Are These Guys Good – AL SP Edition

I did this with three young outfielders and really enjoyed it so I’m running it back with some pitchers. In fact, I might do a couple for pitchers given the remarkably vast pool of arms. Are these guys good? We’ll look at a couple key elements of their game and then give a recommendation.

One guy had some nice highs, but also some remarkably painful lows and injuries have dogged him throughout his career. Another guy held a sub-3.00 ERA through August 21st, but struggled so hard in his final eight starts that he wound up with a mid-3.00s figure by season’s end. Our last guy is 33 years old so we probably already know the answer, but a remarkable 11-start run to close out the season has re-opened the question about his goodness.

Michael Pineda

The Good: Pineda got off to a tremendous start with a 2.72 ERA in his first seven starts capped off with a 16-K effort against the Orioles. Spoiler alert: it didn’t hold up. But the frustrating part is that he’d vacillate between good and bad the rest of the year. He still had nine more gems (0-2 ER) from mid-May on with great strikeout and walk totals. Over the course of the season, he had 15 starts where he allowed 3 ER or fewer which yielded 99 IP of a 1.64 ERA and 0.95 WHIP with a 29% K rate and 3% BB rate.

There were 111 pitchers with at least 15 starts of 3 ER or fewer and Pineda’s 1.64 ERA was 13th-best, right in between David Price (1.62) and Jacob deGrom (1.66), but they had 27 and 26 such starts, respectively. Pineda’s best was enough to hang with the elite, but he was far too inconsistent to be trusted.

The Bad: His second half was a nightmare. He put up a 5.80 ERA in 54.3 IP after the All-Star break due in large part to 11 HRs allowed. It’s actually worse if you do a pure split of his season. Well, as pure as you can split 27 starts. First 13: 3.54 ERA, last 14: 5.22 ERA. He missed virtually all of August with a strained forearm, his fourth DL stint in an injury-riddled career that saw him miss 2012 and 2013 entirely. He hit the DL on July 30th so it likely played a role in a lot of those second half struggles. Of course, even if we give him a pass for in 2015, who really feels confident saying he’ll make it through 2016 unscathed?

The Verdict: He is good. Or rather, he can be good. Very good, in fact. But I worry that health will be a constant hurdle for him. The tough part about these perennially hurt pitchers is that we don’t really know if their struggles are injury-related because in fantasy baseball we tend to assume a certain level of health if a guy is out there pitching or playing.

He can miss a ton of bats, his changeup keeps him platoon-proof, and we’ve seen him be awesome for extended runs in all three of his MLB seasons. That is all enough to invest again, especially at a lowered price after last year, but there’s no way you can mark him down for more than 150 IP at this point so he has to be a luxury item in the middle or backend of your rotation (depending on league size) as opposed to someone you’re relying on atop it.

Hector Santiago

The Good: On the surface, it looks like his 2015 was right in line with 2013 and 2014. It looks worse than the last two seasons by ERA indicators like FIP and SIERA, but he’s been outrunning his component numbers forever so I’m less-inclined to get too hung up on those. He carried a sub-3.00 ERA (2.91 to be exact) through 25 starts, but melted down the rest of the way making it look like the rest of his seasons.

It was kind of the inverse of his 2014 wherein he started horribly (5.19 ERA through May 7th) and finished with a 3.21 ERA in his final 92.7 IP. Add the 2014 finish to his 2015 start and he ran off a 3.03 ERA, good for 21st among the 116 pitchers who faced at least 800 batters in that admittedly super-arbitrary time period (May 11th, 2014 to August 21st, 2015). He’s a severe flyball pitcher which helps keep the BABIP in check. Add a 78% LOB rate – 6th-best since 2012 – to that BABIP and you start to see how his ERA and FIP don’t match up.

The Bad: However, the tradeoff of fewer hits from all those lazy flyballs is the ones that get blasted and leave the yard. His 1.2 HR/9 is 13th-highest since 2012. Homers were behind the late-season meltdown, too. He allowed 10 in those final 35.3 IP for an obscene 2.6 HR/9 rate. In addition to the homers, he allows a lot of traffic on the bases which only exacerbates the HR issue and almost necessitates the gaudy LOB rate. He trimmed 0.10 off of his 2014 WHIP, down to 1.26 which is passable (42nd among qualified SPs), but his career 1.32 suggests it’s probably headed back upward.

The Verdict: First off, Happy Birthday! For some reason, I get a kick out of randomly going on a player’s Baseball-Reference page and seeing the bold all-caps birthday wishes. The verdict here is that he’s probably just a solid arm with more real-life than fantasy value. His ability to start or relieve adds to that real-life value whereas it’s a negative in fantasy.

I’d be a lot more bullish on his outlook if there was any work being done on the walk rate. If he trimmed the walks, he’d have a chance to emulate the Marco Estrada model, but a career 10% BB rate in the majors follows his 11% from the minors and makes it tough to see drastic improvements coming any time soon. He’s not bad, but for fantasy purposes, he’s not really that good, either.

J.A. Happ

The Good: His finish in Pittsburgh was incredible. His first start with them was on August 4th, from that point through the end of the season he had a 1.85 ERA which was third to only Jake Arrieta and Clayton Kershaw (min. 200 batters faced, sample was 120 SPs). He allowed 4 ER to the Cubs in 4.3 IP during his Pirate debut, but then allowed just 9 ER in his final 10 starts. Happ’s strikeout rate exploded to a filthy 28% (up from 18% w/SEA) and he even chopped a couple points off the already-solid walk rate to a very healthy 5% clip.

The skills were there and when batters did reach, he left ‘em there with an 86% LOB rate. Homers, long an issue for Happ, disappeared with Pittsburgh. He allowed 3 during the run and none of those were in PNC Park. That said, he was actually better on the road. One of the biggest changes with Pittsburgh was his pitch usage. He turned up his fastball usage to 72% (up from 64%) at the expense of the curve and change and it’s easy to see why when the fastball was allowing a .225/.268/.314 line with a 29% K rate and 6% BB rate.

Maybe it was just the small sample or maybe it had something to do with the more selective usage of it, but the curveball was excellent (.280 OPS, 36% K in 25 PA) and with that the changeup wasn’t really needed to stifle righties.

The Bad: Basically 2011 until the trade was pretty blah. He had a 4.75 ERA in ’11-’14 and then a 4.64 ERA with Seattle prior to the deal. This is another case where the real-life and fantasy games diverge because he was definitely worth a backend rotation spot in the majors, especially being a lefty, but until that Pittsburgh run it was hard to justify him in anything but super-deep leagues. I mentioned the homers that have been an issue throughout his career. Walks were a major issue until 2014 and the strikeouts have always been modest outside of a 2012 spike that quickly faded in 2013.

The Verdict: A 33-year old pitcher had the best 11-start run of his career and parlayed it into a three-year deal. It’s too bad that deal didn’t come with Pittsburgh because I’d feel a lot better about him in 2016. Instead, he’s headed back to Toronto where he posted a 4.39 ERA and 1.37 WHIP in 291 IP. Staying in Pittsburgh wouldn’t have made him a full-season sub-2.00 ERA pitcher, but I’d feel comfortable betting on something in the 3.00s.

Back in Toronto, the homers are likely to once again be an issue. I’m sure he picked up some things from Ray Searage and company in Pittsburgh to take with him, but PNC Park isn’t one of them. I think the most aggressive on Happ can only really get him into the high-3.00s with a projection, otherwise they’re kind of kidding themselves. He ran out and it was great, but if it has happened with Seattle and just blended into the rest of his season, it wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much attention. So is he good? Not for fantasy purposes, no. 33-year olds never rarely* turn into studs out of nowhere.

*OK, I can’t really say never because I didn’t research it, but I doubt there are too many guys with 950 IP of mid-4.00s ERA who became mid-rotation guys in their mid-30s.

If you have any requests for the NL version of this game (and possibly even a second AL edition), leave the names in the comments.





Paul is the Editor of Rotographs and Content Director for OOTP Perfect Team. Follow Paul on Twitter @sporer and on Twitch at sporer.

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wily momember
8 years ago

shouldn’t you cross out never and leave rarely, if that’s what the asterisk means