Who has the highest Pitch Info, Pitch Type Value (pVal) on a slider this season among all pitchers? Andrés Muñoz. Ok, same question but a changeup instead of a slider and third place instead of first? Nabil Crismatt. Unfortunately, neither Andrés Muñoz’s slider nor Nabil Crismatt’s changeup was drafted in the 2022 FanGraphs pVal competition. In this draft, each participant selects a number of specific pitches trying to maximize the sum of their pVals. There’s a little more to it than that, in our version of the pVal Competition that a few of us FanGraphs/RotoGraphs writers inherited from the Pitcher List staff, participants must choose pitches from this list:
At the start of the 2022 season, the always gracious Nick Pollack and friends at PitcherList lent the FanGraphs staff the pVal draft template and a few of us conducted a slow draft of all slow drafts. It was great! Tweets were tweeted, points were tallied and now, it’s time to take a look at how we’re doing. If you want a little pVal background, you can read my previous posts, Highfalutin pVals or Sweet Swirlin’ Secondaries. Or, you can read our glossary explainer, or just head over to the 2022 leaderboard and click around.
Before we get into the results, here’s a quick rundown on how this works. Each participant drafts an individual pitch and your goal is to maximize the sum of your pitch pVals. Just like a traditional fantasy manager must draft certain positions (OF, SS, SP, RP, etc.,) the pVal drafters must choose different pitches:
Participant: Lucas Kelly Current Place: 3rd Best Pitch So Far: Michael Kopech’s four-Seam fastball Worst Pitch So Far: Walker Buehler’s four-Seam fastball
Lucas pVals
Player
Category
Pitch
Points
Walker Buehler
3x Fastballs (wFA, wFS, wFC, wSI)
wFA
-9.2
Zack Wheeler
“
wFA
7.9
Alex Cobb
“
wFS
0.2
Max Scherzer
2x Sliders
wSL
6.3
Cristian Javier
“
wSL
-0.2
Corbin Burnes
1x Curveballs
wCU
7.5
Lucas Giolito
1x Changeup
wCH
-2.3
Shohei Ohtani
1x Secondary
wFS
-1.7
Yu Darvish
1x 2021 Negative pVal
wFC
-0.4
Matt Harvey
1x Negative Regression
wCH
0.0
Liam Hendriks
2x Util
wFA
-0.1
Michael Kopech
“
wFA
9.8
Alek Manoah
2x Reserves
wFA
6.4
Hunter Greene
wSL
5.8
*PitchInfo Pitch Type Value
**Highlighted values have been replaced with Reserves
3x Fastballs:
Walker Buehler’s four-seamer was my first pick and I thought I had taken candy from a bunch of babies. The pitch earned a pVal of 17.9 in 2021 and with his 207.2 innings pitched that season, I thought it was a guarantee points getter. This year, however, opponents are hitting .377 against the pitch and slugging .638. It’s being hit hard 51.6% of the time and has a very low 8.6% K%. The pitch has been used only 33.1% of the time, a career-low, and he’s increased his cutter usage to 25.1%. While the cutter is performing better than the four-seamer, the effective combination of both pitches led to success for Buehler in the past. Nicklaus Gaut wrote about Buehler’s spin rate decreases in his latest post. He did a great job of analyzing what has been going wrong with the pitch.
Zack Wheeler‘s four-seamer is right where I want it to be. Its usage is in the low 40% range which is right in line with where it was when it earned 16.7 pVal points last year. It has a 36.7% K%, a career-high, and hitters are getting to it with a .215 batting average. It is being hit hard 47.4% of the time which is a little concerning, but just a little. Alex Cobb’s splitter is being used at a career-high 40.8% and has an xBA of .149! That’s great. We’ll have to see if his health can keep him throwing the pitch. He’s currently on the IL with back trouble.
2x Sliders: Max Scherzer, please come back!..and wear mittens when you’re helping injured dogs. Scherzer’s slider has a very nice 32.5% K% on the year so far, but it’s well below his career-best 50% in 2017. While I don’t expect it to reach career-level marks, the pitch didn’t seem fully refined at the start of the season and I think there’s room for improvement once he’s back. I’m not sure what to make of Cristian Javier’s slider. He’s only thrown 235 of them so far this year, but it has a 44.9% K% and a .182 batting average against. In 2021 the pitch accumulated 12.0 pVal points in 101.1 innings and this year, Javier is on pace (GP%) for 126.0 innings. I think there’s room to grow here as well.
1x Curveball:
I think I did it! I think I picked a good pitch. Corbin Burnes‘ curveball is currently a league leader with a 7.5 pVal. He’s closely followed by Framber Valdez (6.4), Shane McClanahan (6.3), and Kyle Wright (6.3). It has been Burnes’ best secondary and he’s using it a career-high 19.7% of the time. It has a 47.1% K%, hitters are batting .080 against the pitch, and it is hard hit only 15.4% of the time.
1x Changeup:
Yikes! Lucas Giolito hasn’t found the changeup yet and its usage is down. Its K% is still high at 41.5% but hitters are likely laying off (.371 wOBA) and getting to it (.267 BA, 21.7% Hard-Hit%) more than what the man with a fantastic first name would like.
1x Secondary:
I have a thing for splitters and I really just wanted to take a Shohei Ohtani pitch so that I have even more to root for when I watch him pitch. As of now, he’s only thrown the pitch 25 times and it has been hit with a .333 BA. I’d say it’s too early to tell, but he’s got some catching up to do if he wants to get back to the 14.2 pVal points he earned with the splitter in 2021.
1x Negative pVal:
This one is fun. The idea is to draft a pitch that had a negative value last season and bet that it improves this season. Last season Yu Darvish’s cutter earned -2.8 pVal points. To be honest, I saw a GIF of a dirty Darvish cutter from the past and thought, “There’s no way that pitch is negative in 2022.” So far, I’ve been wrong. He’s still using it 32.7% of the time but it’s getting hit hard with a .337 xBA and a .533 xSLG. He’s putting the cutter in the zone (57%) more than the MLB average (45.8%) and that could be part of the reason for the high xBA. Darvish’s PitcherList player page shows a .321 BABIP on the pitch vs. the .295 MLB average on cutters, so perhaps there’s still some hope.
1x Negative Regression: Matt Harvey’s changeup earned 4.7 pVal points in 2021. I didn’t think he could replicate that again and it looks like I might be right, just for reasons other than what I had in mind at the time.
2x Util:
Cool fact; Hanser Alberto and Liam Hendriks have the same wFA pVal, -0.1. Go figure. In one way, this shows how pVals really need to be understood before they’re used to make any grand statements at your local watering hole. In another, it goes to show you that Liam Hendriks has struggled with the pitch in 2022. It’s just getting hit too often and too hard; .349 wOBA, .277 BA, .462 SLG, .578 xSLG. Kopech’s fastball on the other hand is my money maker and currently sits 3rd best in the MLB according to pVal.
2x Reserves:
Last but literally not least are my reserve picks. Lucky for me, the rules of the pVal competition allow me to drop the two worst performing pitches and replace them with my reserve picks. Alek Manoah‘s four-seamer is bringing my total back up and as long as he keeps utilizing his three positive pVal pitches (6.4 wFA, 2.6 wSI, 4.7 wSL), he’ll likely be replacing another pitch all season. Hunter Greene’s slider is the only of his pitches holding positive pVal this season and that’s fine with me. Baseball fans everywhere were excited to see Greene’s 99th statcast percentile fastball velocity on a more regular basis in 2022, but the pitch has not been effective from a pVal standpoint at -12.8. It’s being put in the zone a little too much and getting hit (.352 BA) a lot too much. The slider, however, is only getting a .112 BA and has been impressive thus far with a 40.4% Whiff rate.
Time will tell if my squad will be able to reach Luke Hoopers pVal leaders. What I do know is that this pVal draft was a lot of fun to conduct and has been a lot of fun to score. If you can find a few friends to participate in one, do it. It’s another great way to interact with the game. Thanks again to the PitcherList crew for sharing the rules of the game with us and stay tuned for more updates throughout the season.
Using my Pitch Leaderboard, I identified every “new” pitch* thrown during MLB’s glorious first weekend. Then, using my Pitch Comps tool, which uses pitch specs (like velocity, spin rate, movement, and release points) to compare pitches to one another, I wanted to see if I could make any quantifiable declarations about the quality of these pitches in small samples. I can’t write about everyone, so I’ll select the most interesting ones (in my humble opinion).
(*Including existing pitches from rookies for whom we now finally have MLB statcast data as well as existing pitches thrown by players who missed all of 2021 due to injury. It will be interesting to see if the latter group looks measurably different post-injury than they did pre-injury.)
At the end of the season, I’ll revisit to find out these comps were actually indicative (i.e., “predictive,” in a sense) of quality, but it’s also strongly possible the comps will change as samples grow. This is very experimental, but it’s something I’ve wanted to try in the past but hadn’t found the motivation to do.
Why pitch comps? I know I am prone to bias watching a handful of pitches from a pitcher. I can’t scout because I can deceive myself into just about any conclusion (and I think the same can be said for most of us, whether we like it or not).
Earlier this week, I shared and discussed starting pitcher velocity gainers on Monday and Tuesday, and then relievers yesterday. Now let’s flip to the fastball velocity decliners. My level of concern for the pitchers on this list, and for those who missed the cut but have also suffered declines, is lower than my excitement for the velocity gainers. Given the abbreviated spring training, it’s understandable if some pitchers are still building up their arm strength, and we’ll see their velocities gradually rise closer to what we expected. Surprisingly however, leaguewide velocity is actually up! During the same date range of Apr 7 – Apr 12, 2022 fastball (four-seam, two-seam, sinker) velocity is actually up from 93.4 MPH in 2021 to 93.6 MPH in 2022. So it’s hard to use the blanket short spring training as an explanation, but I’m sure every pitcher is affected differently. Bottom line is while this group is certainly worth monitoring and a trip to the IL with an injury shared could certainly be announced, I wouldn’t panic just yet.
We’ve got lots of guys to talk about, so let’s get right to it. Check out the start of last week’s article for an explanation of what we’re doing and how we do it. The pitchers are listed in descending order of likelihood that they’ll do what the stats we’re looking at suggest they’ll do. In other words, we list unlucky guys in ascending order of our pessimism about our optimism, and lucky guys in ascending order of our pessimism about our pessimism.
UNLUCKY STARTING PITCHERS
Kyle Freeland: Hesitant as we are to recommend, and for that matter to draft, Colorado pitchers, we are making an exception for Freeland, whose 2018 was unquestionably the best single season ever by a Rockies pitcher. The only thing that went wrong for him last year was that he was suddenly unable to get left-handed hitters out. Since he’s never had that problem before, we envision that he won’t have it again, at least not this season.
The end of the lockout hasn’t cleared things up quite as much as we were hoping, especially with Kimbrel still not traded and unlikely to be by Opening Day at this point.
I’ve got the Closer Chart for you with my Next-In-Line and Darkhorse candidates so you can see every bullpen at a glance and then there is a straight ranking of the relievers after that where you can see that I favor some of the Medium stability closers over some of the High stability guys. It is admittedly hard to be super confident in a reliever ranking after the 10-15 just because who you already have will then dictate where you go later in terms of handcuffing or dipping into other bullpens with lottery tickets, etc… so don’t be too locked into the exact order of the ranking sheet.
As we head into primetime drafting season, I will be rereleasing my positional ranks. Here are my current ranks for relief pitchers for 2022, my third of the offseason. I will post updates as things change with signings, injuries, or news in Major League Baseball. On the Sleeper and the Bust Patreon, you can see the rankings updated live.
Buoyed by the welcomes we received upon our return to Fangraphs this season and the compliments extended to us last week, we now fearlessly resurrect what was, from 2015 to 2019, an annual Birchwood Brothers feature: a consultation of the Holy Quadrinity. For newcomers, and for that matter oldcomers: years ago, Bret Sayre, then of Baseball Prospectus, posited that “the three skills that are most important to the art of pitching [are] getting strikeouts, reducing walks, and keeping the ball on the ground,” and that pitchers who can do those three things, as betokened by their above-average numbers in those categories, are worth the attention of those who ponder such matters. He called this approach The Holy Trinity.
Then we came along and, like John Calvin standing on the shoulders of Martin Luther, suggested a variant of Sayre’s approach. We call it the Holy Quadrinity, which admits only pitchers who are in the upper half of two categories (strikeout percentage and soft-hit percentage) and the lower half—in other words, the better half—of two others (walk percentage and hard-hit percentage). We figured this approach wouldn’t turn up much interesting stuff—that the guys who qualified would be the guys who had good seasons by any metric you cared to use. And there were a lot of those guys. But we were surprised to find how many not-great-season (and, occasionally, not-good-season) pitchers this approach identified. Moreover, and more importantly, although the Quadrinity isn’t infallible, it points you more often than you’d expect in the direction of moderately-priced or even cheap pitchers who go on to have better seasons than the market expects.
With draft season upon us, it is important to monitor where players are being drafted on a regular basis. Throughout draft season, I will be doing that work for you with regular updates on the Average Draft Position on NFBC up until Opening Day. You can find all the pieces in this series here.
Top 100 Players Rising
Will Smith (+10.98)- As will be repeated over and over again in this article, closer prices have been on the rise all draft season and it is no different for Smith. Smith is coming off of a great season in which he saved 37 games with a 3.44 ERA and a 1.13 WHIP. He is one of the few closers that seems to be entrenched in the role, so with all the uncertainty at the position, he deserves to be going high.
Jordan Romano (+10.32)- Like Smith, Romano is rising after coming off of a great season in which he saved 23 games for the Blue Jays. There is no real competition for the role on the team, but the Blue Jays could be a team that shops for bullpen help in free agency or via trade once the CBA is finalized, so I would be careful about over investing in him.
Top 100 Players Falling
None
Top 200 Players Rising
Blake Treinen (+12.97)- Treinen is rising as he appears to be the de facto closer in Los Angeles with Jansen now a free agent. However, the Dodgers could re-sign Jansen, trade for Kimbrel, or pick up a different free agent closer. I like Treinen a lot if he is the guy, but there is a lot we don’t know about the situation.
Taylor Rogers (+25.49)- Rogers is rising like a lot of closers, but this one is really risky. I like Rogers a lot, but he finished the year on the IL and the Twins had been looking to trade him at the deadline last season. Chances are that Minnesota moves him prior to the start of the season or in season which would likely make him a set up guy in a different location.
Top 200 Players Falling
None
Top 300 Players Rising
Lucas Sims (+17.19)- Sims’ rise is indicative of the general rise at the position. Sims is the assumed bullpen leader in Cincy in spite of the fact he saved his last game on June 16th. The Reds spread the save opportunities around last year with 10 pitchers registering at least one save and no pitcher getting more than eight. I don’t expect thi to change much, so if I am investing in the Reds bullpen, it will be on the cheaper options like Art Warren or Amir Garrett.
Jake McGee (+23.23)- The last time I checked in on the relief pitching ADPs, McGee was falling in response to Doval rising. Now Doval is dropping and McGee is rising. I think that there is not a ton of clarity to the Giants bullpen, but good news is that Gabe Kapler is pretty honest about his bullpen usage, so once spring training gets going, we should have a good idea of who is closing.
Top 300 Players Falling
Dylan Floro (-11.17)- It is a bit surprising to see Floro drop considering all the other closing options are rising. I think it likely has to do with the thought that the Marlins may try and bring in a free agent closer like Jansen or Colome. I don’t know if I should buy that to be honest. The Marlins are furthering their rebuild and a high-priced closer doesn’t make a ton of sense right now. I think they could roll with Floro who was great in the role last season.
Ken Giles (-14.68)- Giles is dropping because of the plethora of options in the Seattle bullpen. Giles hasn’t pitched since tearing his UCL after 3.2 innings pitched in 2020. While there is a ton of upside, chances are that even if he is healthy and ready to go, it will be a committee in Seattle.
