MLB Daily Notes - October 2nd
A daily automated report of what happened yesterday in Major League Baseball, along with other recent trends and further analysis.
It is over! Another MLB regular season is in the books, and that means the second year of Daily Notes on this Substack has come to an end as well. I published 182 daily notes posts, developed and posted the game previews post, and added a lot more scripts, dashboards, and analysis to the blog - so I’d say it was a good year.
For a minute there I crossed 300 paid subscribers and 1,600 free subscribers, which I never really thought I could pull off in just two seasons, so that’s been awesome to watch - and I thank everybody who has chipped in along the way. Now those numbers are receding fast (down to 265 and and 1,580), so for those of you who have left for the off-season, thanks for being here and I hope you come back next year - it’ll be even better!
Three of my favorite things in life are sports, statistics, and attention - so this blog scratches all three of those itches at once. It’s really something to be able to write about stuff you really enjoy and then have hundreds of people read it. I need to continue to improve on not caring so much about the size of the audience or about constant growth and all of that stuff - it’s a tough thing to not get sucked into but I am trying to just be content. I’ve never really had a problem with the contentment part of life, I have always been quite happy with wherever I was and whatever I had, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t sometimes think about what if I could turn this blog into my full-time job and add on a podcast and more football stuff and so on and so forth. But with three kids and my wife being a stay-at-home mom (which is awesome, we’re never going to change that), it’s most likely not in the cards. Life is expensive out here these days, even in the flat and quiet state of Indiana.
I changed some things this year with how I go about the fantasy baseball stuff, and I think it’s all been for the better. In June I hung it up at RotoBaller to just do stuff here. There are clearly some people out there that really don’t like me, and you know, fair enough. I’m not saying I’m a great guy that never thinks or says stuff he shouldn’t. I’ve always viewed the world a lot differently than most people do, and I also have a problem with being much too confident that I’m right about stuff. So that situation naturally turns into some people really liking me, and some people really disliking me. There were plenty of personal attacks, people digging up old tweets to make me look bad, and all that business. Some of these people even tried to get me fired from RotoBaller. To the credit of the guys who run RotoBaller, that didn’t work - and I thought they handled it all fine. But it did really turn me off to wanting to be in that crowd. I don’t really care to associate with the “industry” people anymore, so that drove me to just go full independent here and it’s been a rewarding decision. I will certainly never write for FanGraphs or The Athletic or work for an MLB team or anything like that, and that’s perfectly fine with me, let’s just keep it going here. That’s the beautiful thing about this being a side job, I don’t really need it and that comes with a lot of freedom.
You’re not going to be done hearing from me about baseball, not even for a minute. I’ll [probably] be doing previews and reviews for each day in postseason action, although I can’t say with 100% certainty that I’ll be able to churn that the whole way through - but I do want to do it so we’ll see what happens. We’ll take a look at each day with an eye still on DFS and betting, but I do want to try to just talk in more general, non-gambling-related baseball terms. Should be fun.
I’m guessing nobody cares about the automated notes from yesterday, so let’s give out some season awards!
Subscriber of the Year Award
I’m making all of this up as I go. Substack gives each subscriber an “activity" rating” from one star to five stars based on how much they read and interact with my blog here. So this lets me filter to the five-star members and then really give you guys a look. I mean I can tell what e-mails you open, how many times you visit, what links you click - everything! It’s pretty wild. So the subscriber of the year should be someone with that five-star rating, someone who didn’t just show up in the middle of this season, and someone who is paying me - of course!
Putting that all in the bucket along with a little bit of random choosing and the winner is ALEX LUCAS! He’s been a paid sub since the $5/month days and he’s been five-starring the whole time. What a guy, thank you, Alex! You’re probably wondering now if you won anything! The answer is no!
Pitcher of the Year
This award is not going to the actual best MLB pitcher. This isn’t like me saying who I’d pick for Cy Young, this is a daily notes-specific award, and I have to give it to Griffin Canning. Everybody in this business wants to be the guy that picks out that breakout pitcher and beats the drum for them weeks before anybody else did. I tried that a few times this year (Louie Varland was one of them… yikes), but the guy I really talked about a lot here was Canning. It’s not like I can say he pitched all that well either, but look he was better than a lot of people would have thought so I’m counting that as a win!
22 GS, 25.9% K%, 6.7% BB%, 19.2% K-BB%, 14.1% SwStr%, 48.8% Strike%
How can you not love that line? It’s too bad that he pitches for the Angels, who could be historically bad next year, but regardless - you’re going to be hearing a whole lot more about Canning from me, and I’m guessing he’ll be one of my favorite SP recommendations for 2024.
Hitter of the Year
I have to give it to Tommy Pham. It’s not every day that an MLB player unfollows you and then tells you to go fuck yourself on Twitter only to make you $100 later that night with a home run that you bet on just for the Twitter engagement. That was quite a night. I actually ended up scooping Pham on the home league team, and he helped quite a lot. He was probably one of my best players in August & September. Unfortunately, he couldn’t help me bring home the championship, but I’ll always have that moment.
481 PA, .256/.328/.446, 55 R, 16 HR, 68 RBI, 22 SB
Top Algo SPs
I developed this pitcher ranking algorithm mid-season and made the results (updated daily) available, but then I pretty much stopped referencing it. So here’s the final top 20, and if you click that link you can see the full results now (available for everybody).
It’s very much biased toward swinging strikes, as you can see there - but more goes into it than that - I think it’s a pretty solid algo and I wish I would’ve paid more attention to it this year!
My Guys Review
I wrote this piece on RotoBaller in February about my five favorite players to draft this year. They were:
Corey Seager
Teoscar Hernandez
George Kirby
Dustin May
Ramon Laureano
It was actually a pretty bad showing by me there. Seager was incredible, but he wasn’t a total game-changing player with the injuries and the lack of steals, and also - everybody freaking knew he would have a good year, so no real credit there.
Hernandez was just okay:
.258/.305/.435, 26 HR, 70 R, 93 RBI, 7 SB
Kirby didn’t make the strikeout gains I predicted:
190.1 IP, 3.35 ERA, 1.04 WHIP, 22.7% K%, 2.5% BB%, 20.2% K-BB%
May threw like six innings, and Laureano was a trash heap (.707 OPS, 10 HR, 13 SB). So a pretty pathetic showing there. That’s two years in a row of really unimpressive stuff from me picking my favorite players. This is where I’m supposed to tell you that I’ll “review my process and improve”, so okay - I’ll review my process and improve.
NFBC Results
I’ve never been a high-stakes fantasy player like most of the other guys writing. And maybe that’s a strike against me. “Put your money where your mouth is” is perfectly valid, and I don’t do that nearly to the extent of what other people do. That has to do with me getting all the fantasy baseball I need from my home league and just writing and analyzing stuff, and I also don’t really think it’s the most financially sound thing to do tying a bunch of money up while competing against other people that really know what they’re doing as well - but anyways… I did draft a handful of NFBC leagues between December and February and I’m here to tell you that I’m a loser. I won two leagues to get most of my money back, but overall it’s a pretty unimpressive showing from me and I finished with a -14% ROI.
These were 100% draft-and-hold leagues because I just cannot make myself interested enough to do FAAB and all that other detailed stuff with any league other than my home league. I would like to say that I won’t do any of those leagues next year, but I definitely will because doing the drafts in January/February is just so, so much fun - it’s almost worth the entry fee just to be able to do a competitive draft.
Also, the payout structures on NFBC are just so bad. So much of your entry fee goes into the “overall” prizes, which means you have to beat hundreds/thousands of other people - and anybody telling me there’s a real skill to that can pound sand give me a break. I mean sure, I’d have a better chance at beating 2,500 other teams than, say, my mom would, but the main driver in a situation like that is clearly luck and at that point, you’re basically playing the lottery.
It would be nice to have some draft-and-hold drafts in January/February where all the money stays in that league, that’s something I’d be really into. So if anybody knows about that - LET ME KNOW.
Full Season Magic Formula Qualifiers
Hitters
This is Brl% > 14% and K% < 20%
An incredibly hard thing to do for a full-season, and only three players did it - and there are no surprises here.
Ronald Acuna Jr. (732 PA, 15.3% Brl%, 11.5% K%)
Corey Seager (527 PA, 15.2% Brl%, 16.7% K%)
Yordan Alvarez (491 PA, 18.0% Brl%, 18.7% K%)
Pitchers
K% > 27%, BB% < 7%, GB% > 43%
Only one man managed to do this for the full season (20+ GS minimum), and that man was Pablo Lopez (29.2% K%, 5.9% BB%, 45.3% GB%). If we get rid of the GB% parameters, we have more names:
Luis Castillo (27.3% K%, 7.0% BB%)
Joe Ryan (29.9% K%, 5.9% BB)
Kenta Maeda (27.3% K%, 6.5% BB)
Chris Sale (29.5% K%, 6.6% BB%)
So that’s three Twins, pretty wild stuff there.
Playoff Predictions
Let’s take a quick look at some gambling lines here. Even if you’re not a gambler, these lines are a fantastic source of information. Everything you can think of gets cooked into these lines, so you can really learn a ton about what is likely or unlikely to happen in the future with these single numbers.
The top four teams get a massive boost by simply not having to play the first round. Even if those teams were worse than other teams, they would still be the favorite just because they have to do so much less to win the World Series.
I’m not going to do any in-depth statistical analysis or anything here, I’m just firing from the hip. In baseball, more so than other sports, you can see the long shot making a run. The Marlins could certainly win four out of seven games against the Braves, nobody would be stunned by that at all. This does not mean that the long shots are the best bets because as I mentioned above, all of this is cooked into the lines.
By my math, here are your implied odds for each team:
Add up those implied odds and you get to 118%. If there was no house advantage, that would be 100%. So you’re paying an 18% tax here by entering the market - your EV is negative no matter who you pick. But if you just can’t help yourself…
I think +2000 on Minnesota is pretty enticing. They have to get through the Blue Jays first, but they have the advantage of being at home for the full series, and the pitching is just so good. They line up with Lopez tomorrow, and then I would assume Joe Ryan gets the ball in game two and Sonny Gray goes game three with possibly Maeda backing him up if they really just want to let those two guys combine for 6-7 innings and go full bore at them. And then they what might be the best bullpen in the postseason:
I think it’s hard to say they don’t have the best pitching staff in the playoffs, and that’s half the game right there! If I’m laying anything down on this, I’d go with Minnesota.
Again, lots more stuff about the postseason action coming starting tomorrow!
Alright, that’s it for me today, I’ll say again - thank you to everybody who has read the notes this year! This has been incredibly enjoyable for me and it’s just so cool to have people reading and writing back. It’s especially sweet because it helps support my constantly growing family here, we should be done having kids now but we’re getting into the stage where they’re doing activities and eating more and needing new clothes and all of that stuff - so the money actually does really help out here - I’m not just buying pumpkin beer with it (although I’m doing that too…).
Talk to you soon! Here are the notes from yesterday if anybody cares!