Archive for Starting Pitchers

In the playoffs, pitching identities become extra apparent as teams look to lean on strengths; the Rays, Brewers, and Red Sox led all of baseball in usage of certain single-pitch types, which helped guide them to playoff places. These trends are by no means a coincidence and make up the blueprint of team ideologies. But these ideologies shift and evolve season to season and can often be useful as a predictive measure of how teams visualize their pitching going into next season, whether that’s molding pitchers to fit their philosophy or bringing in arms that can better reinforce their vision than their current staff.

Going through every team’s pitch usage trends, there were certain teams that stuck to their tendencies. The Brewers’ cutter and the Mariners’ slider-and-sinker profile stayed true, but some notable new trends did occur.

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On the third Saturday of March, as has been customary for many of the past 15 years, I joined friends and colleagues in Las Vegas to draft live in the NFBC. Their Main Event is the largest national high-stakes contest – a 15-team standard 5×5 roto format with an $1,800 entry fee and a $200,000 grand prize for the overall champion.  This season, I reduced my FAAB leagues from 10+ to five to focus on content and time management/family balance. Before having kids, spending most of my Sunday updating FAAB content and working through my own bids was no sweat. Now, with two youngens, ages five and seven, and a robust youth travel hockey schedule, limited weekend time during the MLB season is mostly spent on producing content. For that weekend in Vegas, the Saturday NFBC Main Event was my only live draft in the Year of Brad Lord, 2026.

A few days before the draft, I set pick 14 as my sixth draft preference (KDS) after picks 1-5 and earned the 14th pick. I would have been thrilled to earn pick one or two to start with Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. Sadly for many, those early first-round picks were anything but a gift this year. At pick 14 and pick 17 in the second round, I knew I would have the option to select two players I’d be happy with — Kyle Tucker, Gunnar Henderson, Fernando Tatis Jr., Junior Caminero, and/or Cristopher Sánchez. Since Sánchez was my only SP target in Round 2, I mapped out two contingency-based draft roadmaps: one with Sánchez, and one that started with two hitters. I also had a few precepts for this draft I wanted to stick by:

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Over a fantasy season, it’s hard to trace results back to the decisions or actions you took that led to that result. We take so many actions from keepers (if your league has them), to the draft, to trades, to FAAB or waiver moves, to lineup decisions, that parsing what mattered and what didn’t can be impossible.

Instead, I find it is more productive to evaluate things the other direction – look at decisions you made or actions you took, determine how they impacted your final results, and then decide if you did something right and repeatable or wrong and avoidable. That is how I started the analysis of my trade for Tarik Skubal. And that’s why I am diving into my bullpen in Ottoneu League 1.

I felt I had a strong team, with a good lineup and a top-tier rotation. I finished 4th. That’s not terrible – we pay out the top four spots and I still get bragging rights over eight managers, many of whom I have competed with for nearly two decades. But it isn’t what I hoped. And the bullpen might be why.

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In my first article for Rotographs, I dug into a premise that always puzzles me at the beginning of the season. What do you do with the seemingly low end starting pitchers who are off to hot starts? 

I noted how sometimes, they can stay hot for the full season, citing Rick Porcello’s Cy Young season in 2016 and more recently, 2025 standouts like Kris Bubic, Shane Smith, and Tyler Mahle. 

I set the parameters for this type of pitcher around a variety of the statistics that fantasy managers look to when determining the staying power of a starting pitcher. 

“We want to find pitchers who are suppressing runs and locating, but who may be considered unsustainable due to underlying metrics, specifically around the GIF making Stuff+ and K-BB%. To capture this, we’ll focus on pitchers with Stuff+ below 100, a Location+ above 100, a K-BB% of 17% or less, and an ERA below 3.00.”

Here was that list as of May 1 this season. 

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Midseason, I charted the rookie crop of pitchers using a z-composite score. As the first full season for many of these pitchers wraps up, let’s come back to them to see how they fared and what this means for fantasy value moving into 2027.

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Lon Horwedel-Imagn Images

With the dust finally settling, I ended the 2026 season with $3K in profit over 12 leagues. Here are my league results and some of overarching thoughts on the season and some leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re doing a follow-up article on pitchers who underperformed their projected value after looking at those who outperformed. Many of these pitchers were injured, including Brandon Woodruff, Cole Ragans, Daniel Palencia, Edward Cabrera, Garrett Crochet, Hunter Brown, and Spencer Strider. Meanwhile, several struggled relative to expectations, like Luis Castillo, Logan Webb, Bryan Woo, George Kirby, and others.

The table below shows pitchers who lost $10 in value compared to their projected dollars within the top 200 picks.

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Entering his contract year, Freddy Peralta was one of the biggest offseason moves, coming to the Mets from Milwaukee as a top-20 starting pitcher in fantasy ADP. For Peralta, the Mets, and anyone who drafted New York’s prospective ace this season, 2026 is a year that has not gone as planned. But following a fresh start in Florida, it seems as if Peralta is back on track, at least for now. We will look at this rollercoaster season for Freddy Peralta, what this means for his fantasy value in 2027, and what he can learn from both his time in New York and Tampa Bay.

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Smooth moves, kid

George Lombard Jr. also drove in the winning run for the Yankees with this two-run blast in the bottom of the eighth.

On the Agenda: 

1. Quick Hits
2. Various News and Notes
3. Streaming Pitchers

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Welcome back, Ceddanne Rafaela!

My bad. Rafaela left in the third inning of Wednesday’s contest with a strained right hamstring.

On the Agenda: 

1. Quick Hits
2. Various News and Notes
3. Streaming Pitchers

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