Jose Abreu Vs. the Scouting Reports
Today’s the day that Jose Abreu wins the 2014 American League Rookie of the Year Award. Seems like they’re doing a whole announcement show, and nothing’s official yet because they don’t want to spoil the suspense, but the suspense has already long been spoiled, by Abreu and by the rest of the AL rookie class. There’s been a little bit of chatter that Abreu might have an MVP case. Now, he’s not going to have an MVP case, as reflected by the voting, but if a guy is getting talked up in some circles as a dark-horse MVP, he’s your Rookie of the Year.
A little over a year ago, the White Sox signed Abreu to a six-year contract. At that point, it looked like a heavy investment in a player whose value would be entirely tied up in his bat. Now, Abreu’s looks like one of the more valuable contracts in the game, as he’s coming off a season that saw him answer most of the questions about his productivity. Abreu wasn’t an outstanding defender at first base. He wasn’t a stealth quality base-runner, so everything really did come down to the hitting, but the hitting was phenomenal from start to finish, and it seems worthwhile now to reflect upon Abreu’s scouting reports around the time of his signing.
Conveniently, we can stare at this article from Jerry Crasnick in September 2013. He spoke to a small handful of talent evaluators, and, let’s ignore the stuff about Abreu’s defense and speed and body. Let’s consider only what was said about his offense. We’ll go in order, first showing the report, then examining data from Abreu’s 2014. In this way, we can see how and where Abreu might have exceeded expectations.
1
Multiple scouts used the term “slider-speed bat” in reference to Abreu. Translation: He might be challenged against pitchers who can crowd him with fastballs on the inner half of the plate.
[…]
“If you throw him 90-92 [mph] inside, he gets beat a lot,” said a scout for a National League club. “I don’t think he’s going to hit a good hard fastball in.”
Now, there’s one important point to make here, before we proceed: it’s hard to hit a good inside fastball. Lots of good hitters get challenged with heat under the hands, because that’s a perceived weakness. Some guys look for inside heat, but then they can be vulnerable to stuff away, because they’re focused on the pull side. It’s not an easy thing to cover the whole hitting zone, and when you’re as good at going the other way as Abreu is, that means you could have a corresponding weakness.
But anyhow, we can turn to Baseball Savant. Let’s look at right-handed hitters, against fastballs and fastball types over or beyond the inner half of the plate. The league average against such pitches was a .438 slugging percentage. Abreu came in at .506, far from the league lead, but ranked above the middle. Some other names in his vicinity: Adam Jones, Mike Napoli, Adrian Beltre, and Aramis Ramirez. If Abreu had a weakness in there, it wasn’t often exploited.
There are also some other indicators we can look at. How’d the league pitch to Abreu? For example, Mike Trout has a known weakness against fastballs up, so Trout saw a lot of fastballs up. Abreu saw 31% inside fastballs, a little above the righty league average of 28%. But Abreu’s overall fastball rate was one of the lowest in baseball, as pitchers preferred to try to get him out more often with slower stuff. This could explain why: Abreu ranked third in the game in run value against fastballs. He was first against cutters. He was first in value against fastballs per 100. Abreu clobbered fastballs. He clobbered a lot of fastballs over the plate, but if he has a weak spot, it’s tucked way in there.
2
“But there’s a lot of marginal pitching out there. The No. 1 and 2 starters are going to get him out, but he’s going to feast on the 3, 4 and 5 guys. That’s where he’s going to make his money.”
The best pitchers get most guys out. We can acknowledge that up front. But now, let’s look at Abreu. This is a little subjective, but I went through his log, prevented myself from seeing his results, and created this group of high-quality starting-pitching opponents:
- Anibal Sanchez
- Clayton Kershaw
- Collin McHugh
- Corey Kluber
- Dallas Keuchel
- David Price
- Felix Hernandez
- Garrett Richards
- Hisashi Iwakuma
- Jake Arrieta
- James Shields
- Jeff Samardzija
- Jon Lester
- Matt Shoemaker
- Max Scherzer
- Phil Hughes
Against that group of pitchers, Abreu batted 113 times. He hit for a .305 average, and a .514 slugging percentage. He homered off Kershaw, Kluber, Price, and Richards.
3
But his raw power compares favorably with Puig, Cespedes and White Sox outfielder Dayan Viciedo, who all have the ability to scatter clouds when they catch a ball just right.
“He has monstrous power,” said a scout who began following Abreu at the 2009 IBAF World Cup.
This past season, 146 players qualified for the batting title. Out of all of them, Abreu finished first with a 26.9% HR/FB. In other words, more than a quarter of Abreu’s fly balls left the yard he was hitting in. Right behind him: Giancarlo Stanton. A few more percentage points behind him: Chris Davis. There have been only two higher rates since 2009. Abreu wasn’t constantly hitting the ball 450 feet, but there are a few ways to show raw power. You can show peak power, and you can end up with home runs despite mis-hitting the ball, or hitting it on a line. Abreu hit home runs of all types.
Not surprisingly, Abreu wound up with a top-five finish in isolated power. Additionally, he was one of nine players to finish with an isolated power of at least .250 to all three fields. That’s a group with names like Paul Goldschmidt and Andrew McCutchen.
4
“He’s crafty. I think he’ll make the adjustments.”
This is a stretch, but I just want somewhere to put this. Last season, Abreu finished sixth in baseball in OPS with the pitcher ahead in the count. He finished third in baseball in OPS in two-strike counts. Despite what the contact numbers might indicate, Abreu was not an easy hitter to put away, in putaway situations.
5
Another expressed concern that Abreu looks “confused” against breaking balls and thought he could benefit from a little seasoning in the upper minors. Once Abreu gets the hang of major league pitching, the consensus is that he has the strength to hit 30 homers by accident.
By run values, Abreu was indeed a little below average facing curveballs. However, against sliders, he finished in the upper fifth, and he also had some success against changeups, splitters, and knuckleballs. An interesting part of Abreu’s season: before the All-Star break, he struck out 24% of the time, and he drew unintentional walks 4% of the time. After the break, he struck out 18% of the time, and he drew unintentional walks 9% of the time. The improvement in K-BB% was the second-biggest in baseball, just a bit behind Jedd Gyorko, as Abreu became less of a slugger and more of a hitter. To whatever extent he was bothered by breaking stuff, it didn’t stop him from hitting north of .300.
6
“Hitting-wise, he reminds me a lot of Dayan Viciedo,” said a scout. “He’s just not as athletic. This guy has more power than Kendrys Morales. But Morales is a better hitter for me.”
A second evaluator compares Abreu with Angels prospect C.J. Cron, a former first-round pick who hit .274 with 14 home runs in the Double-A Texas League this season. And another scout told Rob Biertempfel of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that Abreu has “Pedro Alvarez-type power with more hit-ability and the same body type, too.”
Dayan Viciedo owns a 95 career wRC+. Kendrys Morales is at 111. Cron just finished at 113. Alvarez stands at 104. As a rookie, Abreu came in at 165. He’s projected by Steamer for a 143. Pedro Alvarez-type power with more hit-ability? That sounds like Pedro Alvarez, but good, which sounds reasonable now. Jose Abreu is a lot like Pedro Alvarez when he’s going well. And that guy’s an All-Star.
7
“If he is simply what he is right now, he will probably develop into a middle-of-the-road first baseman with ’80’ raw power, who guesses and kills mistakes and inferior pitching but struggles against top-quality guys,” the scout said. “That’s not a bad floor, actually, and that’s the reason why he’ll get paid anyway. But he may disappoint the expectations of ‘best hitter on the planet’ that some have already placed on him.”
Given his swing-and-miss tendencies, and given how frequently he goes out of the zone, it would be hard to buy Abreu as the best hitter on the planet. For that title, you’d be looking for a little better control of the strike zone. Jose Abreu isn’t the best hitter in baseball. But then, last year, the gap between him and first place in wRC+ was six points. Steamer this year projects him right between Paul Goldschmidt and Buster Posey. Jose Abreu isn’t the best hitter in baseball. But based on Year 1, he sure is awful close.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Watching him all year, it seems like his success came from the ability to make adjustments DURING an at bat. A pitcher would throw him a breaking ball, he’d swing 2 seconds early and above it by 10 inches. The pitcher, thinking “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” would go back to the same pitch, and Abreu would clobber it.
My hypothesis for getting him out is this: throw random pitches out of the zone, never in the same spot twice.
To tangent off this, he also made adjustments throughout the season. April & May he was basically your prototypical power hitter. Yet, as the season went on he refined his approach (used opposite field, cut K’s, increased BB’s) and became a hitter with power.
That advice perhaps could be generalized to “don’t be predictable”
Thanks for the article.
Some discussion about Abreu’s HR decline / BABIP rise in the second half and whether we expect the homers to return would have been nice too.
I pin it on fatigue and simple regression.
“As we all know, mid-season splits are less predictive than full season results. While Abreu’s power fell off in the second half, in the absence of an recurring injury, we should assume it was due to randomness, sequencing, or the gods of baseball, and thus isn’t particularly useful in projecting Abreu’s 2015 season.”
I think to really get the #1/#2 numbers you’d want to look at the results only against:
Anibal Sanchez
Clayton Kershaw
Corey Kluber
David Price
Felix Hernandez
Hisashi Iwakuma
Jake Arrieta
James Shields
Jon Lester
Max Scherzer
I waiver on whether to include Jeff Samardzija but he probably won’t introduce too much noise on his own. Guys like McHugh, Shoemaker, and Keuchel are not #2 pitchers in the scouting sense, regardless of whether the depth charts on their teams might throw them into certain matchups.
McHugh and Keuchel pitched well enough this year to be considered #2 starters by any standard. Both pitched to about a 4 WAR per 200 innings level.
I hate to sound like a broken record WRT game theory, but…
A player’s “weakness” is in a vacuum and assumes some fixed rate of throwing that particular pitch in that particular location.
Leaving count and game situations aside, once you factor in how often a pitcher throws a certain pitch/location to a batter, IT WILL NO LONGER BE A WEAKNESS OR STRENGTH. All pitches will have equal value!
In other words, you cannot find a batter’s weakness by looking at the values of those pitches and expecting it to be less (from the hitter’s perspective) than other pitches.
Here is a thought experiment. Again, we’ll put count and game situation aside. IOW, we will assume that the count (and game situation) does not change the value of any pitch.
A batter, say, Abreu, generally has a “weakness” against high inside fastballs, more so than the average batter. I put “weakness” in quotes because, as you will see, “strength” and “weakness” are dynamic and context dependent concepts.
So you look at the value of his pitches and you see that he indeed has a lower value when he gets those pitches, which he receives 20% of the time (or any percentage, it doesn’t matter). Well, if that is the case, then pitchers would throw him 25% of those pitches, right? In that case, what happens? The value of those pitches goes up (and the value of the other pitches goes down), because the value of a pitch is directly related to a batter’s expectation. If you don’t believe that, simply imagine guaranteeing a batter all fastballs or all curve balls and imagine what it would be like. \
And what if the value of that 25% fastball that the batter can now expect more often goes up, and the values of the other pitches goes down, but the value of the inside fastball is still worse for the hitter, OR, if you insist, the values don’t change?
The pitchers would throw even more fastballs, right? 30%. Now we check again to see which values are higher, the high inside fastball or the off-speed pitches. And the response is the same. If they still have not converged, the pitcher will throw even more fastballs.
Where do you think it ends? It ends with either the pitcher throws 100% high, inside fastballs, because the value of the fastball, even when the batters knows it is coming, it is still worse for him than an off-speed which almost never comes (i.e., it is a complete surprise), OR, in almost all cases, it ends with the value of the fastball and all other pitches being EXACTLY the same.
So, please, Jeff, and everyone else, stop thinking that there is some fixed definition to a batter’s “strengths” and “weaknesses,” and more importantly, stop thinking (and writing) that you can find it by looking at the value of these pitches (not to mention the fact that looking only a SA or any stat “on contact” tells us the value of a pitch – it doesn’t).
If you want to define a batter’s strengths or weakness, in terms of pitches, as the value of that pitch given some fixed percentage of time thrown plus a fixed count and game situation, that’s fine. If you do, then you STILL will not find that the actual values of those pitches will be any different than any other pitches (again, given the same count, pitcher, and game situation.
You CAN however infer to SOME degree a batter’s “strengths and weaknesses.” It is the percentage of time he gets a pitch, compared to other batters, again, given the same context. If batter A gets a high, inside fastball 30% of the time, and batter B, 28% of the time, assuming the exact same context, then we can assume that batter A is weaker with that pitch than batter B, relative to the other pitches and the overall value of all pitches to that batter.
But does that not (incorrectly) assume every pitcher is throwing the perfect % of specific pitches based on the hitter’s strengths and weaknesses? For example, Mike Trout sees a lot of high fastballs, because it looks like he has trouble with them, compared to other pitches. However, given that his numbers are still worse on high fastballs compared to other pitches, shouldn’t pitchers be throwing him even MORE high fastballs? Obviously eventually there will be a “break-even point”, but how does anyone know when that point has been reached?
You don’t need a “perfect” game theoretical distribution of pitch selection for what I said to be true. It IS true and it HAS TO be true.
If Trout gets more high fastballs than other batters (again, in similar situations), and STILL has a SIGNIFICANTLY lower value on those fastballs, then, yes, pitchers will OBVIOUSLY throw him more fastballs. They and their coaches and scouts are not idiots. Will they eventually throw him the EXACTLT CORRECT percentage of fastballs? No, of course not.
But they are surely just as likely to throw him a bit too many or a bit too few, which is why his VALUE on those pitches, relative to the value of his other pitches, can NOT tell you what his weakness is.
If in fact Trout still has a lower value on those fastballs, it does not necessarily mean that pitchers are throwing too few. It is SOME evidence that they are, but one would first have to parse everything into similar (count, pitcher, outs, runners, etc.) buckets and THEN compare pitch values.
And even then, if the differences are small, it could be noise or it could be that pitchers are slightly under or over throwing that particular pitch.
But, whether batters and pitchers act optimally will not change the fact that you can’t look at pitch values to find a batter’s weakness, no matter how you slice it!
I think you have to demonstrate this. There are plausible reasons why pitchers may, on the whole, always adjust their approach less than game theory would dictate they should.
Jeff did include Abreu’s percentage of time being thrown an inside fastball (31% versus league average of 28%). We would also need to know the count distribution but in lieu of that I think it’s reasonable to assume that since Abreu saw a higher-than-average percent of inside fastballs and had results worse than his season totals that the scouting information about that being a weakness of his makes sense. Funnily enough Jeff seemed to draw the opposite conclusion but I’m not sure why. Pitchers attacked him with more inside fastballs than expected and had better results than expected. It’s a weakness only relative to his otherwise superb numbers, but it still (appears to be) a weakness.
Jeff came to the opposite conclusion because he thinks, incorrectly, that for it to be a weakness, it has to have lower aggregate value then the other pitches he sees. As I just explained, that is patently untrue.
And you are correct that the evidence that that is a “weakness” of his is that he sees more of them. That is the ONLY way to tell what a batter;s weaknesses and strengths are in terms of pitches and pitch locations.
This statement is only correct if you make certain assumptions that are not necessarily justified.
Also, he did not come to the opposite conclusion. He used the fact that Abreu saw more inside fastballs than normal, despite seeing fewer fastballs overall, to provide independent evidence that Abreu has a weakness against inside fastballs.
Bip – Jeff said, “if he has a weak spot, it’s tucked way in there.” To me, that reads like he is discounting the possibility of Abreu having a weakness to inside fastballs. Perhaps I misread, and he’s saying that Abreu does have a weakness, but the fastball has to be REALLY inside before his weakness is exposed. If so, I apologize for my misinterpretation.
I understood to mean that he’s really good against fastballs overall, so if you had better get it inside if you’re going to take advantage of this weakness. I think also, based on one season we can’t conclude with certainty that Abreu has a weakness for inside fastballs, when the large data set shows him being very good against fastballs in general.
In theory this is true, but I think it doesn’t happen to the fullest extent it should for a few reasons.
1. Baseball events are very sparse. This year, no one faced Abreu more than 17 times. For a guy like Abreu, who no one really knew for sure about, a pitcher knows that that number of plate appearances is not a large enough sample to consider radically changing strategies. If a pitcher were to change strategies, that size of a sample is much too small to get an accurate reading on what the optimal strategy is. A pitcher would probably either adjust too far or not enough and miss the optimal strategy.
He could look to Abreu’s numbers against everyone for more information, but pitchers are so different that those numbers will not likely yield the optimal strategy either. Abreu may be comparatively weak against inside fastballs, but perhaps a particular pitcher’s fastball has more tail than average. He doesn’t know how this should affect the optimal pitch distribution.
2. Pitchers tend to stick to their strengths. I think they do this erring on the side of not adjusting far enough. Of course a pitcher’s strengths are part of the equation, so if a hitter is good against curveballs, a pitcher with a great curveball will still go to it pretty often. However, I think, given how no two pitchers actually throw the exact same pitch, pitchers don’t weight pitch-type scouting reports as much as game theory says they should, and most pitchers usually just stick with what they know works, making little adjustments here and there. I think what they feel is working for them that day is also a big part of it, so a batter might be vulnerable to the curve, but the pitcher may not feel confident about it on a given day.
Ok, but batters do have “strengths” and “weaknesses” in a very real and useful sense. Sure, if Mike Trout got a 100% high fastballs he would become the best high fastball hitter in baseball. That still doesn’t change the fact that, compared to the average spread of batter proclivities, his is disproportionately worse against high fastballs than other pitches, given a league average distribution. He is not “weak” in the sense that he will always hit them worse than other pitches no matter what he is thrown, but as long as we all understand how pitch variation works, it is perfectly fine to say Trout has a “weakness” against high fastballs. It’s a semantic argument.
I think that around here, everyone basically knows that pitch selection affects how well a batter does against each pitch. If anything, Jeff sometimes takes heat for writing too many caveats. We have all heard the spiel about pitch values. Pitch values do not exist in a vacuum. It’s an important point and one worth making, but I completely disagree with the idea the Jeff and other fangraph writers have been negligent in this regard.
I think an exploration of the game theory of pitching would be a good thing for fangraphs to explore, in any case.
Does Jeff not, in this article, reference the frequency with which Abreu gets inside fastballs, relative to the league?
You either don’t fully understand much of what I am saying or you are repeating much of what I have said.
Ok, if you’re going to distill my comment, that is fine.
One thing I am saying that you are not is that I believe pitchers will, on the whole adjust less that GT says they should. I don’t have evidence for this, but you are acting like it is a forgone conclusion that pitchers will not be biased towards adjusting too much or too little, and I don’t see how that assumption is justified.
As I said several times, pitchers are not going to be able to establish perfect GTO strategies. But that should be the default assumption, more or less. That’s all I am saying. I think it is also obvious that pitchers and batters come close to GTO strategies. That reason for that is two-fold: One, you are not going to survive in MLB without doing so,. Two, it will be obvious from the data and from experience if you are significantly over or underthrowing a certain pitch. A third reason is that there is a lot of collective wisdom among pitchers, catchers, coaches and scouts that would direct a pitcher towards a GTO approach, whether they know it or not.
That being said, surely some pitchers will do that more than others (the most successful ones being better). There may also be some types of pitchers who over or underthrow certain pitches – Matt Schwartz found some (controversial) evidence that that may be the case.
But all of that does not change the fact that looking at the value of pitches is a poor way of identifying batter “weaknesses.” Pitch frequency is better. That is also “all I am saying.”
Of course that does not necessarily mean that it is a batter’s “weakness” just because he sees more of them. That also depends on how you define weakness.
Let’s say that a batter is a good fastball hitter and a slightly worse curve ball hitter. If he has no power and only hits singles, the pitcher will likely throw him many more fastballs than off speed because he is trying to avoid the walk and does not mind a BIP when all it can result in is a single.
But that violates game theory, right? Yes and no. Depends on how we define “good at fastballs.” If we include the fact that fastballs are thrown for strikes more often, then he won’t actually be better at fastballs. He will be “better” art curve balls simply because he gets to take so many of them out of the zone!
So, for game theory purposes and for purposes of how often a pitcher should throw each pitch (until the value of all those pitches are equal), we must define “good” and “bad” and “strength” and “weakness” and “good pitch” “bad pitch” from the perspective of the pitcher TO INCLUDE the chances of throwing a strike when you want to. In order for a curve ball to be a batter’s “worst pitch” he has to be really bad at them because so many end up as balls, as compared to the fastball, even against poor curve ball hitters.
Can you answer this question: If this game theory analysis holds up to statistical inquiry (which you haven’t provided evidence of,and I would be interested in it if it’s available), would an aggregate analysis necessarily say much about the individual reasoning? The first rule of statistics is that correlation does not equal causation, so I be curious to see analysis that compensated for potentially confounding variables.
Let’s say Pitcher A’s best pitch is a sharp curveball. It can get hitters to chase it out of the zone for a strikeout, so he naturally likes to use in 2-strike counts. But he also knows that a hitter sitting on a curveball in a 2-strike count is less than optimal, so he mixes in his fastball to avoid being obvious. Let’s say he mixes in his fastball 35% of the time with his curveball 65% in 2-strike situations. Does that necessarily mean all of that variance is due to game theory? Could it be that he also uses 50% fastballs against singles hitters and 20% against power hitters, regardless of his attempts to optimize game theory to avoid the opponent knowing what’s coming? Or could it be that variance is also based on his feel for each pitch in each scenario rather optimizing game theory?
Igloo all of that is true. Game theory dictates that the percentage of each pitch thrown is a fixed value AND that those values are determined such that the resultant win value of each pitch is exactly equal.
The win value of each pitch depends, as you say, on the batter (singles hitter, power hitter, bad/good strike zone command, etc.), the outs, runners, score, inning, next batter, umpire, weather, park, how the pitcher’s pitches are working that day, assuming that what the pitcher or catcher thinks about that isn’t a fiction, etc.
So, yes, the GTO percentages of how often each pitch should be thrown is a conglomerate of many mini-games, each with its own GTO strategy.
That is why I KEEP SAYING, “given the exact same situation, batter, pitcher, park, umpire, score, etc.”
I think the lesson here is that cuban translated MLB projected stats > any scout’s eye
These are humorous comparions, viciedo, morales, when clearly his Cuban stats screamed monster.
This guy had a .555 OBP and a .822 SLG over a full season in Cuba! The Barry Bonds of Cuba is somehow Dayan viciedo?
There are a lot of Cuban players in the MLB. You are cherry-picking ONE player.
G-Dynasty, you are exactly correct.
From Alexei Ramirez to Yoenis Cespedes to Yasiel Puig to Abreu, the players who’ve hit the best in Cuba — once age, plate discipline markers, and home ballpark are properly factored in — have been solid-to-highly successful batsmen in the majors. Conversely, those without a stellar Cuban pedigree have generally floundered.
All in all, MLB translations of Cuban performances, at least over the last decade or so, have been astonishingly steady & stable. Doubt it? I would welcome any skeptic to find a player (or two, if you can) who hit extremely well in Cuba at an early age — again, with the standard caveats re BB/K rates and ballpark factors — then failed in the U.S.; or find a Cuban who performed well in the majors after a so-so career under the Castros.
Impressive ML debut even for a 27 year old veteran hitter. What is his upside, or is this it?
Not that this really tells you much, but Cespedes, Puig, and Alexei Ramirez all had their best season at the plate in their first season.
Generally I think a hitter has a slight advantage if pitchers don’t know how to pitch to him, so the longer a hitter is in the league, the more vulnerable he is to having pitchers figure him out. Great hitters adjust if this happens, which Abreu seems to have done. Puig actually did the same thing last year. He started 2013 swinging at everything. His swinging strike rate was totally unsustainable. However, instead of getting exposed, like a player with those tendencies should, he adjusted his approach and now has above average plate discipline.
“Generally I think a hitter has a slight advantage if pitchers don’t know how to pitch to him, so the longer a hitter is in the league.”
Actually the evidence points in the opposite direction. Of course that evidence is based on MLB data where the pitchers have good scotuing data on the hitters before their first MLB AB. Perhaps for foreign players, especially Cuban players, they don’t have good scouting data on the hitters.
But, you did generalize that concept, and you are wrong, at least according to the data.
What ABOUT his defense, though? It wasn’t good, but how bad was it? How long before he’s primarily a DH?
He was pretty terrible in April, but seemed to get markedly better as the season went on. Now I’d call him below average but passable; his range leaves something to be desired, but he’s at least doing most other things right.
Plus White Sox fans watched Paul Konerko man first base for nearly 15 years, so we’re not accustomed to range anyway.
During the draft, I passed on this guy and took Liriano, based on these types of scouting reports. Then with the intention of drafting him when the draft snaked around, he was taken 2 spots ahead of me and I ended up taking Billy Butler.
Ouch. In a 16 team league, that’s hard to come back from.
Liriano gave me 0 wins and a 5 ERA and I dropped him.
Somehow my team still won and made 176 points out of 192 even though I had no SP with more than 12 wins. I still can’t pinpoint exactly how. Mostly a lot of good luck with waiver pickups, a great bullpen and Giancarlo Stanton.
Can’t believe I had to scroll through all these comments to FINALLY get to your fantasy team. THANK YOU!!!