One of the projects I plan to tackle at the start of this off-season is to profile a player who was, in my opinion, the most pleasant surprise. I plan 3 articles, one each for the category of defense, offense and pitching. That’ll get me to the part of the off-season where there is some real news to digest.

Who was the most surprising (in a good way) pitcher this year? Stephen Matz might get an honorable mention here. Some corners of Twitter-verse would likely stump for Mathew Liberatore and/or Kyle Leahy. I landed on Matt Svanson. One, because of the outstanding season he had in St. Louis, but also because what we got was so much more than we had reason to expect. Let’s dive in.

Svanson’s MiLB profile from his time in Memphis was … not inspiring. Here is his Statcast data from the first

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