In that dark apocalyptic nightmare that we called 2021, there was a light shining brightly upon the firm buttocks of Robbie Ray, who illuminated our world with a cheeky Cy Young Performance. Why use this as my lede? Because last year, I was brazen enough to look at Robbie Ray — a player who was being drafted as SP5 on in 24-team leagues — and see a Top 50 pitcher. Do I have any other tricks up my sleeve or am I just Simple Minds hoping that you won’t forget about me when I don’t produce any successful brazen takes in 2022?
For “brazen” takes, I want to move beyond the typical “bold” takes that flood the blogosphere. You’re not going to win your league by drafting players who are just OK. You want the players who are massively outperforming their draft position — or who look like obvious avoids, like that roller grill hot dog that clearly has a coffee stain on it.
Tyler Mahle finishes in the Top 15 SP
Rawr, I’m so brazen! The “Tyler Mahle Success Train” is about as edgy as a Linkin Park documentary. Sure, you’ll scare the old ladies at the polka party but teenagers everywhere are just whispering into the mirror, “I’m about to break.” Mahle is taken as the 45th pitcher overall at NFBC (including relievers) and is 126th overall, with a high pick of 199. But as I look at my SWAT Guide to Starters (Sponsored by GamePro), I notice that my personal rankings have Mahle ahead of players like Shane Bieber, Jose Berrios, and Sandy Alcantara, all of whom are being drafted 50-80 picks earlier. Let’s dig into Mahle’s marks for 2022 and what makes him a brazen pick.
Mahle finished as SP27 in 2021, buffered by 13 wins and 210 strikeouts and hampered by a 3.75 ERA and a 1.23 WHIP. We’re living in a time where a sub-4.00 ERA is a bad thing! Well, if we’re only using 100 out of the 400ish SPs/openers that appear every year, then yeah, it’s sub-optimal over the course of the season. Going into 2022, Mahle is 27 years old and slated to be the #2 starter on the Cincinnati Reds, behind SABRmetric superstar Luis Castillo. But, Mahle was pretty good at the ol’ advanced stats himself. Looking at K-BB% — which is one of the most predictable factors in pitcher success — Mahle finished as the 32nd best among qualified starters in 2021, which was within the same percentage threshold as Walker Buehler, Joe Musgrove, and Shane McClanahan.
Right now I hear the keyboard clacking sounds of those readers who are searching for Mahle’s splits because they hate hearing hype and they love pointing out splits, as if reducing the sample size of a player’s performance is somehow superior practice. It’s the same thing I do with Gerrit Cole to shock y’all. While I’m at it, Gerrit Cole –AGAIN — had a run that lasted 20% of the season with a 6.15 ERA and a 5+FIP and a 2+ HR/9 and y’all are drafting him as the first SP overall. WHATEVER. Back to Mahle: the splits are clean, and I mean like they’re basically statistically identical across the pre-and- post All-Star Break, and he actually got a bit better after the 2021 sticky stuff ban. Arguably, Mahle’s worst run of games came in the middle of the season, where over the course of 7 outings he had a 4.93 ERA/4.53 FIP and only 2 wins, yet he still cranked out nearly 40IP, 54K, and had an encouraging 3.53 xFIP over that time span. In layman’s terms, his 1.64 HR/9 stat over that period was a bit fluky due to the small sample size, and a couple of those homers were affected by park factors rather than pitcher factors. Why do I keep rambling about small sample sizes here? Because if we compare Mahle’s worst 2021 period to Gerrit Cole’s worst 2021 period, we find that Mahle actually comes out a bit ahead. Cole was actually hurting your team at spots in 2021, which is not what you want from your first-round draft pick; Mahle was merely simply sub-optimal at his worst, and you would have received positive value if you just set him and forget him. No wait, don’t forget him, that’s the whole point of this brazen exercise!
ENYWHEY. Tyler Mahle: good track record, advanced stats check out, off-the-radar at ADP 127, and Win upside (did I just say that about the Reds?). You know what would make me really happy? A Shane Bieber/Chris Sale/Tyler Mahle top of the rotation on your fantasy team. There’s a non-zero chance that trio puts up 800 Ks this year, and you didn’t need to overpay on a single draft pick.
Luis Castillo Returns to Top 10 SP Form
Buy low theory in full effect! OK, I promise I’m not a Reds fan, what with the two brazen predictions about the top of the Reds rotation to start my article. But I suppose that my Twins fandom probably gives me a bit of a proclivity to root for the underdog, and here we are with Luis Castillo. A lot went wrong for Castillo in 2021, and it wasn’t just a massive discrepancy between his baseball card stats and his Bill James stats. After being drafted as a top 10 SP in 2021, Castillo finished as SP72 on the season, right around noted aces Nick Pivetta, James Kaprielian, and Michael Pineda.
Throughout 2021, I noted how Castillo was getting unlucky, as if he had never heard Pharrell. Throughout his first two months of 2021 MLB action, Castillo had a cumulative 6.47 ERA, but his FIP/xFIP were a full two points lower, and his BABIP sat at an unappealing .335. One major factor in Castillo’s “unluck” was his nearly 4.00 BB/9 rate to start the season, which was uglier than waking up to me after I’ve binge-watched all the Star Wars movies. To finish the season, Castillo went 85 innings with a 3.18 ERA and matching FIP/xFIP numbers while cutting his BB/9 down to a still-too-thick 3.18/9. Is symmetry between ERA and BB/9 a thing? BRB, gonna listen to Synchronicity (I kid, I’m listening to Loathe as I write this).
The reason I’m highlighting Castillo here? Two names: Robbie Ray and Corbin Burnes. The biggest jumps we saw in pitcher performance over the past few years came from players who had one really bad pitch, several other good pitches, and then they eliminated or drastically overhauled the bad pitch. This is, of course, a classic “play to your strengths” mentality — you won’t keep your job if you don’t fix something that is really problematic. Who remembers that Corbin Burnes had the absolute worst fastball in 2020? You probably don’t remember it anymore because he ditched that pitch for a cutter and now you’re drafting him in the first round. Meanwhile, Robbie Ray had a few too many pitches that didn’t allow him to set up his knee-breaking slider enough. The solution? He overhauled his failing fastball to his older-bat-missing style and then became a two-pitch primary pitcher (with his fastball and slider adding up to 90% of his pitch totals in 2021).
In other words, we can’t look at bad performance at this level of competition as necessarily predictive. There are something like 100 minor league teams filled with aspiring baseball players who would love to take Castillo’s job. So, for a player like Burnes or Ray or Castillo to remain employed, they need to make changes. Changes mean defying projections. In the case of Ray and Burnes, we saw them make those changes immediately, deflecting their weaknesses and buffeting their strengths. In the case of Ray, we had actually seen him be a top 10 fantasy starter before his 2020 collapse and 2021 resurrection. Burnes nearly blew his chance at an MLB role by starting his career with an 8.82 ERA in 2019. Yeesh.
Now I’m asking you to consider Luis Castillo as a candidate to move from collapse to resurrection for your 2022 teams.
Luis Castillo fits this “buy-low” model perfectly. To recap: we need a promising pitcher who has one really bad main pitch and plus secondary pitches. In 2021, Castillo had the 5th worst weighted fastball among MLB starters who threw more than 40IP. This awful fastball was also his primary pitch, accounting for 52% of his repertoire. Meanwhile, he possessed the 12th best slider (better than Robbie Ray!) and 17th best changeup (better than Aaron Nola, Corbin Burnes, and Kevin Gausman!) among the same qualified cohort of starters. And Castillo had these great secondary pitches despite racking up a fantasy season where he would have been better left on your bench for much of the year.
The good news? Castillo had a positive value fastball in 2019 and 2020, and his fastball velocity was cranking upwards of 98MPH to finish the 2021 season. If we look at Castillo’s post-All Star Break stats last year (there’s that small sample size again!), we see that Castillo made improvements to his fastball, becoming merely the 12th worst fastballer in MLB (next to, gasp! Tyler Mahle). But each pitcher had elite non-fastball pitches, which is what we’re looking for in our model. Castillo was already putting up nice fantasy value to finish the 2021 season while still having a bad fastball. If he makes minor tweaks to recover his 2019-2020 form — even if he just arrives at a status quo fastball — he has more than a fair shot at reclaiming his status as a top 10 starter in the 2022 season — a fantasy value that many drafters were fine with in early 2021. At an ADP of 83rd overall and being drafted next to SP like Frankie Montas, we can easily see Castillo returning massive value for 2022 fantasy baseball teams.
What are your brazen predictions for the 2022 season? Let me know down in the comments and have an awesome week!
