The first thing you probably notice when you look at Jeff Samardzija’s player page is his ERA of 4.34 last year. And if you click over to his 2013 splits, you’ll see that ERAs north of 5.00 in each of the last three months of the season were responsible for the high ERA.

But don’t let the Shark’s apparent struggles in the second half scare you too much. In reality, July was the only one of those three bad months in which Samardzija actually pitched poorly. His strikeout and walk rates went in the wrong direction in July, but they were back within his normal range in August and September. His ERA just stayed bad because his BABIP was over .340 in those months, his strand rate was 66% in August, and his HR/FB rate was 26% in September.

What’s most concerning is that the July blip wasn’t the only significant rough patch that Samardzija has had since becoming a starter. In June of 2012, his strikeout and walk rates also went in the wrong direction, and his ERA ballooned to 10.41 in that month. Just to give you an idea of how out-of-the-ordinary those two months were, here is a chart showing the Shark’s strikeout and walk rates, ERA and xFIP for each of his 12 professional months as a starter. Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Corbin has been a regular topic of thought and conversation for me the past few weeks, which tells you one thing about me – that I maybe think and talk about baseball more than I should – and another about him – that there is considerable reason to discuss him. Both are true.

First, Brad Johnson projected a wide range of values for Corbin and offered his expectation that Corbin would fall near the bottom of that range. Then, I had a long (for Twitter) conversation about him on Twitter. Michael Salfino asked why Corbin was so underrated; I suggested that his K/9 might be the problem, Eno Sarris pointed out a scary platoon split, and now I am here to tell you not to be worried about either.

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A month ago, the Nationals acquired Doug Fister in a bizarre trade that only required the team to give up a decent starting pitcher prospect, a middle reliever and a utility infielder. Aside from making Nationals fans happy that a solid starter has been added to their rotation, fantasy players get to look forward to a starting pitcher making the move to the National League, which is usually beneficial. Fister ranked as just the 57th most valuable starting pitcher this year, but a move to the other league could boost his draft stock.

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It’s a little painful to look back and see that pre-season, Max Scherzer was ranked just barely within the top 20 of all starting pitchers. His price tag wasn’t appreciably different from R.A. Dickey, C.C. Sabathia, and Jered Weaver and his ADP was several rounds after all of them. Of course, hindsight is 20-20 but then again, I’m not sure that that his 2013 wasn’t telegraphed pretty clearly.

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Writer’s Note: Mike Pelfrey ranked 139th on Zach Sanders’ rankings.

You aren’t going to draft Mike Pelfrey. You probably won’t pick him up in season. You may not even use him as a two-start option.

But Pelfrey isn’t as bad as he looked last year, and in fact may have some untapped upside that the Twins could be getting on the cheap after re-signing him to a two-year, $11 million deal.

Pelfrey missed nearly all of the 2012 season after having Tommy John surgery, and rushed back to join a Twins rotation in shambles just a year later. It was obvious he wasn’t right from the get-go, and he said as much himself — though much later on. Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Wheeler‘s major league debut played second fiddle to Matt Harvey’s pre-Tommy John surgery season. Wheeler was a fairly highly-touted prospect since being drafted in 2009 by the Giants and then being traded to the Mets (#49 in 2010, #55 in 2011, #35 in 2012 and #11 in 2013 by Baseball America). He started his first MLB game in the middle of June and his season was combination of good and bad. Going into 2014, walks and injury concerns will be limiting his fantasy value.

The 24-year-old right-handed pitcher didn’t exactly light the world on fire. He had a 7.6 K/9 and 4.1 BB/9. His ERA was respectable at 3.42, but all of his ERA estimators were north of four (4.17 FIP, 4.21 xFIP, 4.40 SIERA). The reason for the disconnect was his 78% LOB%. Here are some comparable 2013 starters with similar walk a strikeout numbers.

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Madison Bumgarner is only 24 years old, but he’s already established himself as a stud starter in fantasy circles. For the second-consecutive year, he was a top-15 starter in standard rotisserie formats and even catapulted himself into the top-10 in 2013 with a stellar 2.77 ERA in 201.1 innings. Owners appear to be valuing him properly, too, as his ADP had him the 13th-highest starter drafted coming into the 2013 season.

When turning our attention to future performance, very little stands out in a negative sense. We can perhaps be concerned about the .251 BABIP from last season, but Bumgarner still compiled a 3.05 FIP, which would still be better than average. Aside from the BABIP caveat, fantasy owners have to covet his consistency. His fastball velocity is firmly planted at 91 mph, his innings totals hover around the 200 mark, his ERA roughly dances between 2.75 and 3.25, his ground-ball percentage is either 46 or 47 percent, and his OSwing% has remained above 30% (and increasing).

Most of the time, pitchers in their early-to-mid 20s are projected to improve in key areas. Perhaps they’re supposed to add velocity or improve their command/control, but the overarching assumption is that young pitchers will take steps forward until their prime, where their performance will then stabilize. While all such generalizations will never be 100-percent factual, Bumgarner appears to buck the trend. He is what he is, and he’s largely been the same pitcher for the past three seasons with some fluctuations in BABIP and HR/FB.

For fantasy owners, such consistency for a starting pitcher is attractive. We’ll never be able to perfectly project year-to-year production, but with guys like Madison Bumgarner, we can at least feel confident in what we’re getting on draft day. His teammate, Matt Cain, was much the same from 2009 to 2012, which is why the right-hander’s abysmal performance in early 2013 was so alarming for many owners.

Bumgarner has been consistent, but it’s notable that his strikeout rate increased from 8.25 K/9 in 2012 to 8.90 K/9 last year. That’s the highest mark of his career, if we don’t include the 10 innings he threw for the Giants in 2009. If the southpaw is going to take the next step forward and become a bona fide ace, I believe it will happen because he begins to miss more bats. It happened last year, and a specific trend makes me wonder if it could continue.

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In my piece on Jordan Zimmermann, I referenced Harry Pavlidis’ wonderful research into changeups. One of the primary findings of his research was that a bigger gap between fastball and changeup velocity generally leads to more whiffs, and you can trade whiffs for a few more grounders if you reduce the gap in velocity. Pavlidis specifically mentioned Chris Archer when detailing his findings, noting that Archer has the big fastball/change velocity gap (11 mph), but he doesn’t have the the big whiff/swing rate that other guys with a big velocity gap have. The explanation was that Archer wasn’t using his change in swinging counts very often, using it early in the count instead.

Pavlidis’ findings were published back in May, so I wanted to see if Archer changed his approach at any point in the 2013 season. Unfortunately, as the chart below will show, Archer continued to use his changeup more early in the count. The chart only shows his usage against left-handers because Archer almost never throws the change to right-handers. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll cut to the chase right from the start: George Springer is worth drafting in mixed re-draft leagues in 2014. Even if he doesn’t start the year on the major-league roster, he has the potential to be an impact player from the moment he arrives in the bigs.

I saw Springer play quite a bit last year, both in the Double-A Texas League and in the Triple-A Pacific Coast League. It’s hard to describe how much Springer stood out from his competition at both of those levels. I guess I could just point to the fact that his weighted offense was about 75% above league-average in both leagues, or that he hit 37 home runs and stole 45 bases on the year.

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By almost any measure, Jered Weaver’s best two seasons came in 2010-11, when he threw well over 200 innings and was worth more than five WAR each year. My guess is that most people still think he peaked in 2012, when he was 20-5 with a 2.81 ERA, despite a terrifying decline in his strikeout rate, and if being a “20 game winner” isn’t what it used to be, it still does count for something in fantasy.

Still, headed into 2013, I think most of us were worried about an impending drop-off thanks to lessened velocity and that strikeout decline, and we got it: Weaver’s 2013 was, by most metrics, his worst since at least 2009. Of course, not many of us expected that he’d fracture his left elbow in his second start of the season and miss nearly two months, either, and that’s obviously a factor in his down year.

So then the question becomes, as Weaver heads into his age-31 season: Is he done as an ace? Done entirely? Or is there more there? Read the rest of this entry »