The Daily Bender: April 3

When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.

Well it’s Opening Day….again.

Now listen, I’m a huge baseball fan. You know that. Real baseball, fantasy baseball, baseball video games…hell, I used to play Strat-O-Matic when I was a kid. But come on with this whole multiple Opening Day crap. MLB made us nuts with the whole Opening Night stuff several years ago, but we accepted their money-hungry ways and moved on. But now if you’re going to have three games on Sunday to cover the morning, afternoon and evening, why not just have the full 15-game slate on Sunday and have one Opening Day for everyone? Is there some sort of a scheduling issue that prevents it or are we falling victim to the greed once again?

I feel a grass roots campaign coming on. Let’s take it to Twitter, maybe. #OneOpeningDayForAll

Now let’s talk actual fantasy stuff…

Chicks Dig the Long Ball

As I sit down to write today’s edition of the Daily Bender, there have been 27 home runs hit this season by 24 players. Yasmani Grandal, Rougned Odor and, yes, Madison Bumgarner are tied for the league lead at two apiece and we still have at least 23 innings to be played in the final two games of the night. While I’d love to discuss each and every dinger hit, I’ll just highlight a few. The rest can be found in our MLB stats page.

I’d like to start the accolades here with Colorado first baseman, Mark Reynolds. An odd place to start for some, but as I’ve been shouting from atop my soapbox all day, there’s nothing better than when a late-round draft flier or early-season FAAB acquisition pays immediate dividends. I actually wrote about picking up Reynolds a few weeks ago, so if you jumped on the bandwagon back then, you should be flashing a big, Kool-Aid smile right now after he went 3-for-3 with a double, a home run, two runs scored, three RBI and a walk. People can bitch about the guy’s batting average and strikeouts all they want, but if he continues to rake while Ian Desmond sits on the disabled list, why wouldn’t you grab him? Just looking at the month of April, what’s the difference between him and Chris Davis? You guessed it – one home run.

Congratulations to Bryce Harper who smacked his fifth Opening Day home run. That actually sets a new MLB record and you don’t even need to asterisk it because there are more Opening Days. He only plays one Opening Day game a year. Again, #OneOpeningDayForAll.

While Harper set a record for the whole league, the Dodgers hooked themselves up with a franchise milestone at the expense of the Padres as Joc Pederson and Grandal became the first Dodgers to hit back-to-back home runs on Opening Day. Considering how long the Dodgers have been a major league club, that’s pretty impressive. To add a little special sauce to the moment, Grandal went deep again later in the game, but did it from the other side of the plate.

If you had any thoughts of approaching the Andrew Benintendi owner in your league with a trade proposal, you can immediately scrap those plans. The guy (or gal) probably overpaid on Draft Day thanks to an unhealthy rookie crush and now that he’s on-pace to hit 162 home runs, the asking price is probably hovering somewhere in the stratosphere. He’s a good player with a whole lot of talent and upside, but the hype machine has been moving at light-speed and isn’t showing any sign of slowing down.

Speaking of man-crushes, mine on George Springer continues to grow. Isn’t he dreamy? Sigh. Now if he could only run like he did when he was in the minors, my heart would be his forever.

Looks like that Phillies stack paid off in the DFS world as both Cesar Hernandez and Freddy Galvis went yard off Scott Feldman today. Watching these two is actually going to be quite interesting as they are both playing for the jobs right now. The Phillies want to bring J.P. Crawford up at some point this season and either Hernandez or Galvis will be the odd-man out. Keep tabs on both throughout the first half because if they can use Crawford’s eventual promotion as motivation, both could be decent fantasy assets.

On the Corner of Doughnut & Whiff

The yin to the long-ball yang is unpleasantly found among the vast number of 0-for’s we saw today. No one struck out every time they were up to bat, but there were quite a few who came close. There were a number of top players who came up empty today, such as Joey Votto, Christian Yelich and Eric Hosmer, but the ones who really stood out like a turd in a punchbowl were the guys who couldn’t even get bat to ball. These dirty bastards are:

Pitching Domination

Between Bumgarner, Carlos Martinez, Jon Lester and Chris Archer, we saw some really strong pitching performances Sunday. With an even larger slate riddled and even more marquee names to watch, you had to expect some big performances once again. Well, we certainly got them.

As expected, Clayton Kershaw was his usual ridiculous self. He gave up an unearned run early in the game, but went on the blank the Padres for the next six frames while limiting them to just two hits with no walks and eight strikeouts.

Though they failed to record the win, Noah Syndergaard, Julio Teheran, Danny Duffy all looked strong with a minimum of six innings pitched and at least a strikeout per innings. In fact, the only run given up between the three was by Duffy and that was a solo shot by Miguel Sano. Not surprisingly, Thor was the most-impressive of the three as he allowed just five hits over six innings and did not walk a single batter. I’m not a huge fan of Duffy, from a long-term fantasy perspective, but I’m actually expecting big things out of Teheran this season.

Surprisingly, Ervin Santana came up big against the Royals as he limited them to just one run (a Mike Moustakas solo shot) on two hits and two walks over seven innings. He earned the win, but only had three strikeouts. He’s not a guy I like to trust often, so if he doesn’t increase that strikeout rate, I’m going to lose interest pretty fast.

And finally, there’s Stephen Strasburg who picked up his first win of the season with seven strong innings as he allowed just two runs on six hits with no walks and six strikeouts. Again, the K-rate was disappointing, but hopefully he picks that up over the next few starts. We’ll have to watch it closely though as Strasburg opted to pitch exclusively from the stretch rather than use his full wind-up. His delivery was more compact and his release point was more consistent, but we’ll have to see if this has an adverse effect on the strikeout total.

Taking it Up the WHIPhole

There’s nothing worse than watching your fantasy rotation get smoked on Opening Day. Tanaka really shoved it up my WHIPhole Sunday night without even so much as a courtesy spit, so I was already raw to start the day. Unfortunately, things didn’t go much better as Jon Gray fell apart in the fifth inning against the Brewers and posted a 2.00 WHIP while coughing up five runs over four innings. On top of that, as of right now, Corey Kluber has decided to rub me the wrong way with six hits and three walks allowed over six innings. Oh year, and then he also slapped me in the face with five earned runs. Please take him out of this game!

Yu Darvish hasn’t exactly been lights out either with five walks issued and if you want to go even worse, we can start talking about Scott Feldman whose 1.93 WHIP and 5.79 ERA over 4.2 innings is the thing of which fantasy nightmares are made. While I won’t ever touch Feldman this season, I’ve got a fair amount of confidence in everyone else. The skill sets are definitely there so no need to hit that panic button just yet.

Blown Save Watch

Unlike Sunday, there were no blown saves today, thankfully. But that doesn’t mean everyone came away from the day unscathed. Jason Grilli is filling in for the injured Roberto Osuna and while he wasn’t in a save situation, he did give up an 11^th inning solo home run to Mark Trumbo and took the loss. The club could take a look at Joe Smith or Joe Biagini to close, but Grilli served them well last season and is probably going to get a little bit longer of a leash.

The other guy to watch right now is Jeanmar Gomez. Phillies manager Pete Mackanin surprised everyone and endorsed Gomez as his closer multiple times this spring, but with Hector Neris, Joaquin Benoit and Edubray Ramos hanging out in the bullpen, I can’t imagine Mackanin giving his “closer” more rope to hang himself. Remember, Gomez fell apart in a major way late last year so his job security was already hanging by a thread, I’m sure.

Final Thoughts

As the season goes on, we’ll get into more trends we see developing. Once we have that, we can start using the data to serve as predictors of who could be a nice buy-low or sell-high. Can’t wait actually! One game in the books for every team…..161 beautiful babies each to go!