For the vast majority of the season, I completely ignore ERA, instead relying on SIERA for rest of season projection purposes. While this method is far better than looking solely at ERA, what about the pitchers you expected to be good, but have been terrible, with weak skills to match? These are the guys whose SIERA confirms they have pitched poorly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will continue posting such weak skills. So let’s discuss three starters we expected better from, but whose current skills don’t provide much hope for a rebound.

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If you scooped Fernando Romero off your waiver wire on Sunday night, you were paid immediate dividends as the 23-year old righty threw six scoreless innings in St. Louis on Monday night, allowing just three hits and three walks while striking out nine. He now has 11.7 scoreless innings to open his MLB career and has many wondering if he can be a game-changing rookie for both the Twins and your fantasy team. He has consistently been a Top 10 entrant in Twins prospect lists for the last couple years including 7th by Eric last year and will place top five for this year’s list, which is coming soon. Let’s take a closer look at the electric righty.

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Strikeouts are up again this season, but there’s another trend affecting pitchers that has received less attention. As we approach the six-week mark of the 2018 campaign, pitchers are notably wilder than they have been in a long time.

For each season between 2011 and 2016, the average Zone% for the major leagues hovered between 44.2 and 44,8 percent. Last season, pitchers were less wild than they had been since 2010, locating in the strike zone at a 45.0 percent rate. So far this year, pitchers are wanting to have much less to do with the strike zone, as their collective Zone% has dropped to 43.4 percent.

Subpar control is not an early-season thing. Last March and April, pitchers combined for a 44.8 percent Zone% and in the previous March/April, pitchers were practically trolling hitters into swinging, posting a 47.3 percent Zone%. Another thing that mark from 2016 shows is that there is still plenty of time for Zone% to regress to its norm this season.
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FanGraphs hosts a statistic for pitchers called ERA Minus FIP (“E-F”), which is as advertised. FIP being a (somewhat) adequate measure of pitcher over-/under-performance, one could look to E-F to identify pitchers who may, as they say, be due for regression. FIP’s correlation with ERA, however, is weaker than that of xFIP due to the former’s inability to account for the volatility inherent to home run-to-fly ball ratios (HR/FBs). To take it a step further, xFIP’s correlation with ERA is weaker than that of SIERA due to the former’s inability to account for a pitcher’s ground ball rate (GB%) and how it interacts with his strikeout and walk rates (K%, BB%).

Alas, I often use SIERA, rather than xFIP or FIP, to identify pitchers who may be ripe for regression. ERA Minus SIERA (“E-S,” henceforth) is not the be-all, end-all by any means, and I would never consider making a roster decision based exclusively on that metric. Player evaluation is a holistic endeavor, which you likely know yet I still intend to demonstrate. Three names stood out to me — four, if you include Luis Castillo, but I covered him a week and a half ago — as interesting E-S targets, but I came away from this feeling good about only one of them.

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Wow, I can’t believe we’re already a month into the season! A quick refresher on how I put these together. This is a narrower focus than just “rest of season” as I’ll be updating these every month. Pitching is just too volatile to have confidence in a single ranking set for more than 4-6 weeks at a time. The tiers are more important than the numerical ranking as they’ll guide the start/sit decisions more accurately.

I want to be clear that the Must-Starts aren’t automatically the best pitchers, but rather the guys that you can’t sit with any confidence. Do I really think that (spoiler alert!) Sean Manaea is the 27th-best starter for the rest of the season? I have hard time saying that, but there is no circumstance where I’d bench him right now.

• March rankings

Please leave your questions and comments below!

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I mentioned on a recent podcast that my updated starting pitcher rankings would be out today, but I’m not quite done so you’ll have to wait a little longer! In the meantime, I wanted to look at some struggling arms and see if there’s any hope. Remember, this time last year saw Jimmy Nelson toting a 5.34 ERA and probably on a ton of waiver wires. From May 1st on, he had a 3.13 ERA and 176 strikeouts in 146.7 innings.

Kenta Maeda (6.58 ERA), Jose Quintana (5.22), Carlos Martinez (4.71), and Justin Verlander (4.60) were a few other arms who emerged from crummy Aprils. Not every quality arm found their footing so it’s far from a guarantee, but a handful of April duds will be gems the rest of the way. Let’s see if we can find some of them and start with a repeat struggler from last year.

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A bad start to the season somehow got worse for Lance Lynn on Monday night. He entered his fifth start of 2018 with a 7.71 ERA, having allowed five or more runs in three of his previous starts. By the time the Blue Jays forced his exit after five innings, Lynn’s ERA rose to a ghastly 8.37.
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Caleb Smith

If I didn’t give Smith a Quick Look, I feel I was failing. I watched the 26-year-old lefty’s game from the 22nd (good camera angle) when he went 6 IP, 2 ER, 10 K’s, and 0 walks.

• Fastball: 91-94 mph. Kept it down and commanded it well. Hitter just couldn’t get a read on this pitch but I couldn’t tell exactly why. Some hitters are seeing it well since it has given up all his home runs.
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Last week, I reintroduced my Small Sample Normalization Services (SSNS), analyzing strong starts by Dylan Bundy, Jose Berrios, and Patrick Corbin in the context of other small samples within their respective careers or recent histories. This time, I discuss three more odd starts among starting pitchers and their implications.

Chase Anderson, MIL SP

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Mike Clevinger had plenty of proponents coming into the season and they no doubt felt that even if his ERA/WHIP combo exceeded last year’s 3.11/1.25 marks, they would at least have strikeouts to fall back on. He’s currently besting both marks with a 1.75 ERA and 1.05 WHIP, but has just a 17% strikeout rate, down 10 points from last year’s 27% mark that sat 14th among pitchers with at least 120 innings. It’s hard to be too mad at the performance with those ratios, but we also know there’s virtually no way he maintains either because he’s not Pedro Martinez. What happened to his strikeout rate?

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