Archive for Meta Analysis

The All-Star break provides a much needed rest and a perfect opportunity to assess your team(s). The last time I used xHR/FB rate to identify hitters due for a home run spike was in the middle of May, so now is an excellent time to name names once again. These are the fantasy relevant hitters whose xHR/FB rates most exceed their actual HR/FB rates, which represents a strong list of acquisition targets if you’re looking to bolster your standing in the home run department and are hoping to buy at a discount.

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About a month ago, I started searching for the league’s underthrown pitches. Pitches that despite inducing elite swing-and-miss, ground ball, and pop-up rates, are thrown with scarcity relative to other inferior offerings. It was as an enlightening a topic to research, as it dealt with untapped potential, as it was a fun series to write. Though to be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot of actionable fantasy advice to be gleamed. But in the process of writing those pieces, I had to grade each pitch. And arsenal scores, a subject of interest to the RotoGraphs community over the years, were just a stone’s throw from away from the groundwork I’d already laid.
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It’s been a unique fantasy season in which I’ve never experienced. Pitchers should be dominating the landscape with strikeouts at an all-time high. They’re not because home runs are also at an all-time high. With this unique environment, the fantasy norms which owners have been familiar with no longer exist. No one has played fantasy baseball in this high strikeout and home run environment because it has never existed before.

Here are some new guidelines for navigating this season and thinking towards next season.

Home runs have pushed scoring is up, but not to any historical levels

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On Thursday for my American League starting pitching slot, I used my expected strikeout rate metric to determine which starters have the most strikeout rate upside given the components of the equation (strike percentage, along with swinging, looking, and foul strike rates). Today, I’ll look at the starters with strikeout rate downside hinted at by xK%, but expand my group of pitchers to both leagues.

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Over the last several weeks, I’ve scoured Baseball Prospectus’ PitchF/x leaderboards for the league’s underthrown pitches. We’ve covered two different pitch types each week starting with four-seam fastballs and sinkers in the first installment, cutters and curves in the second, and sliders and changeups last week. This week, we put it all together. Now that we’ve identified the most underthrown pitches, who should consider overhauling his entire pitch mix to make the most of his electric stuff?

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Earlier this year, I updated my pitcher expected strikeout rate metric, or xK%, with new coefficients. The equation uses a pitcher’s overall percentage of strikes thrown, as well as the breakdown between the types of strikes he generates — swinging, looking, and foul. We could use xK% over a smaller sample given that its denominator is pitches, rather than batters faces, so it likely stabilizes much more quickly.

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Yesterday, I listed the 20 pitchers with the largest gaps between their ERA and SIERA marks, with their ERA marks sitting significantly higher than their SIERA marks, suggesting serious potential for improvement moving forward. Today, I’ll list the pitchers on the other side of the coin, the 20 with ERA marks significantly lower than their SIERA marks, suggesting real potential for ERA regression.

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We’re nearing the midpoint of the season (wow has it come quickly!), so it’s finally time to check in on the starting pitchers whose ERA marks are significantly higher than their SIERA marks. Naturally, many on this list are bad, even after figuring in some improvement, but there are enough potentially good pitchers that would make for actual fantasy targets. So let’s discuss them. For completeness purposes, I’m listing the entire top 20, but will only discuss those that matter.

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Welcome back to the third and penultimate installment of Underthrown Pitches and the Pitchers Who Underthrow Them. Over the last several weeks, we’ve identified high performing four-seamers, sinkers, cutters, and curves and the pitchers who should consider throwing them more often. We’ve defined “high performing” based on a Pitch Score that factors an offering’s proclivity towards inducing whiffs, ground balls, and pop-ups. We’ve also defined the degree that a pitch is “underthrown” using a simple measure of pitch score to frequency.

For a more detailed recap of the results and methodology to-date, check out the previous installments linked below.

Vol 1: Four-seamers and Sinkers

Vol 2: Cutters and Curves  Read the rest of this entry »

Change in pitch mix often coincides with a change in performance. It’s one of the few statistical changes we could identify immediately. So let’s take a look at which American League starting pitchers have changed their pitch mix versus last year the most.

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