Welcome back to our Patience or Panic series! Today, I am taking our weekly article in a slightly different direction. Too often, fantasy analysts prognosticate and fail to go back and evaluate how accurate they were. This is a critical step, as it maximizes accountability and provides the opportunity to learn from instances where recommendations were inaccurate. That is my goal today.
I provided Patience or Panic recommendations on 22 hitters this season. Six times I called for patience, and 16 times I sounded the alarm bells. Below is a table showing each player’s stats since the recommendation, and a verdict on whether I was right or wrong in my conclusions. In determining the verdict, I considered what each player’s stat line would look like when extrapolated to 600 plate appearances, and made a decision in the context of both their performance to date and preseason expectations. This helps explain why players with similar numbers and the same recommendation may have different verdicts. For example, Jo Adell, who was an afterthought in shallow leagues this year, is marked as “Incorrect” for a Panic recommendation while Anthony Volpe, who was drafted around pick 100 and had a fantastic season, is marked as “Correct” for a Panic recommendation. Some players will also be marked “Push” if it seemed too close to call or “Incomplete” if they suffered an injury or were covered very recently. The date range of the stats goes from the day before publication to the present, as my articles were submitted prior to the completion of the previous day’s games.
To provide a further breakdown, of the 16 instances where I recommended “Panic,” six (Scott II, Albies, Jones, Varsho, Volpe, and Smith) were correct, six (Carroll, Mullins, Chourio, Adell, Swanson, and Olson) were incorrect, and four (Carter, Garcia, Robert Jr., and O’Hoppe) were pushes or incomplete. But I believe that by the end of the season, O’Hoppe will fit in the “Correct” category. Of the 6 instances where I recommended “Patience,” three (Alvarez, Lindor, Abrams) were correct, one (Harris II) was incorrect, and two (Springer, Turang) were pushes or incomplete.
My Biggest Misses
This section belongs to a pair of exciting young outfielders, Jackson Chourio and Corbin Carroll. These two made me look foolish, but in different ways. Chourio went on a tear almost immediately after I recommended that we panic on him and still hasn’t looked back! At the time of my publication, Chourio was sporting an OPS barely above .600 thanks to a poor plate approach, and seemed to be relegated to a part-time role. In retrospect, those appear to have merely been growing pains. Chourio hit over .300 in June, July, and August while posting 12 HR and 13 SB. He quickly regained a full-time role thanks to his excellent performance and became the youngest player in MLB history to post a 20-20 season. In recommending that managers panic on Chourio, I underestimated the extent to which platoons and playing time splits evolve throughout a season. It would have made more sense for managers to hold and bench Chourio before cutting to see if he could find more playing time and make the necessary adjustments during his first run in the big leagues. I also failed to acknowledge the improvement in his strikeout rate from March/April (32.1%) to May (19.1%). While this did not initially come with improved performance (68 wRC+ in March/April, 51 in May), it may have been a sign of what was to come.
Unlike Chourio, Carroll at least waited a while before making my May 1 panic recommendation look bad, making this verdict a little less obvious. After an awful first month, Carroll continued to be pedestrian in May (.614 OPS, 1 HR, 1 SB) and June (.725 OPS, 0 HR, 5 SB) before going on an absolute heater in July and August with 17 (!!) total homers. While he has returned significantly less value this year than managers would have expected at the beginning of the season, this one still gets graded a loss because of how exceptional Carroll has been the last few months. My concerns about Carroll’s ability to be a batting average asset (.232 this season, .259 career) remain, and the steals have regressed (54 in 2023 vs. 28 this year), but his power-speed blend still makes him a premier fantasy asset. He ranks right around 50th among all players this season and is poised to slightly improve that down the stretch.
Conclusion
I thoroughly enjoyed diving into these players’ profiles and providing advice to you all this year. One of my biggest takeaways from looking at my work throughout the season is that I recommended Panic slightly too often. I would never shoot for a specific Patience to Panic ratio, as each player’s circumstances are different. But, baseball is and always will be a game with statistical flukes in small sample sizes. This is important to remember when looking at a sample of players who mostly came into the season with high expectations, typically because of a track record of strong performance or top-notch prospect pedigree. With that being said, one fantasy maxim I adhere to is that if you did not cut or trade any players that you regret, you likely weren’t managing aggressively enough. While results are what allow us to win in this game, process matters too, and a sound process often generates good results.
Please let me know in the comments what you thought of my work this season or if you disagree with my verdict on any of the recommendations!
Many writers wouldn’t bother to do a self-evaluation retrospective. So immediate props for that. It’ll be interesting to see how some of these guys perform in ’25.
Thank you, Xan! It’s going to be an interesting offseason trying to figure out how low to buy on some of these guys who had real falls from grace this year (Harris II, Albies, Jones, Volpe, etc.).
Completely agree with Xan; thank you for providing this review for us.
While it’s a small sample, if you squint while making some arbitrary date cut-offs you could argue that the early and late predictions were quite accurate, leaving only the middle section as hit-or-miss. That makes some intutive sense, as at least some of the early predictions (e.g., Nolan Jones) seemed likely based on his stat profile while the late predictions had a longer in-season track record on which to base judgment.
The topic I’d most like to see explored more is what role injuries played for incorrect predictions. I realize that adequate information might have been unavailable in some situations, but I think it’s plausible that injuries were a major factor a group including Carroll, Albies, and Harris.
Happy to do so, Bill! I agree that guys I wrote about later on like O’Hoppe, Volpe, and Garcia could be placed into the “Correct” group without much objection, but I leaned towards marking anything that felt pretty debatable as a push. My prediction on Carroll looked good for quite some time too before he went absolutely bonkers this month and last. Just shows how talented he is and how amazing that AZ offense has been.
The injury point is interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if Carter, Harris, and Albies were performing poorly because they were dealing with injuries but didn’t want to go on the IL. Carroll is a less clear case, as he’s repeatedly denied having lingering issues with the shoulder and has clearly found his power stroke. I think it just goes to show that we as fans often have incomplete information, so we can only make predictions based on production and the underlying metrics at our disposal. Hope I helped you this year!