8 AL Starting Pitchers Throwing More Strikes

Strikes are good. Your favorite starting pitcher throwing a higher rate of them is a wonderful sign. In fact, I like to identify high strikeout starters with control issues as breakout candidates. Control is much easier to improve upon then strikeout rate and it tends to get better with maturity. So let’s take a look at eight American League starting pitchers throwing a higher rate of overall strikes than last season. For context, the league average Str% is 64.2%

Roenis Elias has taken the injured Hisashi Iwakuma’s spot in the Mariners rotation and run with it. This kind of success is certainly not going to continue of course thanks to an absurd 90.9% LOB%, but he’s throwing more strikes and his F-Strike% is up significantly. He possesses an excellent changeup that has induced bother swinging strikes and grounders, while his curve ball has also generated an above average rate of swings and misses. His two-seamer gets average whiffs, but a ton of ground balls. His ERA is going to jump, but he should maintain solid value in AL-Only and deeper mixed leagues.

Gosh, that Nick Martinez implosion still hasn’t happened after nine starts! He hasn’t allowed more than three earned runs all season. It’s nice that his strike rate is way up and now just below the league average, but this is a ticking time bomb. If you picked him up, congratulations, you have walked on fire and survived to tell the tale. But it’s not going to last. If you can’t trade him, I would actually advise dropping him. Seriously.

Amazingly, this is actually a career best Str% for Ubaldo Jimenez. That’s the good news. And on the surface, his strikeout rate is up, as are his ground balls. But his swinging strike rate (Baseball-Reference version) sits at a career low and his strikeouts are currently boosted by a career high looking strike rate, which is at a level that won’t be sustained. It’s true some of those looking strikes may become swinging strikes, but some of them will also be put in play, eliminating the possibility for a strikeout. It’s hard to believe that Jimenez is suddenly a new man after just eight starts and his strikeout rate looks ripe for a partial crash. You can’t really sell high, but I wouldn’t want to be starting him for the imminent regression.

Remember long ago when Jeff Samardzija was a hard-thrower who struggled with his control? He has become a strike-throwing machine. His current Str% easily represents a career best mark, but unfortunately his swinging strike rate has tumbled as he has thrown more strikes. I’m not suggesting there’s a correlation there, just merely pointing out the trends. We have to also remember that this is his first full season in the American League, so although he maintained his strikeout rate over his 16 starts with the Athletics last year, you had to assume some regression was in store.

This is more of a rebound than any improvement in control for C.J. Wilson, as last year’s Str% mark tied for a career low. It’s now back up to just below his career average.

Jake Odorizzi has changed his pitch mix and his pitching style, transitioning from an extreme fly ball, strikeout artist, to more of a control pitcher with a league average batted ball profile. He has stopped throwing his slider and reduced the frequency of his fastball in favor of a cutter, while upping his use of his changeup/splitter. Unfortunately, while version 2.0 look significantly better if judging solely by ERA, his overall skills package is actually identical by SIERA. But this one comes with less strikeouts, meaning his fantasy appeal is lessened. He should remain a good fantasy starter though, just not this good, of course.

Wow Chris Archer. The Str% stats are from before yesterday’s dominating effort. He’s throwing his four-seamer and changeup in the strike zone more often than last year, while he’s getting batters to go fishing outside the zone more frequently on his slider. So he’s throwing more strikes, but the other big difference is that he has upped his slider usage at the expense of his fastball, and now his slider is being thrown nearly 40% of the time. Is that a sustainable rate? If he keeps throwing it two-fifths of the time, the major breakout is there for the taking.