Archive for November, 2022

Verlander Completes Comeback

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022

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When Justin Verlander underwent Tommy John surgery after just one start in 2020, it felt like it could be the end of the road for one of this generation’s greatest pitchers.  While many pitchers have successfully returned from UCL surgery, most weren’t 37+ years old at the time.  After missing almost all of the 2020 season and all of 2021, Verlander returned this season as a slightly different pitcher, but as good as ever.  He helped lead a rejuvenated Moonshiners pitching staff to their first ever DTBL Championship.  In a year of countless great pitching performances, Verlander was quite clearly the best.  In a unanimous decision, Justin Verlander is the 2022 DTBL Cy Young award winner, earning the award for the third time in his career.

Verlander’s comeback season was quite magical.  The 39 year old defied odds to put up one of the best seasons of his career, which is saying something since he had already authored some of the best seasons in league history.  His ERA and WHIP tell most of the story.  His 1.75 ERA ranks sixth all time while his 0.83 WHIP is the fourth lowest single season mark in DTBL history.  Both marks easily led the league this season and were personal bests as well.  His 18 wins also led the league this year, but doesn’t quite stack up with historical records due to the modern suppressed pitcher win environment.  185 strikeouts is an impressive number, but was not near the league leaders and highlights a changed approach for Verlander in which he no longer dominates simply by not allowing hitters to put the ball in play.  Verlander’s 14.8 Pitching PAR led the league by over 2 points and is the eighth highest mark since 2005.  He now holds three of the top 8 figures in that stat’s single season leaderboard.

The Moonshiners are the third DTBL team for which Verlander has starred.  Originally drafted in the second round by the Demigods way back in 2007, he spent a dozen spectacular seasons with the Kings with whom he won four DTBL Championships and a pair of Cy Young awards.  Those two Cy Young campaigns (2011 and 2019) are on the short list of the greatest pitching seasons in league history.  He won 24 games while striking out 250 in 2011.  In 2019, he had a 0.80 WHIP with 300 strikeouts and a record Pitching PAR of 17.5.  Tommy John surgery ultimately ended his run with the Kings as he was dropped from the league roster while recovering from surgery in 2021.  The Moonshiners made him a second round selection for the second time in his career when they picked him with the 17th overall pick in this season’s draft.  That proved to be quite the steal for the Moonshiners.  Verlander joined Alek Manoah and Yu Darvish to make up the league’s best starting pitching trio.  Their championship gives Verlander a smooth five DTBL rings to go along with three Cy Young awards.  This is the second straight season in which a pitcher has won his third Cy Young, following Verlander’s former Tigers and Kings teammate Max Scherzer turning that trick last year.

Verlander’s gaudy numbers made him the obvious choice for this award.  He received all nine first place votes to become the unanimous choice for this award, totaling 90 points.  That is definitely not to say there weren’t other great pitchers this season though.  In one of the most under-the-radar dominant seasons in recent memory, Diamond Dogs righty Sandy Alcantara put himself into the company of the league’s elite pitchers.  Perhaps most impressive was his 228.2 innings pitched, which was 26 more than any other pitcher.  Oh, and he also struck out 207 with a 2.28 ERA and 0.98 WHIP.  Alcantara was the only pitcher besides Verlander to appear on every ballot.  He received three second place votes and a total of 41 points.  Next comes what might be the most anticipated aspect of this vote:  where will Dylan Cease and Alek Manoah rank following their narrow Rookie of the Year competition?  Well, turns out they flipped for this award.  Rookie of the Year runner-up, Moonshiners young hurler Manoah finishes third for the Cy Young in his debut season.  His 2.24 ERA and 0.99 WHIP were incredible for such a young pitcher.  He received a pair of second place votes and a total of 31 points.  Right behind him is Rookie of the Year winner, Choppers fireballer Cease.  Cease received three second place votes, but was left off three ballots, which ultimately caused him to fall three points behind Manoah with 28.  For the record, nobody swapped the order between Manoah and Cease on their Rookie of the Year and Cy Young ballots.  It was just a matter of how those points were distributed.  One other pitcher received a second place vote, that being Cougars ace Corbin Burnes.  Burnes finished second in the league with 243 strikeouts.  He is the only pitcher to rack up 200+ strikeouts with a sub 3.00 ERA each of the past two seasons.  Burnes finished in fifth place in the vote with 13 points.  A total of 10 different pitchers received Cy Young votes.

Click here to view the full voting results.

It’s looking like I won’t get around to announcing the 2022 DTBL Most Valuable Player until early next week. There probably isn’t too much suspense surrounding who will win that award anyway though.

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Rookie Cease Fire

Monday, November 21st, 2022

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Starting pitchers dominated the first couple of rounds of the 2022 DTBL Draft.  Seven starters were chosen in the first twelve picks, six of them having DTBL rookie eligibility.  While a couple of them had disappointing seasons due to injuries and/or underachievement, this will still go down as one of the best rookie pitching classes in recent memory.  Three of those pitchers, in particular, were impactful contributors to their teams and wound up finishing at the top of the rookie of the year vote.  In one of the tightest votes imaginable, Choppers right handed hurler Dylan Cease is the 2022 DTBL Rookie of the Year.

Cease took a bit of a circuitous route to this award.  First, while he obviously was a DTBL rookie this season, it was not his first season in the league’s player pool.  After making his much anticipated MLB debut in the summer of 2019, he was added to the league for 2020, but went undrafted prior to that pandemic shortened campaign.  Late in the season, the Choppers took a flyer on him as a free agent signing, but did not put him on their major league roster.  Because of his somewhat pedestrian numbers that year, leading the American League in walks without a terribly impressive strikeout total, he was released by the Choppers and then dropped from the league for the 2021 season.  2021 was his true breakout season, significantly reigning in the walks while nearly doubling his strikeout rate, making him a hot commodity for the 2022 draft.

The Choppers took Cease with the ninth pick of the first round this year.  He proceeded to build upon that strong 2021 season with an even better 2022.  His ERA hovered around 2.00 most of the summer before settling to an extremely impressive 2.20.  He actually led MLB in walks. But despite that, his hit suppression was so strong that he still finished with an excellent 1.11 WHIP.  He won 14 games and led all rookies with 227 strikeouts.  Only three other pitchers recorded more strikeouts this season.  The Choppers led the league in pitching points and Cease was the primary reason for that.  He led the staff in wins, strikeouts and ERA among qualified pitchers.  It was all the Choppers could have hoped for in solidifying their staff.  Cease, along with fellow rookie Logan Gilbert, should give the Choppers a formidable pitching staff for quite some time to come.

This Rookie of the Year award was hotly contested.  Cease was hardly the only rookie pitcher to have a season worthy of the award.  And the vote reflected that.  Cease received five of the nine first place votes cast.  On the other four ballots, he was ranked second.  Meanwhile, Moonshiners pitcher Alek Manoah, who was picked two spots before Cease in the draft, received the other four first place tallies and was placed second on all of the other ballots.  Manoah won two more games than Cease and had a better WHIP, while Cease had more strikeouts and an ever so slight edge in ERA.  Manoah also had a slight edge in PAR (11.7 vs. 10.4).  So this was a tough call for voters.  In the end, Cease’s 78 points put him three ahead of Manoah’s 75.  Both figure to be candidates for the Cy Young award as well, so it will be interesting to see how they stack up in that vote.  Yet another starting pitcher came in third in the vote.  Komodos lefty Shane McClanahan was possibly the leading candidate for this award before being knocked out by injury for a bit in the late summer.  He still managed to strike out 194 with a 2.54 ERA and a sub-1.00 WHIP.  McClanahan was the third and final player to appear on all nine ballots, receiving five third place votes for a total of 35 points.  Finally, we have a hitter in the mix with Jackalope outfielder Adolis Garcia finishing in the fourth spot.  Garcia led all rookies with a 5.7 Batting PAR.  He hit an impressive 27 home runs with 25 stolen bases.  Garcia received the other four third place votes that didn’t go to McClanahan and finished with 28 points.  Rounding out the top five is another starting pitcher.  Darkhorses first round selection Logan Webb also lived up to the rookie hype with 15 wins and a 2.90 ERA.  Webb compiled 10 points in the vote to finish in fifth place.

Click here to view the full voting results.

I haven’t figured out the exact schedule for the announcement of the other two awards, but am hoping to do both before the end of this week.  It seems unlikely the vote for either will be as close as this one, but we shall see!

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Moonshiners Break Through

Saturday, November 5th, 2022

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Almost right from the start, the 2022 DTBL season had a different feel to it.  The traditional powers were struggling while the top half of the standings was filled with teams who had either never won a championship or were experiencing decades long droughts.  While the defending champion Kings did make a late push into contention, it remained a year for the upstarts.  What also looked different about this season compared to most in the recent past is that it appeared a bunch of teams would be in contention until the very end.  Ultimately, that didn’t prove to be the case though.  The Moonshiners stood head and shoulders above the rest, besting the rest of the league by 9 1/2 points.  A franchise perhaps most commonly known for never being terrible, but also never being great, has written a new story.  For the first time in franchise history, Mike’s Moonshiners are the DTBL Champions.

For the past couple years, the Moonshiners built a solid roster that could compete in the upper echelon of the league, but couldn’t quite put it all together.  In the pandemic shortened 2020 season, they finished in third place thanks to one of the league’s best pitching staffs, but a middling offense kept them from being a serious contender.  Then in 2021, it was exactly the opposite as they had the best offense in the league, but an incredibly disappointing pitching staff dropped them to a fourth place finish.  This year, they were able to keep that elite offense in tact while drastically improving the pitching staff, finishing second and fourth respectively in batting and pitching points.

Reigning DTBL MVP Vladimir Guerrero Jr had another fantastic season in ’22.  However, it was two other teammates who led the way for the Moonshiners offense.  Outfielders Shohei Ohtani and Kyle Tucker were two of the most well-rounded players in the league.  Ohtani hit 34 homers with 95 RBIs and 11 stolen bases.  Meanwhile, Tucker hit 30 home runs while driving in 107 with 25 steals.  He was the only player in the league to reach the 30 HR and 25 SB milestones.  In a world in which Aaron Judge didn’t exist, he and Ohtani would probably both be MVP candidates.  Another key contributor in the power and speed categories was catcher Daulton Varsho.  Getting a 27 HR and 16 SB campaign from a backstop is a huge bonus.  Perhaps the most pleasant surprise in the Moonshiners lineup was shortstop Amed Rosario who started to live up to some of his early career hype with easily the best year of his career.  What is interesting about all of the players mentioned here is that they were all holdovers from last year’s squad.  They were able to keep it together without any major contributions from newcomers.

The pitching staff was a much different story.  They doubled their pitching point total from a year ago, thanks in large part to a pair of newcomers.  As expected, the 2022 DTBL Draft class proved to be very strong on pitching.  Most of the 10 starting pitchers drafted in the first two rounds lived up to or exceeded expectations.  But the Moonshiners may have gotten both of the top two achievers with their first two picks.  First round pick, seventh overall, Alek Manoah will be one of the top contenders for Rookie of the Year.  He won 16 games with a 2.24 ERA, 0.99 WHIP and 180 strikeouts.  Those are numbers of an ace, yet he wasn’t the top dog on this staff.  That was second round pick, 39 year old veteran Justin Verlander.  After missing almost all of the past two seasons due to Tommy John surgery, he returned in a slightly different form, but arguably better than ever.  His 1.75 ERA is the sixth best single season mark in league history and the lowest since Jacob deGrom in 2018.  His 0.829 WHIP ranks fourth all-time, but one of the three marks ahead of him is his own ’19 campaign with the Kings when he posted a 0.803 WHIP.  Additionally, Verlander won 18 games with 185 strikeouts.  He has an excellent chance of winning his third Cy Young award.  While newcomers Manoah and Verlander gave the Moonshiners exactly what they needed, one holdover was right up there with them as well.  Yu Darvish had maybe his best season since his rookie year, with 16 wins, a team high 197 strikeouts and a sub 1.00 WHIP.  No team in the league could come close to matching that trio at the top of the rotation.  Finally, while the bullpen as a whole was not a strength, Edwin Diaz was a huge boon to the staff in not only saves (32), but also ERA (1.31), WHIP (0.84) and a ridiculous 118 strikeouts in just 62 innings.

The Moonshiners appeared to be one of the top contenders for the title right from the start of the season.  By mid-June they had moved into the top three and would never fall lower than that.  For a couple months in the summer, a handful of teams were swapping spots at the top of the standings on a nearly daily basis.  But by the end of July, the Moonshiners had taken over first place for good.  In the end, it didn’t wind up being particularly close.  A late summer run by the Kings bumped them into second place, but they were never a serious threat in September.  What was mostly a positive season for the Demigods, Komodos and Choppers saw each of them fall double digits behind the Moonshiners when it was all said and done.

2022 was the Moonshiners 24th season as a member of the DTBL.  Prior to this year, they had finished somewhere between second and seventh place in all 23 seasons.  They had not finished higher than third since 2008.  And only once had they ever finished within single digits of the champion, in the crazy 2012 season which saw them finish fourth despite only being 1 1/2 points out.  So the ease by which they won the title this year means the Moonshiners have still really only been part of that one competitive championship race.  But I think they will settle for an easy victory.  Congrats to Mike and the Moonshiners!

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