Are We Wrong to Overlook Lance Lynn?

Even though this year’s Winter Meetings were slow prior to Thursday’s three-team deal involving the Mariners, Indians and Rays, the Rangers’ signing of Lance Lynn has yet to receive much attention. Lynn’s $30 million deal over three years pales in comparison on an annual basis to the contracts recently inked by Nathan Eovaldi, J.A. Happ and Charlie Morton. Given Lynn’s 4.77 ERA compiled with the Twins and Yankees in 2018, it’s no surprise that Lynn is drawing less interest than his free agent counterparts in the real and fantasy worlds.

Behind the bloated ERA are some unflattering indicators that should deter fantasy owners. Lynn’s control was poor — especially over his 20 starts with the Twins (36.6 percent Zone%) — and his middling O-Swing% (30.0 percent for the whole season) could not save him from breaking double-digits in his walk rate. For most pitchers, a .336 BABIP would be a sign of better things to come once regression sets in, but his xBABIP was actually a point higher (per xStats). While Lynn was not particularly prone to allowing hard contact, he was hurt by frequent line drives.

Though it’s a bit of a stretch, there is a comparison to be made with Eovaldi. Both pitchers were dealt in the days prior to the July 31 trade deadline, and both improved with their new teams. Though Lynn started off with an ERA that was 84 points higher than Eovaldi’s, both compiled ERAs with their new teams that were nearly a full run lower than their marks with their prior teams. Eovaldi opened eyes with an increase in strikeout rate over the season’s final month, but Lynn bested him by racking up punchouts at a higher rate immediately upon joining the Yankees. As a Twin, Lynn’s 21.3 percent strikeout rate was nothing special, but during his two months with the Yankees, he notched a strikeout in 26.4 percent of his plate appearances.

Even as the season wore on, Lynn maintained the more than 1 mph uptick in average fastball velocity over 2017 that he established with the Twins. Perhaps Lynn’s greatest weakness with Minnesota had been his 13.2 percent walk rate, but after getting traded, only 6.1 percent of plate appearances resulted in a base on balls.

So while Lynn’s overall stat line for 2018 does not inspire much confidence for 2019, his outsized late-season improvements in strikeout and walk rates should at least make us wonder why he is barely on the fantasy radar this offseason.

Yet it is hard to pinpoint exactly how he made these improvements. Lynn did pitch with better control as a Yankee, but in increasing his Zone% to 39.0 percent, we can’t really say his control was good. That level of control is normally not commensurate with a 6.1 percent walk rate, unless it is accompanied by an O-Swing% that is far above average, and Lynn’s rate with the Yankees was a pedestrian 30.7 percent. The only pitchers over the last four seasons who have thrown 150 innings, located fewer than 40 percent of their pitches in the strike zone, posted a walk rate below 7.0 percent and had an O-Swing% lower than 35 percent are Dallas Keuchel and Zack Greinke. No one in this group of low Zone% pitchers had an O-Swing% below 33 percent.

Lynn looks like a strong candidate for some regression from his late-season walk rate, and his strikeout rate is equally hard to buy into. There is a strong correlation between K% and SwStr%, and while Lynn’s strikeout rate as a Yankee was more than five percentage points higher than it was when he was a Twin, his swing-and-miss rate essentially held steady. The table below shows that Lynn did do a better job of getting called strikes and inducing foul balls with the Yankees. However, he was merely rebounding after having been especially bad at freezing batters with the Twins. Lynn had never been this good of a strikeout pitcher before, so the regressing of his called strike rate to his previous norm doesn’t explain how he was able to strike out so many batters.

Lance Lynn’s K% and Sources of Not-in-Play Strikes, 2018
IP K% SwStr% Called% Foul%*
With MIN 102.1 21.3% 10.1% 13.6% 19.8%
With NYY 54.1 26.4% 10.0% 14.8% 20.8%
SOURCE: FanGraphs, except where noted.
*Foul ball rates derived from Str% and F/Str% data on Baseball-Reference.

The increase in Lynn’s foul ball rate is a more plausible explanation for the surge in K-rate. Had his 20.8 percent rate with the Yankees been his mark for the full season, it would have been a career high. As it was, Lynn’s actual full-season foul rate of 20.3 percent was less than one-tenth of a percentage point behind his high-water mark from 2015. The boost in foul rate in combination with a SwStr% that was slightly higher than his usual rates explains at least part of his improvement as a strikeout pitcher.

Lynn has been better than average at inducing foul balls over the course of his career, but it’s not clear that he can continue to be this good at it. Several of this season’s top foul-inducers (e.g., Eric Lauer, Tyler Mahle, Mike Minor, Miles Mikolas) were also among the best at pitching on the edges of the strike zone (per Bill Petti’s Edge% tool), but Lynn recorded his lowest proportion of pitches on the edge this season.

It’s generally not a good idea to take a two-month sample of starts too seriously, but Lynn’s improvements in his strikeout and walk rates were so dramatic that it deserved a closer look. After digging a little deeper, it’s fair to say that we can continue to pass on Lynn in most mixed league drafts this March.





Al Melchior has been writing about Fantasy baseball and sim games since 2000, and his work has appeared at CBSSports.com, BaseballHQ, Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster and FanRagSports. He has also participated in Tout Wars' mixed auction league since 2013. You can follow Al on Twitter @almelchiorbb and find more of his work at almelchior.com.

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RonnieDobbs
5 years ago

I like Lynn. I would add him as a flier arm in any league. No need to keep him if he gets off to a bad start but I get the feeling that he is still trying to figure out quite was he is post-TJ. I think his ceiling is pretty good and he is an easy cut if 2019 looks like 2018. Lynn is a good contact manager, especially if he has a feel for his FBs and I think he didn’t really have that in 2018 very often. That is where the fouls balls come from though. Lynn is interesting to me because I think he has good command, but he is always working the edges, so it ends up looking like a bunch of walks, but in reality he is finer with his FBs than most. He never gives in to hitters and if that means four straight or a five pitch walk… well that happens a lot with him.