Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Head to the pitching waiver wire, and you might remember this classic line from Coleridge’s tale of the albatross and the sailor. Yes, there are many pitchers you can choose from. They all have their flaws.

One of the most common mistakes when facing this situation in a single-season league is to reach for the young guy. Yes, prospects have that fresh feeling, and their upside reaches to the top of any rotation. To dream upon a golden arm and maybe, just maybe, be rewarded with an Asgardian hero like Noah Syndergaard!

Of course, reality is much more sober. More than half of all prospect pitchers — and even half of the very best — don’t provide their teams with more value than a middle reliever. Baseball will chew up the biggest of arms.

So consider instead the veterans that have improved their performance this year, in the order in which I would rank them.

Read the rest of this entry »

It was suggested that we should celebrate the day that stats stabilize. Today is Grounder Day! Eat a sloppy joe while sitting on a blanket. Drink one of these, or some of this, but I don’t know about having any of this. Grounder Day!

Well, we actually aren’t all the way there. Only about twenty players have officially reached the stabilization point for ground ball rate. But that’s fine. It actually serves as a reminder that stabilization is not something that magically happens at one point. Stabilization happens over a spectrum, and today we know a little more than we did yesterday, and tomorrow we’ll know a little more.

But! Relative to *other* stats on our leaderboards, we know a good deal about a player’s ground ball rate by now. And the beauty of that news is that just knowing a player’s change in ground ball rate can tell us a good deal about what sort of power we should expect from them going forward.

Read the rest of this entry »

I shop in the bargain bins when it comes to pitching, and I usually do okay. But there’s a pitfall to shopping in those bins, and it comes from velocity. Or lack thereof — the lightly touted, the guys with no pedigree, the guys you find in those bins, they usually don’t have big fastballs. Or they’d be the darling of every scout.

So what, you might say. If they have command and great secondary stuff, then they can ball. Look at Aaron Nola!

Yes, that’s true. But there are inherent difficulties with a bad fastball. So let’s rummage through the bad fastball bucket and see what we find.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks back, I looked at hitter stats that you can use early in the season. And they presaged the Domingo Santana mini-breakout! Now it’s time to look at pitchers, and let you into my toolbox.

There will be leaderboards.

Read the rest of this entry »

Going into the season, we had two young fireballers with straight fastballs and meh results in their rear view mirror. Kevin Gausman and Nate Eovaldi both have good walk rate totals but bouts with homeritis and bad balls in play results that hint at bad command, or perhaps hanging secondary pitches. They’ve had incomplete arsenals, but they’ve recently added a pitch that threatens to make them whole. They’re in the same division, in ballparks that are better for hitters! They even had good starts last night! So… which one you got?

Read the rest of this entry »

Back on my old beat! The ‘Report team needed a pinch hitter, and they gave me the keys to the chart so watch out. Bet I don’t even make a single change, but it is early in the season, and things change rapidly, so let’s see.

Read the rest of this entry »

We are lost in the sea (puddle?) that is the small sample size portion of the season. We’re trying to find a mooring, some stat that we can really use to identify believable results. This is where I link you to the pieces about stabilization of stats, wipe my hands demonstratively and end the piece with a leaderboard.

Wait, I am going to do something like that, but with a few words of caution and analysis as well. For one, it seems to get lost that stabilization is merely the point at which the stat itself is more meaningful going forward than the league average. In other words, league average regression is still meaningful after this point, and the stat itself is still meaningful before that point. It’s all a continuum.

Instead, use the list as a way to judge the relative importance of stats. Easy enough. We’re past the point of stabilization for swing rates — not for reach rates or contact rates — and we’re not at the point where ground ball and fly ball rates stabilize. And yet, we can use swing rates, and ground ball and fly ball numbers, to judge players, because those stats are more meaningful than the others.

There’s also a second level here that shouldn’t be swept aside. Swinging less and hitting more fly balls is not — by itself — the greatest marker for improved performance. Some players should swing more and hit more grounders, of course. But here we’re going to look for guys that could benefit from better plate discipline and who could gain more power from more fly balls.

Read the rest of this entry »

My twitter feed is blowing up with questions about pitching. I can’t get to all of them in crazy detail without cloning myself, so what I’ll do instead is something that’s a little more like what we do on The Sleeper & The Bust, the podcast Paul Sporer and I run — I’ll try to put together a few quick facts and an opinion that should help you make your decisions.

So let’s all take a ride, take a ride on the omnibus.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s not get worried about Madison Bumgarner because he walked five guys. He’s done that twice before and one of them was his first start of the season in 2013. That, you can pencil into a guy feeling his way back into his mechanics. That’s fine.

Let’s not get worried about Madison Bumgarner because he gave up two homers. He’s done *that* 23 times. Even the fact that it was Scooter Gennett and Jonathan Villar that homered shouldn’t bother us too much. His last official start was one in which he gave up three homers — one each to Enrique Hernandez, A.J. Ellis, and Justin Ruggiano. So sometimes the bottom half of the league can touch one of baseball’s best.

So let’s not really worry about Madison Bumgarner because of his results yesterday. Let’s worry about Madison Bumgarner because of his process yesterday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, a trio of fifth starters were announced. They are all worthy of different levels of excitement, but Vincent Velasquez, Aaron Sanchez, and Nate Karns all won jobs, and now we’re all scrambling to re-rank them based on this new information. Here’s the thing, though — don’t move them very far.

The announcement is nice, because it’s like the closer’s role. You either have the fifth starter’s spot, or you don’t, and if you don’t, the innings are hard to find. But you might be surprised how little those announcements may have meant.

Read the rest of this entry »