Last week, I started digging through the free agent pitchers and found those arms who could improve on their pitch mix. Three prime candidates, Jeremy Hellickson, Matt Harvey, and Derek Holland, stood out. This installment includes the older pitchers from MLBtraderumors free-agent starter list while still ignoring those who may or may not become free agents. I’ll look into them once it’s official they are a free agent.

As I said in the previous article:

I’m just going to focus on the each of the pitcher’s 2018 pitch mix. I can’t assume they’ll develop a new pitch, so I need to work with what they showed last year. The two most common ways for pitcher to improve is to drop a horrible pitch or drop their fastball usage. These changes don’t guarantee an improvement but for now, the focus is on pitchers with upside beyond their projection.
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After going through the pitchers, I found they fit into three main groups depending on if changing their mix could help. This ranking is in no way a ranking of pitcher talent but I’m sure someone will bring it up in the comments. These are just pitchers who I believe can improve by adjusting their current pitch mix.

Major Improvement Candidates

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Rob Silver, the 2016 National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) Main Event winner and high-stakes fantasy baseball extraordinaire, messaged me on Twitter a few days ago to ask a question: Which source of pitching statistics are most accurate? I’m paraphrasing. Also, I could paraphrase the question any number of ways: Which source should we be using? Which most reliably correlates with pitcher performance?

It was a question for which I had no answer. Admittedly, I use a variety of sources, none of which align with one another — something I have noticed before but about which I can do nothing but shrug and accept it as a quirk of being a sabermetrician who bears the struggle of dealing with publicly available data.

The sources cryptically mentioned above include the following:

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Shohei Ohtani was one of the most hyped rookies in recent memory. Fueling the excitement was the fact that he came over from Japan and he was a two-way player, both pitching and hitting, and doing each well…very well. Obviously, attempting to translate performance from a foreign league to MLB is difficult, and then you have to actually forecast the upcoming season, which is far tougher than a regular run of the mill projection for an MLB veteran.

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Earlier this month, I highlighted a couple of pitchers who improved their results by changing their pitch mix with a new team. With the positive results, I decided to apply the logic to this upcoming class of free agents. The reason I wanted to focus on free agents because I expect a pitcher’s current teams to keep the pitcher doing what he has always done. After going over 15 pitchers, four stood out with real upside.

I’m just going to focus on the each pitcher’s 2018 pitch mix. I can’t assume they’ll develop a new pitch, so I need to work with what they showed last year. The two most common ways for a pitcher to improve is to quit throwing a horrible pitch or drop their fastball usage. These changes don’t guarantee an improvement. For now, the focus is on pitchers with upside beyond their projection.

I collected the free-agent pitchers from MLBTradeRumors and took the youngest pitchers for this investigation. I didn’t include any pitcher who has any kind of option on their contract. I’ll go back and examine them once it’s known for sure who they are or aren’t a free agent.

After going through the pitchers, I found they fit into three main groups depending on if changing their mix could help. This list is in no way a ranking of pitcher talent but I’m sure someone will bring it up in the comments. These are just pitchers who I believe can improve by adjusting their current pitch mix.

Major Improvement Candidates

Read the rest of this entry »

10/25/18

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 19, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER19!

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• @sporer – Host
• @pitcherlist – Co-Host/Producer

GET THE SLEEPER & THE BUST T-SHIRT FROM ROTOWEAR!

• Clayton Kershaw (4:00)

Inclusions Nick meant to have (10:11)

• Dereck Rodriguez
• Jakob Junis
• Dinelson Lamet
• Steven Matz

Three Nick Ranked/Paul Didn’t (19:45)

• Jeff Samardzija
• Nick Kingham
• Clay Buchholz

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Let’s return to reviewing my preseason Pod Projections, this time with Luis Castillo, a popular sleeper choice and breakout candidate, and for good reason. My original writeup is here.

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10/23/18

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 19, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER19!

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer – Host
• @justinmasonfwfb – Producer/Co-Host
• @jasoncollette – Co-Host
• @pitcherlist – Co-Host

GET THE SLEEPER & THE BUST T-SHIRT FROM ROTOWEAR! Read the rest of this entry »

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Blake Snell

The 25-year-old lefty should have been on several 2017 pre-season sleeper lists but almost everyone missed on him. He was basically a late-round “Why not?” I could see why owners wrote him off with a 4.85 ERA in 20107’s first half. even though he posted a 3.49 ERA in the second half. More importantly, his strikeouts and velocity were trending up and walks were heading down as the season went on.

His K%-BB% climbed from 5% to 16% which put him on par with Jon Lester or Gerrit Cole. Instead, his 196 ADP placed him near Aaron Sanchez, Danny Duffy, and Kevin Gausman.

Snell kept the gains from 2017 with an 18 K%-BB% for the season’s first half. Then, he improved throughout the 2018 season with his velocity climbing pushing his K%-BB% up to 31%.

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I’ve got some piping hot starting pitcher ranks for you today! I’ve been working on this batch of hotness for a good bit now and I’m finally ready to show off the initial. I introduced the concept of The Glob™ last winter – well, I named it. The idea of giant tiers of talent is not particularly new. At any rate, The Glob™ is expanding and still wreaking havoc on drafts everywhere. Even cutting this list at 100, I left off several names I could easily see as Top 100 guys.

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Baseball has a problem, one I’ve personally touched upon numerous times on this site, my personal blog, twitter, in chats, and whilst walking around the grocery store. The traditional role of starting pitchers is dissolving. Even though it has led to teams playing smarter, it’s also deteriorating the product on the field. Baseball, after all, is selling entertainment. We like to pretend that winning equals entertainment, but perhaps that’s not always the case. In fact, we have some decent evidence it is, indeed, not the case.

I explained the problem from a high level on my Patreon yesterday (paywall). I’m hardly the only person to notice this issue – it’s a frequent talking point among baseball circles. Recently, Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer quantified the ways in which starting pitchers are ceding innings to relievers. Bill  James had a rare good tweet about the point of baseball (i.e. entertainment). Jeff Sullivan kindly confirmed that people are pissed via a poll. Sometimes, writers aren’t the best barometer of fan preferences. In this case, we’re all on the same page.

When the way baseball is played changes, so too does the way we play fantasy baseball. The latest trends in pitch usage have altered the way I will approach the 2019 season.

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