Freelance Baseball

Very small five gamer on Thursday. A very busy schedule just got even busier dealing with medical stuff, so Friday…and basically the rest of the month are on a day by day basis. I’ll be here when I can.

Wednesday’s slate is full with 15 games, but 11 of them during the afternoon. Today’s article will only be covering games of interest or potential interest. The early theme through the first week has been losing games late, including two in extra-innings in St Louis already. Let's go for a third. 

First large slate of the season, two short of the full 15 with 11 on the daily fantasy slate. We have a few pitchers coming around for their second start with some teams still on the backend. I was making good time on Monday night until my phone started beeping an extreme tornado warning. 

We have an odd week of baseball with a ton of day games before we settle into a more normal schedule next week. A couple of days won’t even have daily fantasy night slates. I may miss a day towards the end of the week (probably Friday).

As expected, nothing went as expected on Opening Day, which only means the baseball season is underway. The White Sox jumped all over Yusei Kikuchi, Clay Holmes proved you can’t trust spring stats (the Astros BABIP’d near .500 on ground balls, but his sinker couldn’t find the plate) and Garrett Crochet couldn’t get the recently retired Kevin Pillar out. The one Opening Day play posted here was a push.

With 29 of the 30 pitchers for Opening Day confirmed before the weekend and the Dodgers strongly hinting at Blake Snell, I thought I’d be able to spend a few days on a detailed OD pitching article. However, Microsoft Excel had other ideas. I recently upgraded to 365 because their support team said it would solve all my problems. Admittedly, I was using a much older version (2013) because I was afraid of exactly what happened. In fact, none of my problems went away and many more were created, as the newer version did not recognize and refused to import my Fangraphs exports.

As mentioned in the season intro post, there are three significant park alterations to consider this year. Two teams have moved to temporary parks (expected to last at least the entire season), while one has made dimensional changes. We'll cover the latter first, since it's the most familiar. 

On October 16th of last year, Walker Buehler threw just four innings in an LCS game against the Mets, but only allowed three hits, while striking out six without a run. Casual fans probably accept that as a standard performance from an All Star pitcher in a big spot. Only Buehler hasn't been anything close to an All Star in quite a while. After the dreaded Tommy John, he came back to post his worst season ever in 2024 with a 5.38 ERA and only marginally superior 4.78 xERA. At 16.7 inches of vertical break (iVB) and 95 mph, his fastball was merely average. His 10.2 K-BB% was the lowest margin of his career by quite a bit and well below league average. 

We have baseball on Wednesday and Game Five is a living, breathing thing now partially because Dave Roberts did not waver from his commitment to low leverage pitchers, essentially punting Game Four, even though they had a lead at some point, to put his team in a better position for the last three games (if necessary).

Two games in and this series hasn't gone nearly the way I projected. All of the untracked series plays are probably dead except for the Teoscar Hernandez HR leader one. Freddie Freeman is already nearly a lock for MVP, though I shouldn't say that considering all the unforeseen circumstances that have occurred already. Back to Yankee Stadium, where you'd expect cooler weather and a slightly more power friendly environment, though this park plays surprisingly similar to Dodger Stadium outside the short RF porch.