Fantasy Baseball Today - Evaluating Zack Gelof & Merrill Kelly! (Fantasy Baseball Today in 5 Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:02 Two more players you want to hear about Zach Gelloff and Merrill Kelly. Up next on Fantasy Baseball today in five. Welcome into FBT and 5 on Saturday, March 2nd. I am Frank Stanfield joined by Scott White. And let's start this off with Zach Gelloff, who last year came up, Scott, and wowed us, wound up hitting 267 with 14 homers and 14 steals. He added 12 homers and 20 steals in the minors.

Starting point is 00:00:29 So for those counting at home, 26 homers, 34 steals. between the majors and the minors, some questionable plate discipline under the hood, Scott. How do you feel about Zach Gelloff this season? I feel good. I feel better than it seems like most people do. And it's kind of funny that it turned out that way because as Zach Gelloff was debuting last year,

Starting point is 00:00:57 obviously performing well, I was among the loudest skeptics. I said, well, he has to slow down. Look at how much he's striking out. Look at how bad his zone contact rate is. It's below 80%, which is among the worst in baseball. So if you're swinging and missing that much and you're doing it as somebody who doesn't generate high, high-end exit velocities, that's a mismatch.

Starting point is 00:01:26 That generally doesn't add up to big fantasy. production. And look, Gelloff did slow down a little, but he didn't crater the way I thought he did.

Starting point is 00:01:34 And when you consider that he brings so much speed in addition to the power, I mean, you gave the full season numbers

Starting point is 00:01:42 in the minors, but that's not over like a full season number of games. It's not like over 150 games. He was performing like a 30-30 man

Starting point is 00:01:51 last year was Zach Gelloff, which is, of course, at the high end of what you should expect, and he's certainly not being drafted like that. But he's not even really being drafted

Starting point is 00:02:01 like he has 20-20 potential. He's going quite a bit after the Bryson Stott, Andres Jimenez, even I mean, compared to Hassan Kim on average, Gelloff is going like four or five rounds later. And I think he has more upside.

Starting point is 00:02:19 I think if you want to make an upside comparison for Zach Gelloff, it's Matt McLean. I think they both have similar swing and miss concerns. They both produce more power than you'd expect for somebody who delivers the exit velocities they do.

Starting point is 00:02:38 So they kind of both have the same downside cases, but they have the same upside cases too in terms of that power speed combo. They're able to deliver at a position where power isn't all that common. Yeah, I think the Matt McLean comp is probably the one we go to most. and the ADP over the past week over at the NFBC is 74 for Matt McLean and it's 141 for Zach Gelloff. And don't get me wrong, there are limitations with Gelloff.

Starting point is 00:03:09 He obviously plays on the Oakland A's. It's a bad lineup. I get that. But again, you take a peek under the hood, the average active velocity, the barrel rate, the sprint speed, all better than Matt McLean last season. So I'm not saying he's going to be better, but they probably should not be going about 70 picks apart in the ADP right now either.

Starting point is 00:03:26 Let's slide over to Merrill Kelly Scott. And last year, a career season for Merrill Kelly, you look at what he's done the past two years. He's been extremely serviceable. And specifically in 2023, the strikeout rate went up. And that was due to an improved changeup. Now, we don't know for sure that that strikeout rate is going to carry over. But if it does, it could turn out that Merrill Kelly is a pretty big value where he's going in drafts right now.

Starting point is 00:03:54 Yeah. So in a year that was done. defined by like blow-up pitching performances, even for good pitchers, with all the rule changes, the shift ban and all the extra base activity, the pitch clock. We saw a tendency for pitchers to have this runaway inning where everything snowballs and they put up a crooked stat line. And Merrill Kelly pretty much managed to avoid that, finishing with the 329 ERA. So I want to put him in the glob that I talk about so often where pitchers, they don't have, they don't perform up to a standard that would allow them to distinguish themselves from that kind of random number generating mess that the new environment introduced last year. It seems like Meryl Kelly would fall victim to that, but he managed to escape it all season long last year.

Starting point is 00:04:47 So can he do it again? Was it just luck? Should we expect closer to a 350, 380? ERA when all things they're said and done. My hunch is yes, because all the ways we usually evaluate pitchers say so, his ERA estimators, you know,

Starting point is 00:05:04 385 FIP versus that 329 ERA. Let me see if I can get the XERA, the expected ERA. 413 was the expected ERA, so even worse. And it's not like he's a great control pitcher before last year. He wasn't even a strikeout per inning guy. He is an innings eater and should be competent. I suppose at age 35, it could all collapse,

Starting point is 00:05:32 but I'm not expecting that for Merrill Kelly. It's more just, I'm not, it doesn't seem likely that he could be quite that good again. The good news is nobody's drafting him like he's going to be quite that good again. And so it's not like I'm avoiding him drafts. If anything, I'm probably a little ahead of consensus on Merrill Kelly. but if you've sent skepticism over his 2023 performance, that's what it's all about. The ADP for Merrill Kelly 138.6 as the 39 starting pitcher off the board, that comes according to fantasy pros. For more extensive fantasy baseball coverage, listen to the Fantasy Baseball Today podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the Odyssey app, or anywhere else podcasts are found.

Starting point is 00:06:16 Thanks for listening to Fantasy Baseball today in five, and we'll be back again next week. Bye-bye.

Fantasy Baseball Today - Evaluating Zack Gelof & Merrill Kelly! (Fantasy Baseball Today in 5 Podcast)

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