It’s nearly All-Star break time and my fantasy team is running out of time to remember how to hit. Since offense is crazy again this year, my brain is hurting trying to figure out these wacky hitter seasons. So, let’s talk about pitching…American League starting pitching of course. Last month’s rankings for your enjoyment. Oh, and yes, I did realize I have no fallers in the rankings. Not sure how that happened, but it is mostly because any fallers were only a couple of spots within a tier and did not warrant a shiny down arrow.

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For the first time this season, I nabbed a waiver wire pick from the “most dropped” players in CBS leagues. Since fantasy owners are generally as bad as non-professional stock market investors, picking up the hot players and dropping the cold ones just to watch the trend reverse shortly thereafter, I will continue checking out that list.

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I really feel for you deep leaguers. Every week I get so excited to uncover those hidden gems, but I feel like maybe I am looking in the wrong cave. I keep just finding piles of dirt. Yeah, so I don’t know where I am going with this, but maybe these dudes could help you.

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I tend to ignore small sample size trends and usually throw up a little in my mouth when I read that so and so pitcher is “hot”. But sometimes, these positive trends are actually the result of quiet mechanical changes or the so-called light bulb suddenly going off. Of course, it is very difficult to pick out which pitchers are experiencing a real change in skill and which are just having a good run. Anyhow, I decided to have some fun and sort by xFIP over the last 30 days and peruse the first page of the leaderboard. Some of the more surprising names I found were…

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On Monday, I looked at the five hitters with the highest percentage of “Just Enough” (JE) home runs according to ESPN Home Run Tracker. Today, I will look at the other side of the coin, those hitters who have posted the lowest percentage of JE home runs, with a minimum of 10. The minimum is just to ensure our sample size isn’t too small. As a reminder, the latest data we are given for the league average JE percentage is 27% back in 2006. As such, we should expect these hitters to see an increased numbers of home runs that just get over the wall, leading to a rise in HR/FB ratio, all else equal.

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With a league ERA of just 3.88, the first time it has been below 4.00 since 1992, it is tough to find many disappointments so far on the season in the American League. Amazingly, there are no qualified pitches with an ERA between 5.00 and 6.00, however there is one pitcher with an ERA over 6.00. The three pitchers below were expected to post much better results than they have so far. Will any see better days ahead?

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This week’s edition was supposed to look at a pair of NL outfielders, but then I realized too late that my second recommendation (Chris Denorfia) had already been profiled just a month ago. So instead, you get a super dosage of…

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ESPN Home Run Tracker (formerly HitTrackerOnline) is a great resource I feel has been very underutilized. For those not familiar with the site, it measures the distance of every home run hit and then categorizes them based on how far past the fence they flew. Last year I studied previous seasons to see what kind of predictive value home run distances have. I found that the hitters who hit a high percentage of “Just Enough” home runs (league average from 2006 was 27%, no updated data available) saw their HR/FB ratios decline by 21% the following year, versus 11% for the hitters who had hit the lowest percentage of Just Enough home runs. The process passes the sniff test as well, so below are the five hitters with the highest percentage of Just Enough home runs, while hitting a minimum of 10 home runs.

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This is part of an ongoing pro/con series on RotoGraphs over the next couple of weeks. Today we’ll look at the positive/negative side of Ryan Dempster. Expect the opposite side shortly.

It would be easy to look at Ryan Dempster’s 5.48 ERA and 1.41 WHIP, his solid work the previous three seasons, and conclude that one should be bullish on his prospects moving forward. After all, his BABIP is an inflated .320, his HR/FB ratio is a career high 15.5% and his LOB% is well below the league average. But that would be too easy and I like challenges.

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This is part of an ongoing pro/con series on RotoGraphs over the next couple of weeks. Today we’ll look at the positive side of Nick Markakis. You could read the negative side here.

I bravely volunteered to take on the bullish side of Nick Markakis. How difficult could it be to find some positives in a hitter who has never hit below .291 in a season and hits second in his respective team’s lineup? However, after reading David G’s (no, I am not typing out his last name) fantastic bearish post yesterday, I was tempted to raise the white flag. The commenters even felt sorry for the poor soul responsible for the other side of the coin, as one wished:

Good luck to the guy assigned the Sisyphean task of writing the “Bullish on Markakis” article…

That certainly does nothing to help my confidence. However, while Dave’s article is full of strong points that paint a pessimistic picture of Markakis going forward, things should not remain this bad.

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