Week 2, Where Are All the Net Wins?

 

The Smyths taught the young ones how Atlanta does opening day…a week after everyone else and 0-7 in the standings. Thankfully George and Ruth being at the game brought the Braves into the Win column for the year.

Still too soon for a chart, but Michael is off to the hottest start of the year. This is quickly being tested with 7 of his players having hit the IL since ~April 4th. Keith being at the bottom of the list here is surprising after his strong draft capital to start the year, but I wouldn’t read much into it, a rank of 6.79 is the highest last place team since Week 7 of last year. As in, his team is just fine, the teams above him are just packed in tight. No need to Panic.

Cory, Dean, and Michael were the big teams last week with Cory putting up a .272 average with 8 home runs and a 2.51 ERA in a week where AVG and HRs were at a premium. Paul wins the lucky Wins Over Expected (WOE) of the week with a whopping 3.25 more standings points than his stats implied he should have earned. Both Paul and Robert had a bad week, but luckily they got to play each other and Paul came out better for it. Conversely, Kevin drew the short straw last week with a respectable 6.01 EWW yet only 2 standings points for a -4.01 WOE…but he had to face Dean who crushed it with an 8.95 EWW which knocked Kevin down to the bottom of the Yahoo Standings. This too shall pass.

Week 2 was a weird week, ERAs were low, Home Runs were low, so Net Wins should have been up because SPs were pitching longer into games with low ERAs, right? Wrong.

Below you can see the plot of Net Wins vs ERA since week 1 of last year. You can see a decent trendline with the blue data points. But last week? Look how far that trendline (orange) sits to the left of the rest of the data. 

 

I also added the Wk 1 2025 data and trendline (grey) so you can see that Wk 1 was largely in step with 2024 (when normalizing for the long week by dividing the totals by 1.5 which flattens the data). So, what is going on here?

I checked to see if bullpen ERAs are higher this year, inferring that wins are being lost by bullpens…but bullpen ERA is better this year so far (3.97 last year vs 3.90 this year).  I looked at innings pitched per game started, but that number is flat at just over 5 innings average per start, just like last year. Next I looked at Quality Starts per game started, that number is also flat at basically 0.3 quality starts per game started. Starting pitchers this year are 145-159 (.477), last year starters went 1424-1584 (.473), so starting pitching win% is actually up a little bit, contrary to what we’re seeing in our league. Because we own fewer relief pitchers on our fantasy teams relative to the pool of RPs in Major League Baseball when compared to the % of SPs we own vs those in MLB, we are less likely to get Relief Pitcher wins and losses on our fantasy team than we are SP wins and losses. RPs have 164 decisions in 2025 in 450 games (.364), 1850 last year in 4860 games (.381), so RPs are getting fewer decisions than last year.

The most likely answer for what is going on is that there are more starting pitching decisions being left on benches or on the free agent wire than started on our teams than last year. We’ve thrown 1770 innings so far this year whereas last year we’d thrown 2177 innings through two matchup weeks. Injuries may account for this, I don’t have data off hand, but anecdotally, I had as many SPs on the IL last week as I did healthy. If you’re leaving starts on the bench or wasting bench at bats, you’re likely losing ground to the field. If you're injured, I have a shoulder to cry on. It's time for us all to make some tough decisions about how aggressive to be for cutting injured players. Except for Dean and the Braves as they get Spencer Strider back this week.