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Hello you beautiful RotoBallers, and welcome to this little retrospective ditty where I look back at my 10 Bold Predictions from before the 2016 baseball season started.
Perhaps you’ve seen some of my fellow writers doing the same lately, but obviously there is only one Nick Mariano. Let’s see how ya boy did.
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Grading My 10 Bold Predictions for 2016
1. Yasmani Grandal finishes as a top-three catcher.
Why Yasmani? Why can’t you just play near your peak for more than half of a season? Last season he hit .282 with 14 homers in the first half before a horrid dropoff in production that seems to have stemmed from a HBP on the shoulder. Okay, but that does not explain 2016’s first three months. Mr. Grandal hit .295 in April, but only one homer. He then hit .114 with three homers in May, and .169 with three homers in June. YUCK. Just when I thought he couldn’t be possibly any worse, he went and did something like hit .267 with 20 dingers from July 1 on…and completely redeemed himself! Not enough to be a top-three catcher, but #8 didn’t burn anyone. Grade: C+
2. Ryan Zimmerman racks up 550 PAs this year en route to a top-25 CI finish.
Honestly, his 467 plate appearances are more than I expected. It’s the absolutely awful .218/.272/.370 triple slash with a measly 46 RBIs (he had 73 rib-eyes in 77 less PAs last season). This, ladies and gentlemen, was a whiff. Grade: F
3. Francisco Rodriguez finishes as a top-eight RP.
Well, it looks like top-eight was reaching a bit too high here. That said, he still turned in a nice season that saw him convert 44 saves, good for fifth best in the league. His 3.24 ERA and 1.13 WHIP may not have been elite RP numbers, nor were his 52 strikeouts in 58 1/3 innings, but I’ve got him as roughly the RP12 in 5x5 formats. He was coming off of draftboards at around RP15, so there was still some decent profit to be had here. Grade: B
4. Patrick Corbin finishes as a top-25 SP.
Oh no. Please no. That could have read top-250 and I still think I would’ve been wrong. Dude went 5-13 with a 5.15 ERA and 1.56 WHIP. Out of all starting pitchers with at least 150 innings under their belt, guess who led the league in hard-hit rate allowed! It’ssssssssssssss Patrick! 38.5%. That means the composite hitters who faced Corbin would’ve ranked 23rd in the league in that metric. Nolan Arenado had a 37.9% hard-hit rate, for a little context. Just, let’s move along. Grade: F
5. Kyle Hendricks finishes as a top-30 SP.
I totally meant for that to say “top-10”. My finger slipped. 1 and 3 are so close on the keyboard guys. Seriously though, I really liked Hendricks coming into this season but boy did he exceed expectations. The maestro of soft contact really stepped up with a wild 25% soft-contact rate while maintaining a beautiful 5.9% walk rate. The kicker was a swinging-strike rate that went up from 8.1% to 10% while he also boosted his first-strike rate from 63.1% to 68.6%. When you’ve got all of these wild gainz, you’re likely to have a good season. Good call me. Grade: A
6. Vincent Velasquez finishes as a top-50 SP.
This one started off great, as the fireballer didn’t allow an earned run through his first two starts of the season, with the second outing being a 16-strikeout complete-game shutout of the Padres. The sky was the limit. It wasn’t as easy after that but the guy still was 5-1 with a 2.42 ERA and a 10.99 K/9 through his first eight starts of the season. After that he struggled to work deep into games and eventually got hurt on June 8, and while he did pretty well in the month after coming back on June 27, he had clearly hit a bit of a wall by August (21 ER in his first four August outings). His last two starts of the season saw him only allow three earned over 12 innings alongside 15 Ks and one walk though, so I still really like the guy heading into 2017. Alas, he couldn’t turn in a top-50 season, but he didn’t earn himself a burn here either. Grade: C+
7. Ian Desmond is the SS2 this year, as Francisco Lindor, Corey Seager and Xander Bogaerts all disappoint.
That’ll teach me not to bite off more than I can chew. The Desmond prediction alone would’ve been defensible considering how good he was until August hit. But nooo, I just had to drag in Lindor, Seager and Bogaerts into the matter. They all balled out, they all had their cold streaks, and they all finished between the SS4-SS7 range (Desmond was SS5). Not a whiff, but I swung way too hard here and only got a weak dribbler up the middle for my efforts. Grade: B-
8. Jean Segura and Starlin Castro finish as the 11th and 12th best SS-eligible players.
Speaking of shortstops, I pretty much nailed this on average! Segura finished as the #2 SS while Castro checked in at #26. I felt decent about this at the beginning of the season, but boy howdy did Mr. Castro go cold there for a while. Still, hopefully you all bumped up Segura in your draft rankings and have enjoyed diving in your Scrooge McDuckian wealth ever since. Grade: C+
9. Kevin Pillar is on an insane amount of championship teams.
If he was, then you all nailed a lot of other things along the way. Kudos to you all for making this true for me despite Pillar’s own struggles! Seriously, Pillar had a chance at being the leadoff hitter for a Toronto offense that checked in as the seventh-best team in wRC+ (102). Alas, KP only made it through the first 12 games of the season before being bumped down to eighth in the order. Grade: F
10. Jose Quintana finally wins 10 games! 15 to be exact.
Quailman! I couldn’t be more proud. After only notching nine wins in each of the past three seasons (despite topping 200 innings in each of them), he got to double digits! Despite some serious bad win-loss luck, he still delivered 13 wins on the season after turning in 23 quality starts. Teammate Chris Sale turned in 23 quality starts as well, and he got 17 wins. In fact, there wasn’t a single pitcher who had more than 20 QS this season who had less than 15 wins. I was totally on track here, but missed the bullseye by a tick. Still, this is a win. Grade: A+++
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