Archive for Starting Pitchers

There aren’t many refrains more common for fantasy sports writers than describing a hitter who is performing well during the summer as one who is “heating up with the weather.” 

And the thing is, more often than not, it is justified. Ballparks across the country become more hitter friendly as the weather heats up, and cold morning games and windswept, foggy night games become hot, humid oases for home runs. 

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In its base form, Wins are part of our game even as their frequency drops and annoyance with them continues to surge. I don’t mind them despite their variant nature. They do create a lot of outliers when judging fantasy value, though, and because they aren’t bankable as a skill, that can be misleading. This is why it can be dangerous to use Player Raters as value meters. Someone with a bucket of Wins can skyrocket up the Rater and look better than his actual skills. Conversely, a hard-luck loser with great skills gets overlooked if they have too few wins. Today we’re going to remove Wins from the equation and see if we can learn anything from who jumps into the Top 50.

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Below are the latest significant projected playing time swings for starting pitchers over the past week; we’re skipping relief pitchers this week with nothing of note to share there.

Welcome back to the Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit for Ottoneu points leagues. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence.

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Any fantasy prognosticators out there pencil in Curtis Mead for 14 homers before the All-Star break?

On the Agenda: 

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

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Stuff and location have become key parts of pitcher analysis in recent years. It is something I have used a lot in my writing, and I believe it can be a great indicator of success when applied correctly. This can be particularly useful in fantasy when looking to identify pick-ups or diagnose regression.

The relationship between stuff and location is symbiotic, but not exactly equal. To understand this correlation, we can look at how 2026 starting pitchers have performed across metrics and what we can learn through a macro lens when building our pitching staffs across formats. In this chart, we have Stuff+ on the y-axis and Location+ on the x-axis. The higher the pitcher, the more ‘Stuff’ they have, and the further to the right of the chart they are, the better they are at locating their pitches. If you hover over or tap a dot, you can also see how many innings they pitched and their xERA for 2026.

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It looks like there’s no one at this game, though I think I saw a Meckler Heckler.

On the Agenda: 

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

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Ret of season projections are a great way to identify players likely to perform better moving forward. The table below shows all the starting pitchers whose rest of season OOPSY-projected ERA is 3.80 or better (as compared to a league average of 4.19) and at lest 0.20 better than what they have shown so far this year (through June 22).

We’ll likely follow this up with another version looking at potential fallers based on the OOPSY projections. Today, we’ll highlight four starting pitchers that should perform better based on their skills and stuff for the rest of the season.

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It’s been about a month and a half since I last checked on the starting pitcher SIERA underperformers and overperformers. So let’s revisit these names to find out if any make good trade targets or opportunities to sell high on.

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Last week didn’t have significant projection changes worth reporting, but we’re back this week with news aplenty. The relief pitcher table now looks different; instead of showing percent change, which can over-inflate minute projection changes in actual innings, I’m now calculating remaining innings pitched and selecting for significant swings there.