MOVES AND NOTES
Lots of moves, lots of notes. Plus a soundtrack for our first item
Seth Lugo, Signed with the Royals: Did a solid job as a back-of-the-rotation arm last year but allowed too many homers for me or you to feel comfortable expecting him to repeat. Give him a puncher's chance to be useful in an AL-only, especially when the threat of homers is low, and be ready to bail if things go south. Note that the KC BC’s Kauffman Stadium is in the bottom third for homers allowed by both right-handed and left-handed hitters. Savvy move!
Tyler Mahle, signed by the Rangers: He had such a rock-solid season in 2021, that many of us thought we were one home-happy ballpark away from finding an ace. Since then, Mahle finally escaped the Great American Ballpark but stumbled in Minnesota. Not that he pitched much. He had TJ last May, so his new two-year pact with the Rangers is targeted mostly at 2025. Mahle may return this summer, he and the Rangers say he will, but most pitchers struggle with their control the first few months back even after successful surgery. Maybe he's worth a stash if you have unlimited IL spots, but he's more likely to attract someone else's overheated bid next August if you let him go.
Jung Hoo Lee, signed by the Giants: He jumped from high school directly to the KBO, back in the day, and was the league MVP in 2022. His season ended early last year because of a broken ankle. In Korea he walked twice as much as he struck out, which has been less than eight percent of the time in each season since he turned 20. As a teenager, he struck out 10.8 and 11.2 percent of the time. In his MVP season, he hit 23 homers so he’s not without power. The printed Guide will have more of a profile of Lee from Tim McLeod. I’m jazzed about him as a high batting average on-base machine, who also has a little pop. Not a big fantasy star but a very solid contributor.
Rowdy Tellez, signed by the Pirates: The first two months last year he hit 12 homers while playing mostly against lefties. At some point in June his forearm started to bother him and maybe that explains a month in which he hit .170 with zero homers. He was on the IL for nearly all of July and as he prepared to come off the IL he fractured a finger while shagging fly balls and went on to miss another few weeks. He was terrible after coming off the IL, but let's chalk that up to rust. He's now signed with the Pirates and will likely play first base in a platoon. When healthy he's a solid power hitter against righties whose xBAs the past few years have been much higher than his actual BA, which is a slight reason to hope he could be surprising in Steel City.
Edward Olivares, traded to the Pirates: For years fantasy players have been asking the Royals to give Olivares more of a chance. They kind of did last summer, though he sat pretty regularly (though not all the time) against righties. He hit enough early in the season to intrigue a little, but then an oblique strain cost him much of July and when he slumped upon return he was sent back to Triple-A. There he crushed it and after recall to the majors he finished with a big September, hitting six homers with a .329 batting average in 77 plate appearances. The Royals reluctance to give him a full shot has to lower expectations, and at this point he's a late-bloomer longshot to break out this season, but he has enough power, speed, and contact skills to remain of interest. The Royals dealt him to the Pirates in December, which may prove to be a very smart move for one of those teams. We just don’t know which one.
The Braves traded for Matt Carpenter, who has negative defensive value, and will hit below the Mendoza Line. He’s owed $6M this year, but the Padres are paying some of it. It’s hard to see the sense, though Carpenter does walk quite a bit.
Tyler Glasnow, traded to the Dodgers: He's excellent when he gets out on the mound, but it is telling that his 120 innings pitched last year is his career best. Last year he missed the first two months with an oblique injury but was able to take the mound on his turn most of the rest of the season (he missed time with a back issue and cramping but did not go on the IL for either). Given his history and consistent performance when he does pitch he's both safe and risky at the same time. He’s not a linchpin but a worthwhile chance the Dodgers were willing to pay a lot for, and considering how they’ve been able to carry Clayton Kershaw along with limited work for the past bunch of years, they may well make it work.
Ryan Pepiot, traded to the Rays: True fact: Only one pitcher with a minimum of 20 innings pitched had a higher LOB%. That's easier when, like Pepiot, you don't allow very many baserunners and, like Pepiot, allow a lot of home runs. He's a fly ball pitcher, so that pattern isn't unusual except by degree. Those homers are Pepiot's Achilles heel, but as a pitcher who going into last year struggled with command, his ability to avoid walks last year was a big step forward. He should work out of the rotation this year with the Rays (he made three starts last year, 18 innings pitched, with a 2.00 ERA), and if he can control the long ball (the Rays ballpark is not a good one for homers) he could be a solid fantasy starter.
Manuel Margot, traded to the Dodgers: Defensive decline makes his offense harder to stomach, but he puts the ball in play and he runs some.
STATISTICS
I was playing around with statistics over the weekend, especially expected statistics, and I thought it might be helpful to talk about them here, since I refer to them sometimes in the profiles.
Since the dawn of Sabermetrics analysts have been trying to eliminate random outcomes (bad hops, sun got in his eyes, et al.) from the hard actual statistics we use.
Before PitchFX and Statcast, this was done by estimating outcomes. If 28 percent of ground balls become hits and 72 percent outs, a pitcher who gave up 100 grounders would be “credited” with 72 outs, even if in the real world he only got 64 outs. Do this with line drives, fly balls, and infield fly balls, and you have an approximation of how a pitcher pitched that eliminates some of the luck involved and the influence of a good or bad defense.
Since Statcast, nearly every ball put into play has distinct qualities recorded by MLB’s eyes in the sky: Exit velocity, launch angle, direction hit, plus attributes involving the time of day, the weather, the nature of the ballpark, and a lot of others. To calculate xBA, xOBP, and xSLG, some super beancounters at MLBAM compare each struck ball to all the other similarly struck balls in the database and give it a percentage chance that it was a hit or an out or an error.
Add all those percentage values up for a pitcher on the pitches he’s thrown and for hitters on the balls they’ve put into play and you end up with eXpected values. What the most likely outcomes would have been turned into a metric that looks like the hard stats we’ve always used.
Computers!
I was curious about xSLG and whether the difference between it and SLG might be an indicator of hitters who were going to hit more homers the next year. I took a down-and-dirty little look and found that:
In 2022, the Top 15 hitters with the biggest difference between the SLG and xSLG, larger, hit 307 homers in 2022 and 407 in 2023. That’s a 32.9% increase. Bingo!
Looking at the Bottom 15 hitters, those with SLGs higher than their xSLGs, in 2022 they hit 329 homers while in 2023 they hit 303, an 8 percent decrease.
So, the proposition holds, though looking more closely I think the big increase from those with a higher xSLG than SLG was driven by the extraordinary contributions of two Braves coming off abbreviated seasons: Ronald Acuna Jr. and Marcell Ozuna. Here’s the list:
Here are the biggest losers:
The other important thing to remember is that the expected stats are not predictive. That is, they should not bring an expectation of “that’s what someone is going to do in the future.” That’s because they’re based on random trajectories and angles that cannot be scrubbed, so a hitter one year might hit the same ratio of liners, grounders, and flies but to different places and his xBA, xOPB, and xSLG will be totally different.
What these stats do instead is describe whether a player was lucky or unlucky in any given year. Many times the bounces even out, as they say, but sometimes they do not, and the expected stats show where they cluster in a bolus of bad or good luck.
Still, it’s hard not to look harder at the players who had the biggest differences in 2023. So here goes. First, the Overachievers:
And here are the guys to watch for gains this year. At least some of them. Maybe.
Uh-oh, there’s Acuna again at the top of the list!
HOUSEKEEPING
Thanks for your opinions, questions, requests, subscriptions, and everything else. Please say more here:
I’ll be back later this week with more news updates and whatever else you ask for. This edition is going to everyone, but please note that paid subscriptions have been turned back on. If you subscribed last year with an annual it will renew one year from the day you paid last year. I think monthly subscribers are credited with a certain number of days you didn’t get last year, when I suspended it, so you’ll renew on the day those credits run out.
If you have a problem please let me know. The last thing I want is for you to pay for something you don’t want. I can fix things.
BONUS: A subscriber-only feature after the signature below.
Feel free to share the newsletter in the various places things are shared.
And if you aren’t a subscriber, missed out on last year but would like to jump in this year, here’s the link:
See you next time!
Sincerely,
I’ve been working on the cover of Rotoman’s Fantasy Baseball Guide 2024. Let me know what you think…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Rotoman's Guide to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.