CheeseIsGood’s Pre-Musings: 2020 MLB Here We Come!
Ah, 2020, it’s been an honor and a privilege getting to know you. I sincerely hope all of you are hanging in there and doing as well as can be expected. While it’s going to be unusual and even less predictable than normal, I am thrilled that we have MLB coming back into our lives.
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As soon as the season starts, we’ll be diving in headfirst with my Million Dollar Musings, Allan Lem’s Q&A and STLCards Covering The Bases breaking down the main slates for you each and every day. If you’re new to MLB, new to RG, or just want some refreshers, let me recommend a few things you can check out leading up to Opening Day:
CheeseIsGood Pre-Musings – Pitching Basics
CheeseIsGood Pre-Musings – Hitting Basics
PlateIQ RotoAcademy – Six Part Video on Using PlateIQ
These primers will have you up and ready to hit the ground running out of the gate. Now, let’s take a look at some of the challenges of this shortened 2020 season.
How Long Are These Guys Going To Pitch?
Most of the big issues for fantasy baseball 2020 reside on the Season Long side of things. The good news for DFS is that we don’t have to try and predict who is going to get injured, who is going to get sick, or how fast someone will recover. We will have the days starting lineups before the games start. I really don’t see a huge difference in how we will be breaking down hitting in 2020. The bigger problem will be on the pitching side, especially in the first few weeks of the season.
We’ve already heard some teams mention the possibility of short outings for their starters the first couple times through the rotation, and with the stop-and-go spring into a shortened July-training, we can’t assume the pitchers will be as ready as they would be in a normal April. Each day, we’ll talk through what we know about expected pitch counts, but the big picture takeaway here is that I plan to be very cautious with spending a lot of salary on pitchers early on.
If we get news that an ace pitcher is at a full workload, great, I’ll take it, but I don’t expect we’ll hear much of that. If you’ve been with me in the past, you know I am historically a ‘pay up at pitcher in cash games’ guy, as those have always been and will always be the most secure points we can get in DFS. However, a lot of that is tied not just to talent, but also to workload. If the ace pitchers are not getting their normal 100+ pitches, then their skills will not always be enough to make up the gap in shorter innings.
Depending on how the salaries shake out, I will likely be much more willing to spend the bulk of my resources on bats, even in cash games to open the season. As we get past the first couple of times through the rotation, we’ll start to get a clearer picture of how each team is using their starters, and I fully expect that by mid-August, we are going to be in an essentially ‘normal’ place with the top pitchers. In a shorter 60-game season, every game takes on more significance, so most teams should want to use their best pitchers as much as possible, regardless of whether those best pitchers are starters or relievers.
What this means is that once we get past the bumpy start to the season, the ace starters should regain full value, and perhaps be even more valuable than they’ve been in the past. My reasoning here is that with expanded rosters, teams will have a couple of extra arms in their bullpens. Teams will have even less incentive to leave their weaker starters in games, as they’ll have more options to replace them in the mid-innings. But, with the better pitchers, they’ll still be better than their middle relief corps, so the best option there is to leave the aces in the game longer.
Again, this will all be discussed here on a daily basis, and I want to be sure not to try to get too far ahead of myself in predicting how things will play out. But as a basic blueprint of what I expect to see, the first few weeks of the season it will be questionable to pay up at pitching, but the deeper we get, the more the edge will shift back to the top pitchers.
Rule Changes For 2020
National League DH
The biggest overall change to the rules in MLB this season is the addition of the DH to National League rosters. This is going to balance out the leagues a bit in terms of scoring, lowering the value of NL starters compared to AL. Perhaps this gives the occasional extra inning to an NL starter that doesn’t need to get pinch-hit for, but that’s not the type of thing I’ll be chasing one way or another.
What this really does overall in DFS is gives a little more merit to stacking towards the bottom of the lineup and using wrap-around stacks with NL teams. It’s always been tough to use #8 hitters in the NL knowing they’d just get walked if they come up with runners in scoring position and an open base, and knowing they are likely to be stranded on base if they reach with two outs.
While we will still have plenty of pinch-hitting going on, the combination of the DH, along with the three-batter minimum for relief pitchers should help keep those Joc Pederson-type lefties in the lineup a little more often. We’ll talk through these spots case by case in season, but in general, it’s a positive for NL batters who typically often have pinch-hit risk.
Extra Innings = Extra Runner
In an effort to keep games shorter, MLB is implementing a new rule for extra-inning games, starting the inning with a runner on second base. As far as doing daily research and building rosters, this is a completely irrelevant rule one way or the other for DFS. But, as for the actual playing out of contests, I see it as a slight decrease to variance. What will likely happen, is we’ll see a lot of bunting the runner to third and trying to score that one run on a sac fly. This will mean shorter and lower scoring extra-inning games, which sometimes shift contest in an annoying and tilting way. We really shouldn’t be trying to project a game to go to extra innings, and with this new rule, the points scored in extra-inning games should be minimized.
Relievers – Three-Batter Minimum
This is a new rule that was set prior to the original opening to the season. This rule will have a big effect on real-life baseball, but not quite as much for our purposes. Pitchers will be required to either face a minimum of three batters, or to pitch until the end of an inning. The main thing this changes is that relievers cannot be brought in to face one batter (unless it’s the 3rd out after replacing a starter or multi-inning reliever) and then be taken out. This also means that when we see an opener, they do have to pitch at least one full inning, though that is almost always the case already anyway. As mentioned above, this might occasionally help a left-handed batter who may have been pinch-hit for in the past being able to stay in the game, and it may occasionally get the starting pitcher a few extra batters faced. Essentially, I have no change to my DFS lineup building process because of this rule.
Roster Size
Going back to what I said about the pitchers, I think we’re going to see a season that starts off as wild as we expect but fairly quickly ends up being essentially business as usual for DFS purposes. The new roster limits play into that theory. To open the season, teams will have a 30-man active roster. In past seasons, the active roster has been at 25 players. This will allow teams an extra bat or two on the bench along with several extra bullpen arms to help those starting pitchers build up stamina. After two weeks, the rosters will be trimmed to 28, and two weeks after that, they’ll be cut by another two, leaving it at a 26-man active roster. So by the time we get through August, rosters are only one player bigger than usual, but this all gives teams that flexibility to have extra bullpen arms early in the season. Again, pitcher workload is one of the main things we’ll discuss here on a daily basis, but as a general rule of thumb, I’m expecting a lot of short outings that are not worth paying for early in the season.
Schedules and Sample Sizes
For real-life baseball and season-long fantasy, analyzing the teams abbreviated schedules changes a lot of things. Some teams have easier opponents or better ballparks, some have worse. But, this is DFS, and we will only have to look at one day at a time. The only thing that could change a little based on these schedules is how the already unpredictable small sample size stats for the current season will be hard to decipher. In a regular season, in the first 60 games, I am relying almost entirely on the previous season’s stats, as we just don’t have enough at-bats or innings pitched to give us meaningful data. There is going to be a lot of disagreement (and freaking out) from people wanting to read into 2020 small sample size numbers and playing hot streaks and cold streaks. Please refer to my Pre-Musings Part 4 for a peek into my view on many of the issues that are going to come into play with data in a small season.
Just know going in that I am going to basing my analysis heavily on historical stats, and while I’ll talk through who has started off hot or cold or otherwise (lukewarm?), approximately 57% of you are going to be upset with me at some point in August over a player who appears to be suddenly better or worse than ever based on a very small sample size. The other 43% of you, you’re invited to the year-end ice cream party! This party is tentatively scheduled for November 6th, 2027, when the dust has settled, location TBA.
As long as we all understand what data we’re using to have the opinions we have, we can come to different conclusions. It is going to be a fun and interesting ride without having the usual six months for everything to even out. You are allowed to chase hot streaks, high BABIP’s, or HR/FB%, but my analysis in the Musings will always be focused more on the long-term underlying skill sets of the players.
I also want to start off the season by letting you know that the Musings are going to be taking on a slightly different form this season, to do my best to be as useful as possible for the short season. The pitching section will look about the same as you’re used to, where I’ll sort through different tiers of pitchers, looking at where the cash game builds are bringing me, where we can find cheaper value for tournaments, potential risks, etc. But on the hitting side, I’m going to try and be much more focused on the lineup building process. I will still walk through some favorite stacks and batters on every slate, but I am going to spend less time trying to talk about every viable play, and more time talking about different ways to construct lineups on that given slate for different types of contests. We’ll see how it goes, and I’m always here for feedback and to answer questions.
Cliff Notes
If you missed it last year, we discovered together that the world-renowned ‘Cliff Notes’ are actually called CliffsNotes, and they are named after a dude named Clifford Hillegass. Hillegass, of course, as you know, was from Lincoln, Nebraska, and met a non-jabroni named Jack Cole, who was a Canadian of all things, and had a series of study guides called…..wait for it…. Coles Notes. Hillegass, ever the genius, bought the rights to Coles Notes in the United States, and proceeded to take over the world. Now, of course, CliffsNotes is the thing you can get as a student when you don’t really want to read the whole book that you’re supposed to read.
I tend to get pretty longwinded and full of nonsense and occasional Tom Foolery, and combined with all the baseball stats that I yammer on about, I know that some of you don’t want to read everything I have to say every day. Of course, you should, as the best nuggets are always buried deep in the most random paragraphs, but I understand you may have better things to do. As such, I will always have a helpful friendly guide, affectionately known as Cliff Notes at the end of both the pitching and the hitting section. This will be a quick wrap up of my thoughts on the slate that you can use as a cheat sheet, just be aware that they won’t capture the whole picture.