Tuma: What I Got Right in 2022
A look back at my biggest hits of the fantasy baseball season
I recently reviewed “What I Got Wrong” for 2022 fantasy baseball purposes. It’s an important part of my process, remembering the bets ( made back in March 2022, recalling why I made them, and then determining what can be learned for next year and beyond.
Today, I’m looking back on the calls I got right. It’s admittedly a more fun exercise for obvious reasons, but it isn’t meant to be a pat on the back. It’s all just part of the process. Process, process, process. Hopefully some of these calls helped make your summer more enjoyable for fantasy purposes.
Shane McClanahan
There’s only one place to start, and it’s with the player my “brand” became synonymous with this past year — Mr. Shane O’Mac.
I discussed McClanahan throughout the offseason. He was one of my 3 breakout pitchers to target on Underdog Network and a player I thought had multiple paths to a ceiling outcome.
The thesis for targeting McClanahan in 2022 was that his rookie campaign flashed both a trustworthy floor and an exciting ceiling. This is the sort of “small miss, big hit” bet we want to make. Given his 8th round ADP, I felt if we missed on McClanahan it wouldn’t kill our teams. But if he hit? A top-5 SP season was in the range of outcomes.
Luckily, the best possible outcome came to fruition. Among pitchers who threw at least 120 innings in 2021, McClanahan’s 14.8% swinging strike rate ranked 9th in all of baseball. His 3.23 xFIP ranked 8th. These pointed to his true skill level in a way the 3.43 ERA and 1.27 WHIP didn’t. There were workload concerns too. He had a blazing fastball as a rookie, but it got hit hard. This was backed up by Fangraphs’ pitch values, in addition to a Baseball Savant page that featured far too much “blue” for such a promising arm.
Shane pulled off multiple tricks in order to reach his potential as a sophomore. First, he altered his pitch mix, lowering the frequency at which he threw his four-seamer while increasing the use of his changeup (especially against righties). Furthermore, the locations in which he deployed these offerings improved dramatically, especially with his changeup. Take a look:
You continue combing through McClanahan’s year to year changes and every single metric either went from poor to immaculate (hard-hit data) or from good to great (strikeout, walk rates). He also created better extension and improved the vertical movement on his fastball. Per Eno Sarris’ pitching model, his Stuff+/Location+ sky rocketed from 106.7/101.6 as a rookie to 118.3/103 in Year 2. That’s the the good stuff.
This was an ascending arm who still had room to grow, the type of player who we could (in spring 2022) envision towards the top of draft boards in 2023. That litmus test generally means it’s a good idea to invest.
One year after flag-planting Vladito for similar reasons, McClanahan’s 2022 success is a reminder to aggressively target early-career breakout candidates when the price is correctly floor and ceiling adjusted.
Spencer Strider
At one point early this summer I thought the mustachioed, large-thighed rookie SP from Atlanta was going to be my 2023 version of Vlad/McClanahan.
I was blown away by his ‘22 debut out of the bullpen, but it wasn’t until late-May when Strider joined the club’s starting rotation. Those first couple of starts required some patience, which I stressed, and from that point on Strider was one of the most valuable players in fantasy baseball. It was the start of the most prominent, exclusive fan club on the internet, #TeamStrider.
From June 10th until his mid-September oblique injury, Strider went 10-3 with a 2.64 ERA (1.72 FIP) with 153 strikeouts in 99 innings. Okay then! I quickly said goodbye to my hopes of landing him at any sort of discount in 2023.
Still, being early on Strider’s rise was my best in-season call of 2022, so it’s important to review what led to the belief so quickly.
The answer initially lied in Sarris’ pitching model. We knew Strider’s Stuff+ was outrageous before he threw a single regular season pitch. What we didn’t know was how the control would fare, and over a 3-appearance stretch from April 11th through April 23rd, the young right-hander had an ugly 6:8 K:BB ratio.
[Note I’ve spent the past 25 minutes looking for an article from around this time highlighting an approach change Strider made, which led me to believe his quickly-improving control was legit, but I simply cannot find it. For now just trust me it exists].
The lesson, I think, is to buy into “stuff” when the acquisition cost mostly represents upside. Elite stuff partly played into the McClanahan call. It was also a factor in touting Dylan Cease as a breakout pick. Aaron Ashby and Hunter Greene never fully got there, but the upside is still evident and if the cost is right we should be going right back to them in 2023.
“Stuff” breeds aces. Yes, we can cobble together worthwhile seasons from Cal Quantrill and Jose Quintana, two 2022 contributors who rely on their locations, but we’re never getting that fantasy-breaking year from them. That’s what Strider provided. There was never a guarantee he would harness his command, especially in the middle of his rookie campaign, but if he did, the results would be extraordinary. And they were. Among all pitchers who threw at least 130 innings in 2022, he finished 1st in both K-BB% and swinging strike rate.
In fact, among all pitchers with at least 130 IP in a season since 2000, Strider’s 29.7 K-BB% is a top-10 mark. Long live #TeamStrider.
The Macro Fantasy Baseball Environment
I spent a lot of time thinking about fantasy baseball’s macro environment entering the year. There’s just been so many changes lately:
2019: mega juiced ball
2020: shortened 60-game major league season, no minor league season
2021: deadened ball, sticky stuff banned midway through the year
2022: lockout offseason, humidors in every park, and the new CBA encourages a record number of prospect debuts
Oh, and 2023 will feature shift restrictions, a pitch clock, and rules to encourage more stolen base attempts We’ll have our work cut out for us yet again.
There was an argument to be made at this time last year that “MLB keeps changing the ball, there’s no point in trying to guess which ball it’ll be”, but I didn’t buy into that. Reading the tea leaves from what MLB was trying to accomplish by intervening at all, I felt really strongly we’d see a depressed offensive environment from what we had gotten used to. We already saw a downtick in the liveliness of the ball in 2021, and MLB reportedly used both the old and new balls that season.
2022 was going to be all new (deadened) balls. I’d say that’s what we got:
Another way to grasp baseball’s new reality is through the league’s home run to fly ball rate, which I highlighted in “No More Juiced Balls: How to Approach Hitters in 2022 Fantasy Baseball Drafts.” Here are the year-by-year HR/FB rates from the Juiced Ball era:
2015: 11.4%
2016: 12.8%
2017: 13.7%
2018: 12.7%
2019: 15.3% (!!)
2020: 14.8%
2021: 13.6%
2022 checked in at 11.4%, which tied for the lowest mark since 2015 (4 of the 6 seasons from 2009-14 were below 10%, for reference).
This made power the most scarce resource in fantasy baseball and it’s why Aaron Judge basically broke the Razzball player rater for his 62-homer heroics. I didn’t specifically prioritize power in drafts, but I was targeting bats in the early rounds.
The thesis was that if league-wide offense fell, then there would be less great hitters, making the best ones more valuable.
Furthermore, even the limited use of deadened ball in 2021 led to a deeper middle tier of starting pitchers. This made sense intuitively - if pitchers could trust that not every fly ball would result in a homer, like what happened at the height of the Juiced Ball Era, then pitching to contact becomes a more viable strategy and thus deepens the pool of usable arms.
Additionally, banning sticky stuff made the most dominant starters less dominant.
In the end, just 2 of Razzball’s top 25 most valuable players for this year were pitchers. High-end bats were needed to win and were tougher to find on the waiver wire.
I’m soon going to conduct the same study of the 2022 class of SPS that I did for 2017-21, but I’m theorizing that we’ll see another tight standard deviation in xFIP from SPs 11-40.
If that’s the case, then I’ll once again be advocating for early-round bats (and especially power!) in 2023. From there, all we’ll need to do is correctly predict how 3 of the most significant rule changes (the aforementioned shift, bases, pitch clock) will affect the entire fantasy baseball landscape, and we’ll be golden.
I can’t wait to get started.