Editor’s Note: Over a sample size of 402 completed bets (this doesn’t include outstanding futures picks), Joe’s picks published here and back at All Things NIT, our former site, have an average return on investment of 6% when weighted by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high). This, compared to other picks consistently published online, is pretty good. It would be a decent annual ROI for an investor. But instead it’s coming, on average, on each of these picks.
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Two picks today.
As always:
- Lines come from the Vegas Consensus at the time this is written, or the best approximation I can find of it online.
- Data from FanGraphs, Baseball Reference, Baseball Savant, Spotrac, and ESPN is often used and/or cited.
- The blurbs often aren’t justifications of the picks. Often, they’re instead just notes about something or someone related to the pick. Something that interests me. You are not required to read these. This is because in general, the rationale behind each pick is the same, so it would be boring to say over and over again that the numbers I use project a good return on investment and I see no red flags significant enough to make me hold off.
Milwaukee @ Chicago (NL)
Cole Hamels returns today for the Cubs, giving them their deepest rotation since the 2016 team.
It’s interesting to compare that team to this edition. In 2016, the Cubs were a force to be reckoned with. They won the World Series, of course, but they also went 103-58 in the regular season, and their Pythagorean Win-Loss was four or five games better than that figure. They finished the season with a run differential of positive 252, bested by only two teams in the two seasons since (Cleveland topped it by two runs in 2017, and Houston topped it by nine last year).
As one would guess, a lot has changed since then. But at the same time, the roster looks very similar. In theory, the Cubs should have improved dramatically over the years since, as their young talent aged into itself. But while that young talent hasn’t all improved (Báez has gotten incredibly better, Kyle Schwarber and Albert Almora Jr. have not, Carl Edwards Jr. did not, the rest have mostly flat-lined), the bigger difference between those teams might come from personnel.
The 2016 Cubs had four starting pitchers with FIP’s under four, plus Jason Hammel whose 4.48 was accompanied by an overachieving 3.83 ERA. In the bullpen, Justin Grimm and Héctor Rondón had FIP’s at or under 3.50. Aroldis Chapman had a FIP of 0.82. At the plate, Dexter Fowler contributed 4.6 fWAR, and off the bench/in various platoons, the combination of David Ross, Miguel Montero, Chris Coghlan, Jorge Soler, Matt Szczur, and Tommy La Stella contributed a combined 6.0 fWAR—about one win per player.
It’s easy to pin the Cubs’ failure to maintain that excellence on poor development of young hitters, but the more truthful explanation is that the Cubs were extraordinarily deep in 2016, and they struck a lot of good luck when it came to players’ individual performances. Yes, it’s disappointing for Cubs fans that Schwarber isn’t winning Silver Sluggers every year and Almora is a liability offensively. It’s disappointing that the Tyler Chatwood and Brandon Morrow signings have gone so poorly. But what that 2016 team really thrived on was an elite rotation where little went wrong and a collection of surprisingly valuable hitters for whom everything went right. And those are happenings that are hard to recreate.
Pick: Under 9 (-105). Low confidence.
New York (NL) @ Pittsburgh
Marcus Stroman faces Chris Archer tonight in a rematch of former AL East aces. Stroman, of course, was an AL East ace as recently as a week ago, whereas Archer hasn’t really been a typical “ace” since 2015.
Archer’s struggles are, at a glance, puzzling. His velocity is down from where it was back then, but not by more than a mile per hour or two, and it had always wobbled year-to-year. His strikeout numbers are comparable to those glory years.
What seems to have gone wrong is about a 50% increase in walks, a problem that’s new this season, and a high degree of suffering inflicted by the home run boom.
I believe I’ve written about this before on this website, but Archer, back in 2015, allowed home runs at just over a third of the frequency he allows them in 2019. He first increased the amount by about 50% from 2015 to 2016, mostly through an increase in his HR/fly ball ratio. But this year, he’s also increased how many fly balls he allows in the first place, which—along with another HR/FB ratio spike—has been disastrous.
His FIP, entering today, is 5.73. His ERA is 5.58.
The Pirates would like Archer to at least be a serviceable cog in the rotation, and preferably some version of the sub-four-FIP pitcher he was from 2016-2018, even if getting back to 2015 is out of the question. But from the looks of it, to get to serviceability, Archer’s going to need to figure out how to keep the ball out of the air.
Pick: Over 9 (-115). Low confidence.
