The Playbook, Inning 7: Fantasy baseball managers must adjust to real-life trends
Credit to Author: Tristan H. Cockcroft| Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:25:37 EST
From the pitch clock to restrictions on defensive shifts, to larger bases and limitations on pickoff throws, baseball underwent significant changes in 2023.
The principal effect of all this change was the shortening of baseball’s average game time, which by most every measure greatly improved the fan experience. The average nine-inning game in 2023 shrunk by nearly 25 minutes compared to the season before it, all the way down to two hours, 39 minutes and 43 seconds. It was the league’s quickest average time in nearly 40 years.
Inning 1: Fantasy baseball 101
Inning 2: League formats
Inning 3: Salary-cap drafts
Inning 4: Preparation
Inning 5: Roster optimization
Inning 6: Nine must-follow tips
Inning 7: Adjusting to league trends
Inning 8: Utilizing advanced stats
Inning 9: Mastering the player pool
From this fan’s perspective, despite my initial skepticism, I loved the result. The swifter pace was eminently enjoyable, even if it made it more challenging to sneak in some writing between at-bats or innings.
However, I’ll never get on board with the “runner on second base to start extra innings” (a.k.a., the ghost runner) rule. On an aside, and as we all debate the shortcomings of exceedingly long baseball games, someone let me know the next time the NFL’s average regulation-length game time dips beneath three hours. I’ll wait.
For us fantasy baseballers, however, “improving the fan experience” doesn’t move the needle for our analytical purposes. We’re already fans at heart, and we want the nitty-gritty, deep-down-detailed takeaways as to what those new rules meant for our game.
This is where Inning 7 of the Playbook takes the reins. As 2023’s changes took center stage as far as what has been shifting in our grand game, it’s in this space that we closely examine each of them, as well as other trends that could influence your rankings, draft-day plans or in-season strategy.
For those who prefer to skip ahead to their specific topic of interest, the links below will take you directly to each.
Run, run, Ronald: See how the installation of larger bases had a demonstrable impact upon stolen base totals.
The shift didn’t result in a sizeable (ahem) shift in results: Nevertheless, there was a meaningful impact on the statistical results.
Tick tock, pitch clock: Did this controversial innovation change anything more than average game times?
Never finishing what they started: Workload levels from before the pandemic have still not returned.
We’re, of course, talking about Mr. Acuna here, as Ronald Acuna Jr. roared back to superstardom in 2023 as he claimed NL MVP honors thanks to historic power/speed numbers. His performance underscored what was the most actionable valuation shift among last year’s rule changes.
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By expanding the size of each of the bases (although not home plate) by three inches, each increasing in width from 15 to 18 inches, and therefore shrinking the length of the basepaths (from first to second and second to third by 4½ inches and from home to first and third to home by 3 inches), baserunners had a decidedly greater advantage in attempting stolen bases. The restriction on pickoff throws, where pitchers are no longer allowed more than two “disengagements” — which includes pickoff throws, fake pickoffs or stepping off the pitching rubber — without risking a balk, also enhanced this advantage.
All of this led to several notable results:
Acuna’s 73 stolen bases were the most by any player in 16 years.
Acuna became the founding member of baseball’s 40/70 club (at least 40 home runs and 70 stolen bases). To put that into perspective, he’s also the founding member of both the 40/50 and 30/60 clubs.
Corbin Carroll became the first rookie in history with at least 25 home runs and 50 stolen bases.
Esteury Ruiz had 67 stolen bases despite a .309 OBP, the lowest such on-base rate by any player with at least 60 steals in 15 years.
There were four members of the 30/30 club, tied with 1987, 1996, 1997 and 2011 for the most such players in any single year.
The 3,503 total stolen bases across the majors were the most since 1987.
The 0.72 steals-per-game overall team average last season was the highest since 1997.
The league’s 80.2% success rate on stolen base attempts was its best since 1929, or nearly 100 years ago.
What does all of this mean? Yes, an individual stolen base became less valuable in fantasy and our ESPN Player Rater reflected a decline in valuation between 35-40%. However, it became all the more critical to invest in the category in order to keep up in a rotisserie league. This meant knowing where to garner the most “bang for the buck” in the SB department. Among the ways to best do this was — and still is — examining those players with strong underlying speed metrics.
Consider that (among those who appeared in at least half of their teams’ games in both 2022 and 2023) 20 players enjoyed a double-digit increase in their stolen base totals last year. Of those 20, 16 had at least an 80th percentile number in terms of either Statcast’s sprint speed or their own SB success rates, meaning at least a 28.5 feet-per-second sprint speed or an 80% success rate with at least 30 attempts from 2022-23. Among this group of “steals surgers” was CJ Abrams (+40), Ha-Seong Kim (+26), Willi Castro (+24), Nico Hoerner (+23) and Bryson Stott (+19).
Sprint speed is one of the places I most like to look for stolen base values, and the category showed a strong correlation between success there and an increase in steals. Players who averaged a sprint speed of at least 28.5 feet per second, which is what it would have taken to rank in the 80th percentile, accounted for 797 of the 1,017 additional stolen bases seen across the league in 2023 relative to 2022, with the group averaging 0.035 more steals per game last year than the one before it. Players with a lower-than-28.5 sprint speed, meanwhile, improved in the category as well, but by just 0.007 steals per game.
Here are a few of 2024’s value picks, when mining the sprint-speed category:
Jordan Lawlar rarely got a green light during his 17-game stint with the Arizona Diamondbacks (playoffs included), successful on only one of his two stolen base attempts, but he had 30.0 feet-per-second sprint speed and 36-plus steals in the minor leagues in both of the last two seasons.
Jose Siri isn’t much of an on-base specialist, but the aforementioned Ruiz didn’t let that impede his performance in the SB category. Siri (29.8 feet per second) actually had a better sprint speed than Ruiz (29.7) last year, and he stole 20-plus bases in each of his four full seasons in the minors.
Jarren Duran saw a sizable jump in stolen bases (+17) last season, but not to a level that reflected his blazing, 29.5 feet-per-second sprint speed. He swiped as many as 46 bases in the minor leagues in 2019.
Parker Meadows (29.0 feet per second) could figure as the Detroit Tigers‘ leadoff man, giving him a great chance at a stolen base breakthrough in 2024.
Connor Wong is a catcher — seriously, a catcher! — with 28.3 feet-per-second sprint speed, who could offer a handful of stolen bases at a dirt-cheap price tag. As is, his eight steals last season were third-best at his position.
Fantasy managers probably entered 2023 assuming that the A-number-1 rule change that would influence our results was the one governing defensive shifts. Baseball now mandates that, at the time a pitch is delivered, all four infielders are required to be on the infield dirt (or infield grass) with two on either side of second base. This prevented the prior practice of teams shifting a third baseman or shortstop into the hole between the first and second basemen’s typical defensive positioning, often playing an effective “short right field.”
The assumption was that extreme pull hitters, primarily those who batted from the left side of the plate, would experience a substantial improvement in batting average, now that they’d have a greater chance of line drives and hard grounders into the hole sneaking into right field for a hit.
Well, the results are now in. So, let’s report that the leaguewide batting average increased by only five percentage points (to .248), well beneath even the conservative 10-15 point increase I theorized in this space last season. The leaguewide batting average on balls in play (BABIP), meanwhile, increased by seven points (to .297), meaning that the two categories saw merely their best numbers in a single season since 2019 (.252/.298).
That was enough of a change to raise our eyebrows, but certainly not enough to warrant wholesale changes to our strategy going forward. Still, that’s not to dismiss the new shift rules as “irrelevant” for our scouting purposes.
Digging into the numbers, left-handed hitters did experience a small, yet meaningful, boost in performance with the change. Consider that the league’s batting average on pulled ground balls and line drives by left-handed hitters rose to .167 in 2023, 26 more points than in 2022 (and up 25 points compared to the 2020-22 average). Right-handed hitters, meanwhile, did not enjoy quite the same advantage when pulling the ball, with a .208 batting average on pulled ground balls and line drives, down from .210 in 2023 (and right in line with their rate from 2020-22).
Interestingly, it was not the lefty pull types who most benefited. Among left-handers with the most hits accrued on pulled ground balls and line drives last season, six of the nine with at least 25 hits had a pull rate beneath the league’s average of 45.6% (Juan Soto, Michael Harris II, Gunnar Henderson, Christian Yelich, Jeff McNeil and Stott), with the other three only barely pulling the ball at a greater-than-average rate (Shohei Ohtani 45.9%, Carroll 48.0% and Kyle Tucker 48.5%).
All of this supports the notion that “all-field hitters” were the ones who reaped the greater benefits of the new rule. That said, of the 26 players specifically we identified last season as “hitters to watch” with regard to the new shift rules, eight had at least 17 hits as well as a batting average at least 25 points greater than the league’s average on pulled ground balls and line drives in 2023: Yordan Alvarez (17 hits, .212 batting average), Cody Bellinger (23, .215), Brandon Lowe (18, .207), MJ Melendez (24, .242), Jose Ramirez (19, .192), Anthony Santander (23, .319), Soto (.35, .229) and Tucker (27, .209).
The upshot is that you should be making slight adjustments to compensate, but not at a level that would substantially alter your draft strategy. For example, those using the Marcel projections method cited in previous Playbooks might first consider adjusting left-handed hitters’ batting averages from the 2021 and 2022 seasons, when shifts weren’t at all restricted, before calculating.
As we climb further down the “impactful” scale, we come to the installation of the pitch clock, one of the more controversial changes to the baseball landscape in recent memory. Fortunately for fantasy managers, not to mention fans as a whole, the upshot of all this hubbub was a better overall viewing experience — and almost nothing more.
In 2023, there were a total of 1,064 overall timer violations, a number that sounds huge until you consider that represented an average of just 0.21 per team game. In other words, each team (on average) experienced a violation roughly once every five games. Additionally, the leaguewide average declined over the course of the year, as players became increasingly comfortable with the new rule. The league averaged just 0.18 total violations per team game in July, 0.14 in August, and 0.12 in September and October.
From an individual basis, four of the pitchers we called out last year as being the slowest-working in the game didn’t even place among the top 25 in terms of total pitch clock violations: Giovanny Gallegos and Kenley Jansen had three apiece, Devin Williams had just two, and Josiah Gray, the slowest-working starter in 2022, was penalized only once.
Yes, baseball did make one of its rule changes heading into 2024 a shortening of the pitch clock with runners on base, as it will go from 20 to 18 seconds, but that’s not anticipated to have much of an impact, either. When the decision was announced, the league noted that when a universal 17-second clock was used during the final month of the Triple-A season in 2023, the rate of violations did not increase.
Pitching workloads had been in significant decline in the seasons leading up to the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign, but beginning in that year, teams became considerably more calculated with their starters’ workloads. Unfortunately, those pre-pandemic workloads have not rebounded in the way people might have expected in the three full seasons we’ve seen since.
In each of 2016, 2017 and 2019, 15 pitchers totaled at least 200 IP, and from 2017-19, between 58-61 pitchers managed the 162 innings required to qualify for either league’s ERA title. Over the last three seasons (2021-23), by comparison, just four, eight and five pitchers reached the 200-IP threshold, while only 39, 45 and 44 pitchers qualified for the ERA title. Additionally, only 1,939 starting pitchers (among the 4,860 total) last season worked six-plus innings, a decline of 30 compared to 2022 and the second-fewest in any non-shortened season during the expansion era.
The six-inning threshold remains important when evaluating quality starts as a category, as it’s half of the criteria to get credit for one (a minimum of 6 IP, with a maximum of 3 ER allowed). For those who are either considering a move to quality starts as a category, or who had previously transitioned to the category (as one of my keeper leagues did a little over a decade ago when going to a 6×6 rotisserie format), that downward trend is particularly troubling. That league, incidentally, will probably need to shift away from quality starts, and only hasn’t done so yet due to a lack of a compelling replacement — a return to wins is one possibility.
Last season, MLB pitchers accumulated just 1,683 total quality starts — the second-fewest in any non-shortened year since 1962 behind only 2021’s 1,584. (By the way, note that there were only 20 teams in the league in 1962.) That means that only 34.6% of all starts last season resulted in a quality start, the third straight season that the rate was beneath 37%, after the league had posted at least a 45% quality-start rate in every year from 1913-2016. It’s compelling evidence that teams have grown less concerned about length from their starters than quality with every batter faced.
Fantasy commissioners should pay heed to this leaguewide shift and, at the very least, have a discussion among their constituents regarding their scoring settings. ESPN’s points-based leagues, for example, made the shift last season from awarding five points for a win and penalizing five for a loss to two for a win while penalizing two for a loss, while also adding a two-point score for holds.
Additionally, I’ve become increasingly hesitant to endorse my 6×6 format, which on the pitching side replaces wins and strikeouts with quality starts, innings pitched and K/9 ratio. When I started declaring that as my preferred format, the leaguewide quality start rate was at its apex, as there were a record 2,623 quality starts accumulated in 2014, which capped a five-year span that represent the five largest single-season totals ever in the category. In the absence of a compelling alternative to quality starts, a return to wins is a viable substitution.
Innings pitched, however, remains my go-to category on the pitching side. While longtime players might have memories of uninspiring pitchers like Tim Belcher, Scott Erickson and Brad Radke challenging for the categorical lead despite underwhelming ratios and strikeout totals, these days there’s a strong correlation between IP leaders and the game’s more effective pitchers.
Last season, for example, the five pitchers who threw at least 200 innings, in descending order of their finish in the category, placed seventh, fourth, first, 115th and 13th among starting pitchers on the Player Rater, and sixth, fourth, first, 65th and 16th in terms of fantasy points. Miles Mikolas was the outlier, and one of only five pitchers to total at least 180 innings with an ERA greater than 4.50 and a WHIP greater than 1.25. Additionally, 15 of the top-20 SP on the Player Rater ranked among the 25 pitchers with at least 180 total innings pitched.
Turning our attention to saves, the 2023 season was one of the more unusual ones, in that there were fewer big save-getters who slipped through the draft cracks than in the years that immediately preceded it. As I mentioned in Inning 6, only 39% of MLB’s total saves last season came from pitchers who were unquestionably not drafted in ESPN leagues, down from 48% in 2022.
Unsurprisingly then, 12 pitchers managed at least 30 saves, the most in a single season since 2016 (16 did it then). Five teams, however, had at least three different pitchers notch at least five saves, continuing to demonstrate that many teams regard the closer role as more matchups- than individual-based. That list didn’t even include the Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, Los Angeles Dodgers, Texas Rangers and Washington Nationals, all of whom either made a distinct change at the closer position or went through a sizable portion of the season utilizing a closer-by-committee.
That continued trend of saves being spread across a larger portion of the player pool has heightened the challenge for fantasy managers. It’s one of the reasons that closers come at a premium in National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) drafts, as the top seven closers have been selected within the top-70 picks on average (using exclusively February data). Note, however, that NFBC contests restrict in-season trading, and are frequently 15 teams deep — factors that do enhance the value of top-shelf closers.
It’s a major reason why, still, elite-skill relievers with a high probability of capturing the majority of their teams’ saves (Edwin Diaz, Williams, Josh Hader, Emmanuel Clase, Jhoan Duran, Camilo Doval and Raisel Iglesias) possess more fantasy value today than their positional brethren from a decade ago. That said, the spreading-out of the saves pool also enhances the “don’t pay for saves strategy,” meaning that both approaches — going all-in or barely investing anything at all — can be correct.
As with wins and quality starts, it’s league commissioners who should kickstart this discussion. Should a league progress forward with saves an integral part of its scoring? Many leagues have begun to include holds in the scoring in some fashion, either including it as its own category, or bundling it with saves (saves-plus-holds, or saves-plus-0.5 holds).
I’ve been resistant to utilize holds in fantasy scoring, if only because it lacks a clear, universal definition among statistical providers. For example, some credit relievers who work prior to the sixth inning, while others only apply it to those who enter in the sixth inning or later. Some credit a hold to any pitcher who works three-plus innings with a lead, regardless how large, while others demand the score to remain close à la the traditional save rule.
Nevertheless, incorporating saves-plus-holds into the scoring in 2023 would have fairly accurately reflected RP quality. A full eight of the top 17 relief pitchers in WAR — Felix Bautista, David Bednar, Yennier Cano, Jason Foley, Hader, Jordan Romano, Tanner Scott and Williams — would have placed among the top-13 relievers last season in a rotisserie league that used saves-plus-holds instead of simply saves.
This isn’t to say that every league must adopt changes for 2024 and, in fact, I’d strongly urge that any league commissioner introduces such radical changes to a league’s scoring system gradually and delicately. For example, long-standing and/or keeper or dynasty leagues should plan at least a year ahead for such changes, implementing them beginning in 2025 rather than immediately, and leagues that do make such a change for 2024 should require unanimous approval.
A full seven Playbook “innings” are now in the books, and you should be ready to take your fantasy baseball game to the advanced level. In the next edition, we’ll dive more deeply into advanced statistics such as Statcast, defense independent and “luck”-based statistics.