching prospects, but it’s been a long time coming. He’ll turn 23 in April, so he’s still young, but his big breakout season was back in 2022 when he threw 108 innings as a 19 year old with a 39% K% and a 6.5% BB%. He was smoking dudes. And then he had Tommy John and missed the entire 2023 and 2024 seasons (at least as far as pitching in a regular season game goes).
He came back last year and struggled. 26 starts, 118 innings, 23.7% K%, 9.0% BB%, 5.26 ERA, 1.49 WHIP. That’s weird. But his prospect pedigree, big velocity, and chance to make the Phillies rotation have him going in the top 350 picks.
It’s all about the fastball, I think. I mean, it’s not all about it, but it’s the most important thing. If he can’t get strikes and whiffs with the four-seamer, nothing else really matters in my view.
Here are the numbers from his minor league data last year:
96-97mph on the pitch but a super weak 8.9% SwStr% and 45.5% Strike%. That will not cut it. This spring:
It’s only a 32-pitch sample. But there are only two whiffs on the pitch. Maybe it means nothing, but to me it’s a bad sign. Here are your worst-performing four-seamers in SwStr% this spring among SPs who are being drafted in fantasy leagues this year:
If we look at the league’s stud pitchers, none of them are having trouble getting whiffs on the fastball. If it’s a good fastball, it gets whiffs.
And it’s a unique situation with Painter in that all of the post-surgery data we have on his fastball is bad news. He wasn’t getting whiffs on it last year against minor league hitters. So something has to change if he has any chance against MLB hitters this year.
The MLB Pitch Profiler marks on his four-seamer show a 95 ProStuff+. Maybe that’s nothing, maybe that’s something. One thing it’s definitely not is good news.
It’s not looking fantastic for our boy Simeon Woods Richardson.
We never thought this guy had a good fastball. The ceiling was always pretty capped, we just thought this splitter could make him an SP3-SP4 option for fantasy leagues for the free price tag in drafts. But he can’t get to that splitter without getting ahead with four-seamers and sliders. The guy can have a better season without being useful for your standard fantasy leagues. I’m still willing to draft him in the deeper leagues , for a 10-12 team league, I think the upside is too capped to worry too much about it.
There’s also some pressure being applied by Taj Bradley and Mick Abel.
Lots of studly numbers being posted by Abel/Bradley/Matthews in spring. Not a shock! With Pablo Lopez gone, there’s more to compete for. There are three SP locks in my view:
SP1: Joe Ryan
SP2: Bailey Ober
SP3: Simeon Woods Richardson
It’s uncomfortable to call Ober and even SWR a lock long-term. But I think it’s obvious that they start the year in the rotation. I think SWR sticks. Ober might not even if he doesn’t seriously bounce back from his horrible 2025 season.
So all three of these fringe dudes (Zebby, Abel, Bradley) will get in the rotation at some point. But if they’re not in the rotation initially, we don’t want to draft them.
That’s something to watch. Because all six of these Twins SPs are relevant in 15-team leagues, and I’d draft Abel in a 12-teamer today just given the youth, the skills, and the sick numbers he’s posting this spring.
Speaking of fastball data, Abel leads the spring with a 27.3% SwStr% on the fastball (50 pitch minimum).
Quinn Mathews is also someone to continue to watch. We liked him as a break-in and break-out candidate last year into the Cardinals rotations. But he sucked big time in AAA. The early returns are good so far.
→ 36% K%
→ 12% BB%
→ 16.7% SwStr%
→ 43.5% Ball%
Okay, so that Ball% is out of control. And that was his issue last year. So I guess it’s not all good. If he can’t get to a 37%-38% Ball%, I have no interest. But at least he’s getting the whiffs along with the wildness.
That’s all the time I have, time to put my head down and do the real job for a few hours. We’ll be back later with more. It’s full-steam ahead on draft prep week. Let me know what I can do to help you out in preparation.