We have some fancy tools here at FanGraphs, but sometimes brute force works just as well. In fact, Glenn DuPaul found once that strikeouts minus walks beat the ERA predictors at their own game.

Maybe it’s no surprise. That’s the heart of the game, getting outs and keeping people off the basepaths. And maybe sometimes this other stuff is just pyrite. Just because you get a lot of ground balls doesn’t mean you won’t give up home runs. Even if you have a limited arsenal, if you can get strikeouts and limit the walks, you can have success. So focus in on the Ks and the BBs.

Let’s make a list.

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Jesus Aguilar is the very definition of a prospect with more value in fantasy baseball than in real life. Our own Marc Hulet ranked him as the 11th-best prospect in Cleveland’s system last year, and left him out of the top 15 entirely this year. There are plenty of very good reasons for this exclusion, starting with the fact that Aguilar is a bat-only prospect; he has well below-average speed and doesn’t have much of anything to offer defensively.

Furthermore, the 23-year-old’s one plus tool, his power, has mostly been of the five o’clock variety throughout his minor-league career. Listed at 6’3″, 250 pounds (I’d bet my life savings on the over regarding his listed weight), he puts on one hell of a show in batting practice, hitting the ball out of the park to all fields. However, following his 23 homers in A-ball back in 2011, he hit just 15 dingers between High-A and Double-A in 2012, and 16 last year in Double-A.

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A year ago, I developed a regression equation to estimate what a pitcher’s strikeout rate (K%) should be. That formula used a trio of strike type rates found at Baseball Reference, including a pitcher’s looking, swinging and foul strike percentages. While the original formula was a strong estimator, I have since tweaked it slightly.

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When the Milwaukee Brewers selected Taylor Jungmann with the 12th pick in the 2011 draft, he was seen as a polished prospect with an advanced feel for pitching who would move quickly through the organization. If everything went to plan, Jungmann would be in the major-league rotation by late 2013, with a long career as a mid-to-back of the rotation starter ahead of him.

At the time, I wholeheartedly agreed with these sentiments. I saw Jungmann pitch several times during his college career at the University of Texas, and it was easy to see why he was viewed as such a sure thing. He had a mid-90s heater with a sweeping curve that projected as a plus pitch, and a change-up that seemed plenty good enough to avoid nasty splits.

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There’s nothing I love more than a cliche for the title of a post.

Today I want to take a look at a few of the players who have seen some of the biggest drops in ownership percentage on ESPN.com so far this season. Because we’ve only played a few games this year, determining whether I think these guys should be snatched off the wire comes down to whether I liked them in the preseason. I put hundreds of hours into preseason prep work, so I might as well milk it for all it’s worth while I can.

Dillon Gee — 7-Day % Change: -27.6%

There was a point where four of the five most recent articles that showed up on Gee’s player page were written by yours truly. I loved what he did in 2012 when he saw a big spike in swinging strike rate which pushed his strikeout rate comfortably above league average. He also had a solid ground ball rate just over 50%, and he limited walks. But his ERA was north of 4.00 thanks to a strand rate that was in the lowest quantile among pitchers with at least as many innings as Gee. I was all over the guy with solid strikeout, walk and groundball rates going into 2013.

Gee delivered in a way with a 3.62 ERA last year. But he didn’t do it like I wanted him to. His swinging strike rate and strikeout rate fell back below league average to where they had been prior to 2012. His groundball rate also fell significantly as well, but his walk rate did hold. The main reason he was able to post a sub-4.00 ERA was a reversal of strand rate fortune. His strand rate went from 68.9% to 77.9%. To repeat his 2013 ERA he’ll either have to regain the above average strikeout and groundball rates or get lucky again. The good rates of 2012 seem to be the exception and not the rule, and you can’t own a guy banking on strand rate. Leave him on the wire, and use him as a streamer if the right matchup comes along. Read the rest of this entry »

Padres pitcher Ian Kennedy is ready for a rebound. After just 11 innings, it’s starting to look like his move to San Diego will pay off. Kennedy opened the year as a late-round flyer in most fantasy leagues. After three years of consistent production in Arizona, everything seemed to fall apart for Kennedy last season. Kennedy not only walked more batters, but also saw his home run rate jump to obscene levels. This continued even after a mid-season trade to one of the largest parks in the game. When the dust settled, Kennedy’s ERA was a disappointing 4.91. Since he wasn’t an elite option before the drop-off, Kennedy became nothing more than late-round fodder. Based on what he’s shown thus far, it looks like the old Kennedy is back.

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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages…I’m going to have a hard time concentrating today. As you can see in the byline below this article, I am a shameless pro wrestling fan — with WrestleMania XXX coming up this Sunday, I’ll do my best to prevent my subconscious from letting this turn into an endless stream of irrelevant wrasslin’ references. Let’s take a swig of beer for the workin’ man and get this show on the road, shall we?

Roenis Elias is making his first major-league start tonight, and he’s a pretty interesting guy to talk about. The 25-year-old Cuban has lively raw stuff and a decent track record in the minors over the last couple seasons, but no one went into Spring Training expecting him to crack the major-league rotation. However, with Hisashi Iwakuma and Taijuan Walker on the shelf to open the season, and veteran reclamation project Scott Baker pitching so poorly in March that the Mariners released him, the left-handed Elias finds himself making the jump from Double-A to the big leagues.

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You know, I can advocate for different types of leagues. I can talk about the pros and cons of head-to-head, and how redraft leagues are great for the refresh, and about deep leagues and shallow leagues. It’s my job!

But when it comes to playing, to the leagues I actually join, the rubber hits the road. In other words, I vote with my wallet when I join these leagues, because I’m spending actual time and energy in this way. So I thought I’d look through my leagues and see what kinds of leagues I like. And while I’m there, I might as well count up my pitchers so you can see what sorts of arms I’m investing in. My arms and my leagues, and now you know what I *really* like.

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Though my love for Carlos Carrasco is no longer a secret, I feel like I haven’t shared my optimism as much as I did for my favorite sleeper from last season, Andrew Cashner. However, I did first recommend him in deep leagues last summer (he failed to deliver, oops), discussed a bit of his intrigue when delving into the Indians rotation depth chart this year and then boldly predicted that he would outearn names like Danny Salazar, Justin Masterson and Corey Kluber to finish as the most valuable Indians starter. Now that he has officially won the fifth starter job in Cleveland, there is cause for celebration.

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We have been told ad nauseam that spring training stats mean nothing. For the most part, this is true. As soon as you begin reading an article quoting a pitcher’s spring ERA or a hitter’s batting average, you could safely skip any analysis the author provides. But two years ago, with the help of Matt Swartz, I discovered that a pitcher’s strikeout percentage actually does carry some significance with regards to his regular season performance. Knowing this, we could look to the spring stats to identify which starters are punching out batters at a significantly higher rate than they have in the past. These make for an interesting group of breakout candidates.

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