We’re all well aware that Craig Kimbrel is really good. But allow me to give you a little refresher on his greatness.

He’s led all relievers on ESPN’s player rater in two of the last three years and was second in the year he didn’t top the list. Among qualified relievers in those three years he ranks second in ERA, first in xFIP and SIERA, first in saves, and first in strikeout rate. His strikeout rate is so elite that he also leads in K%-BB% despite having a walk rate that is only slightly above average. He’s a stud.

But is he good enough to transcend the “don’t pay for saves” mantra that was started by Matthew Berry and piggybacked on by countless fantasy writers? Read the rest of this entry »

If you look at anything other than ERA, it’s obvious that Tyler Chatwood wasn’t very good last year. Sure, his 3.15 ERA was the 24th best ERA among the 128 starters with 110 or more innings (Chatwood had 111.1 IP), but it’s just about the only thing on his player page that looks good from last year. His xFIP and SIERA were both 4.00 or higher, his WHIP was an ugly 1.43 and both his strikeout rate (13.9%) and walk rate (8.6%) were well below average.

But there was a point last summer where Chatwood looked pretty good. After his first eight starts of the year he had a 2.22 ERA and his strikeout rate was league average. As Chris Cwik noted around that time, Chatwood converted to pitcher his senior year of high school then got drafted and immediately went to rookie ball. He also cracked Baseball America’s top 100 in 2011, so it’s obvious that people thought his arm had potential. With that string of eight solid starts, it seemed like maybe Chatwood was starting to put it all together. But from that point on his strikeout rate was a paltry 10.5%, and he only had five more strikeouts than he did walks.

Within that bad stretch he struck out just 31 batters in 12 starts. What’s insane is that he had an 11 strikeout game in that stretch. Along with the ten strikeout game mentioned earlier, those were the only two instances in which he topped five strikeouts in his 20 starts. It’s somewhat interesting to note that those two big strikeout games were the two games where Chatwood used his slider most. In the 10 K game he threw the slider 24 times and in the 11 K game he threw it 16 times. That’s a little misleading  because there were several games when he threw his slider 13-15 times and struck out five or fewer batters, but it fell in line with Cwik’s observation after Chatwood’s hot start that the slider was driving his success.

Though Chatwood didn’t always have the same success when he used the pitch frequently, it’s obviously his best pitch. Check out these two charts below comparing his slider to his other offerings. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

Rick Porcello is one of those guys whose ERA estimators (xFIP, SIERA) are always lower than his actual ERA. Prior to 2013, no one really cared because his estimators were basically 4.00 or higher. But last year his estimators fell dramatically; his xFIP was 3.19 and his SIERA was 3.39 while his ERA was 4.32. This presents a couple of questions. First, what caused the drop in xFIP/SIERA? Is it sustainable? If so, is it possible his ERA follows the same downward trend that his estimators did?

The first question, what caused the drop in his xFIP/SIERA, is pretty easy to answer. SIERA is primarily calculated with strikeout rate, walk rate and ground ball rate. xFIP is primarily calculated with the three true outcomes, strikeouts, walks and home runs. Porcello’s walk rate and ground ball rate have been consistently above average. In the last four years the league average walk rate ranged from 7.4% to 8%, and Porcello’s walk rate in that span was 5.7%. The league average ground ball rate ranged from 44.4% to 45.1%, and Porcello’s ground ball rate was 52.5%. It was his paltry strikeout rate that was holding his estimators back. From 2010-2012, the league average strikeout rate ranged from 17.6% to 18.7%, and Porcello’s strikeout rate was only 13%. But Porcello’s strikeout rate spiked up to 19.3% last year, and his ground ball and walk rates remained above average.

So is his improved strikeout rate, and by extension are his ERA estimators, sustainable? If so, I would expect to see something like a change in his pitch mix or a spike in velocity. And I’d also like to see his strikeout rate improve, or at least remain above average, later in the year. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Zimmermann has become an extremely reliable starter. In the last three years his ERA has been between 2.94 and 3.25, his WHIP has been between 1.09 and 1.17, and his strikeout rate has been between 18.6% and 19%. Those rate stats along with 12 wins in 2012 resulted in an ADP of 20-25 among starters for Zimmermann prior to the 2013 season. Despite posting similar rate stats, Zimmermann outperformed his 2013 ADP and finished as the 11th most valuable starter according to our valuations thanks to a jump up to 19 wins.

Zimmermann helped himself in the win category by pitching a little deeper into games. He made the same amount of starts in 2012 and 2013, but he threw 17.2 more innings in 2013. That works out to Zimm leaving the game with an average of 1.65 more outs per game. He also got a bit more help with run support as his run support per innings pitched was five runs compared to 4.7 in 2012. So he was leaving later in games and probably leaving with a lead more often. But those improvements aren’t huge and weren’t worth seven extra wins. When you also consider that we’ve only had 42 19+ win seasons in the last decade and that only six pitchers have had back to back 19+ win seasons in that time frame, it’s highly probable that Zimm’s win total will decline in 2014.

Because of the increased win total, Zimmermann is likely to be drafted as more of a top 15 starter as opposed to a top 25 starter like he was last year. But if his win total does indeed decrease, he’s going to have improve in other areas in order to produce a similar value next year and to be worthy of his draft day price. And given the consistency in the rate stats that was detailed above, an improvement in any of those areas may seem unlikely. But I think Zimmermann may have a proverbial ace up his sleeve. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Upton finished the season as the 21st most valuable outfielder according to our valuations. But I can almost guarantee that he’ll be drafted higher than 21st among outfielders next year. The main reason I’m so confident in that is because he finished 2012 as the 19th most valuable outfielder according to ESPN’s player rater, and he was drafted as the seventh outfielder on average on that site in 2013. Someone in your league is sure to believe he has another 2009 or 2011 in him.

Despite finishing consecutive seasons as the 20th best outfielder give or take a spot, Upton got there in very different ways. The long and short of it is that last year his batting average fell in large part due to a big increase in his strikeout rate, his steal total fell almost 60% from where it sat in the previous four years, and a 50 point jump in ISO boosted his homer total and offset the decline in the other areas. Is there a chance those factors change and Upton realizes his upside? Or should you assume the sum of all the parts will continue to equal the 20th best outfielder one way or another? Read the rest of this entry »

Jay Bruce has had a three year stretch of significant consistency. Check out the chart below showing the lack of variance.

The results have been similar, but the way Bruce has gotten there has been a little different. Read the rest of this entry »

The only thing that has kept Everth Cabrera from topping 50 stolen bases in a single season is a lack of playing time. He only got 449 PA in 2012 because he didn’t get called up until May 17. Apparently Jason Bartlett needed to come to the plate 100 times first. And then last year he played his final game on August 4 thanks to his 50-game Biogenesis suspension. But presumably Jason Bartlett will not steal 100 PA from him and there will not be another suspension in 2014, so Cabrera has an excellent chance to steal 50.

He has stolen 81 bags on 97 tries in the last two years (83.5%), and he stole 128 bags in 1,535 minor league plate appearances (roughly once every 12 PA). And once every 12 PA was about the rate at which Cabrera stole bases last year. For you math whizzes, he’d get to 50 steals if he could steal bases at that rate over 600 PA.

Getting to the plate enough is important, but getting on base is at least as important for a base stealer, if not more so. Cabrera improved mightily in that respect last year when he saw his OBP go from .324 in 2012 to .355. The jump was due primarily to a vastly improved contact rate and thus a much lower strikeout rate. He swung a little less as well, but it was primarily the improved contact skills that facilitated the OBP improvement. A slight improvement in his line drive to fly ball ratio also helped out a little. Below are a couple of charts showing these improvements. Read the rest of this entry »

When we were divvying up guys for third base week, I selected Brett Lawrie assuming I could take the angle that he was poised to be a post-hype sleeper. When he came up in 2011 as a 21 year old and hit .293 with nine homers and seven steals in just 171 PA, I assumed we were looking at a kid that was going to be a top fantasy option at third base for a decade or so. And that opinion was bolstered by the fact that he also displayed the power/speed combo in the minors. But in the almost 1000 PA he’s had since, Lawrie hasn’t looked anything like he did in 2011. But because I had long ago decided that he was going to be a stud, I assumed I would find evidence of his likely return to stud-dom. Alas, that wasn’t the case.

To find evidence of the rebound I expected to portend, I had to first figure out what it was that Lawrie did so well during his inital call up. Essentially, Lawrie did two things well: he hit the ball in the air a lot and he stole bases efficiently. Read the rest of this entry »