Fantasy Baseball Player Notes

Greinke is entering his age-37 season, but still somehow keeps getting it done. His ERA of 4.03 last year was certainly higher than fantasy managers are used to seeing, but it came with a 2.80 FIP and 3.51 xFIP. His strikeout rate was his best since 2017 and his walk rate of 3.3% was the best of his entire career. But his velocity was down about two ticks, with his fastball clocking in at just 87.9 miles per hour. Greinke is as smart a pitcher as there is but it's going to be difficult to succeed over the course of a full 162-game season if his pure stuff continues to diminish. He's one of the few pitchers in the game who is probably capable of pitching 200 innings in 2021, but expect a continued downward trend in his performance.

Valdez got his first extended look as a starter in 2020 and the results were very good. He is really a two-pitch pitcher, with a very solid sinker and curveball, but he is able to get away with his lack of a third pitch by getting batters to pound the ball into the ground (60% ground ball rate) and limiting free passes, at least last year (5.6% walk rate). But without a third pitch, it seems unlikely that he can maintain the 26.4% strikeout rate he put up 70 2/3 innings last year. However, with a guaranteed rotation spot on a good team and nothing particularly fluky in his underlying metrics or statcast data, Valdez should be considered a viable SP3 for fantasy purposes, even if he seems unlikely to quite repeat his 2020 season.

McCullers made a successful return from Tommy John surgery after missing the 2019 season and looked almost exactly like the 2018 version of himself. His ERA (3.93) and WHIP (1.16) were within seven-tenths of a point of his 2018 numbers, and his walk and strikeout rates fell just slightly. McCullers relied a bit more on his sinker and less on his curveball than in past years, but the two work well together and he continued to throw them in combination about 80% of the time. In short, what you thought of McCullers heading into 2018 is pretty much what you should think of him now. Unfortunately, that includes concerns about his innings, because after a missed year and 55 innings last year, the chances of him topping 150 innings this season are remote. Buy him at his production, but understand that there's likely a hard cap on his innings total.