You may recall that a month into the season, I was embarrassing myself in the LABR mixed league. Despite going offense heavy during the draft and being questioned about my pitching staff, my team simply wasn’t hitting. My pitching was performing better, but not nearly good enough to offset the atrocities at the plate. Well, a month later, things have improved. Not a whole lot, mind you, but better times indeed.
It is ranking tiers update week and today are the American League starting pitchers. By this time in the season, peripherals are stabilizing and I can now put a lot more stock into skills surges and declines. As a reminder, these rankings are only supposed to reflect how I expect pitchers to perform going forward. How a pitcher has already performed to date bears no weighting here. Refresh your memory with my May update.
The great thing about playing in a league deeper than 12-team mixed for a change is I can now simply check out the week’s pickups in the 15-team LABR league for inspiration. Both the players highlighted today were won with FAAB this past Monday.
On Saturday, I looked at the pitcher leaders in F-Strike% in an attempt to identify those who may see better walk rates ahead. Today I will look at the opposite side of the coin. These are the pitchers who throwing the lowest percentage of first pitch strikes. A pitcher showing up on this list with a league average walk rate or better is likely going to experience an increase in the near future.
As intuition would suggest, F-Strike% has a high correlation with a pitcher’s walk rate (though I can’t seem to find the article that studied the relationship). One of the obvious reasons is because a first pitch strike is a strike, so you already know the pitcher is starting with an 0-1 count. Whenever I analyze a pitcher, I like to compare his F-Strike% with his BB/9 or BB% to see if those last two numbers are sustainable. Today I look at the leaders in F-Strike%. These are the guys who should also be atop the leader boards in walk rate. This is where we search for those who may see an improved walk rate in the future.
The great thing about having a weak pitching staff, as opposed to a poor offense, is that there are always new pitchers being called up who could potentially generate some fantasy value. This is why I have always trumpeted going cheaper than everyone else on your pitching staff during your draft/auction. Let’s take a look at some of the younger guys who have
Today’s waiver wire looks at two hitters who are beneficiaries of injuries. Every year, a large percentage of surprise performances happen as a result of increased playing time, rather than any change in skill. These players are typically undervalued because they have never played full-time and therefore don’t have the history of counting stats to attract fantasy owners or instill the confidence that they could maintain their skills over every day at-bats.
On Monday, I looked at the pitching leaders in SwStk% to see if we can expect any strikeout rate surges in the near future. Today, I will check in on the opposite end of the ledger, those pitchers whose SwStk% are at the bottom of the totem pole. Obviously, these are not the guys you want on you fantasy team. Let’s see if any of them have higher strikeout rates than you would expect and are therefore in for some regression.
Last week, I looked at several American League starting pitchers off to disappointing starts and asked whether we should buy low or not. This week I am not going to do the same as the only possible argument one can make for continued success from these pitchers is their team’s defense. As such, all are strong sells as I would much prefer to bet on skill winning out that expecting elite defensive support to continue.
It’s that day of the week again, time for another walk along the waiver wire. Do you make it safely to the end or fall off and fail miserably with your free agent pickups? Luckily, you have the Mike Podhorzer guide ropes to help you keep your balance.
