Author Archive: Mike Podhorzer

Clay Buchholz entered draft season as an obvious bust candidate to statistically-minded fantasy owners after finishing 2010 with the largest ERA-xFIP differential amongst qualified starters. However, Buchholz was at one point a top pitching prospect, like top three in all of baseball, and any scout would tell you that his stuff was good enough to make him one of the best young pitchers in the game. So the question was whether Buchholz’s ERA in 2011 would rise to the 4.00 level his xFIP suggested or if he would continue to improve his underlying skills while battling the luck regression gods, and see his ERA jump to just the low-to-mid 3.00 range. Well so far the bust side has been right, as he has posted a disappointing 4.81 ERA after six starts. Is it time to send his owner some offers? Nope.

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A couple of weeks ago, I looked at the SwStk% metric and its relationship to K/9. In that article, I looked at pitchers in 2010, comparing their SwStk% and K/9 rates to determine who may be in line for a bump in strikeout rate in 2011 and who might be set for a decline. With a month now in the books, let us check in on some of the leaders in SwStk% who currently have a lower K/9 than might be expected.

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Yesterday afternoon, I was asked by one of my best friends and fellow fantasy baseball owners about whether he should offer a specific trade. He owns Joakim Soria and wondered whether he should offer him for Trevor Cahill. He plays in a head-to-head league with daily transactions, so I would think closers are worth a little more than in your standard weekly transaction rotisserie league. He did currently own a whole bunch of closers, but half of them were temporary or part of a committee, so Soria represented only one of two full-time closers on his roster.

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After nearly a month in the books, it is time to update the AL starting pitcher rankings. As a fantasy baseball projectionist and owner, I am not much of a tinkerer and it takes a lot to change my opinion after only a month of play. At this point, I completely ignore a pitcher’s ERA and instead focus solely on the underlying skill set and metrics; it is process over results for me. So keep this in mind when perusing through the risers and fallers and remember that the original rankings were a compilation of eight RotoGraphers’ individual rankings. Although I would love to adjust all the rankings to reflect my own personal opinion, I will not give in to temptation and simply move players up and down based on potential new information we have learned so far.

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When searching each week for those under-owned gems for deep league use, it reminds me how bad I feel for those Only-leaguers dealing with an injury. Your replacement options are throw up inducing and you’re basically flipping a coin between two hitters that get five at-bats a week. That is no fun! Though the first player discussed below is most certainly owned in all NL-Only leagues, he should be available in deeper mixed leagues and would therefore be worth a look.

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Ground ball rate is one of the three primary peripherals, or skills as I like to call them, that make up the trifecta (which also includes K/9 and BB/9) I look at first when evaluating a pitcher. Simply from my experience and without the benefit of specific research to back this up, it seems that a pitcher’s GB% is generally pretty consistent from year to year, and certainly more so than his strikeout and walk rates. The only real ways for a pitcher to increase his ground ball rate would be to alter his pitch mix, learn and start throwing a new pitch that induces grounders more frequently or consciously locate pitches lower in the strike zone than in past seasons. All of these methods are difficult and require a pitcher to start doing something differently than he had been doing previously. GB% stabilizes at about 150 batters faced, a level at which the top pitchers in the category have nearly reached. As a result, large increased in GB% should be taken seriously.

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On Thursday, I posted an update on three American League rookie pitchers, including Seattle phenom Michael Pineda. One of my criticisms of Pineda was his 56% fly ball rate at the time, which should lead to lots of home runs, despite the fact that he had yet to give up even one long ball. One of the commenters noted Pineda’s fantastic average fastball velocity, currently sitting at 96.1 MPH, and opined that it will be more difficult for hitters to homer off of him, leading to a sustainable depressed HR/FB ratio compared to the league average. Not satisfied with just taking his word for it, I decided to test this hypothesis.

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When I first started playing fantasy baseball around 15 years ago and for many years after that, it was ingrained in my head that I should never draft rookie pitchers or add them to my roster (12 team mixed leagues, obviously in Only leagues, this would be difficult to pull off). I followed this for a while, always avoiding rookies and ignoring the hype. But as new statistical methods of evaluating pitchers became more mainstream and I learned how to use these methods, I realized that rookie pitchers should not automatically be discarded and expected to deliver minimal fantasy value. So I now have no problem drafting and rostering rookie pitchers and evaluate each pitcher on his own, forgetting about whether the rookie label is slapped on or not. With that wordy introduction out of the way, let’s take a look at how some of the top rookie pitchers have fared so far.

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Today’s Deep League Waiver provides fantasy owners with a potential third base replacement for Ian Stewart and my first dive into the pitching free agent pool.

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The first step is admitting you have a problem. I admit it: I cannot rid myself of Edinson Volquez, let alone reserve him for even a week. Ever since picking him up post-draft, but still during spring training, before his breakout 2008 campaign, I have been guilty of suffering from Volquez Fandom Syndrome. Please, someone help me.

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