It’s tough to get excited about this year’s batch of rookie pitchers. One reason is that most of the top arms (Reyes, Gohara, Buehler, Flaherty) have already debuted in the majors. Many of the other top-ranked arms have not pitched in double-A yet.

With this year’s class looking down, there always seems to be a few pitchers who come out of nowhere like Luis Castillo did last season. He wasn’t picked among the top 600 players in NFBC and now he near a top-100 pick. Jake Faria and Dinelson Lamet were a couple other arms who were off owner’s radars. It just takes a pitcher gaining a couple ticks on his fastball or developing a new pitch to shoot up in talent.

I found it best to be aggressive on this these mid-season call-ups. They may be getting promoted because they are ready. Investigate any recent scouting reports and don’t be afraid to roster them if they’re talented.

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Let’s just get this out of the way. I really like Luis Castillo. I like him for all the reasons Jeff Sullivan and Nick Pollack also really like Castillo (Sullivan’s post, Pollack’s post). I emphasize my ‘like’ of Castillo because the rest of this post is about his downside; all the various scenarios in which Castillo isn’t the shiny bauble we witnessed late last season.

The real world has repeatedly confirmed that humans are really shitty at thinking probabilistically. NBC’s Craig Calcaterra was discussing this very topic earlier today with regard to politics. Remember when Nate Silver predicted Hillary Clinton would win with something around a 75 percent likelihood? That meant a Trump victory had the same odds as flipping a coin heads up twice in a row. That happens a lot. In fact, it happens one quarter of the time. Silver wasn’t wrong – at least, we can’t know that he was wrong without a LOT more data. A Trump victory was well within the realm of possibility.

The Castillo painted by Sullivan, Pollack, and others may be here to stay. He existed for a time in 2017. Performing at a high level is a great indicator for future ability to perform at a high level. Still, we as an industry are getting a little crazy about 89.1 good innings. Here’s how it could all go wrong with my guestimated risks. Adjust those however you wish.

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A couple weeks ago, I used our newly installed NFBC ADP data to pluck out some potential hitting breakouts via Steamer 600 projections. I have some pitchers for you today. Honestly, the pitcher iteration of this isn’t quite as juicy as the hitters. I think it’s because pitchers displaying strong skills are elevated into prominent roles sooner than hitters so there aren’t many guys with mid-3.00 or better ERA projections in a low innings totals. In fact, the projections of the guys I picked aren’t that great, but I’m willing to bet on them as I believe they can outperform the projection substantially. The first three are guys I’m actively targeting in my drafts while the latter three are bigger injury gambles meant for reserve rosters in mixed leagues.

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We’d hoped to discuss the first half of our NFBC slow draft this week, but it’s moving with the Thialfian swiftness of Bartolo Colon trying to leg out a triple. So instead we’re back with another installment in our lucky/unlucky series, wherein we attempt to disentangle bad fortune from disappointment and good fortune from success.

For newcomers to our world: our theory, which seems to be borne out in practice, is that pitchers who aren’t hit hard but give up a lot of hits and a lot of home runs are simply unlucky, and pitchers who are but don’t and don’t are merely lucky. We posit that the unlucky guys outperformed their numbers last year, and will accordingly be undervalued in this year’s drafts and auctions, while the lucky guys will be overpriced and should be avoided. And we deduce who these guys might be by looking at 2017’s Hard-Hit Percentage, Batting Average on Balls in Play, and Home Run to Fly Ball Ratio.

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It’s tough to create a perfectly balanced team on draft or auction day. Owners are feeling the push-and-pull of trying to balance all five categories in a roto league. Mid-draft, many owners decide to drop a category with the hope of finding the needed stats on the waiver wire. Knowing which stats can be found can be tricky. By looking back at last season’s Tout Wars leagues, a decent idea of available stats can be determined.

One feature of the OnRoto.com fantasy league website computes the league’s final standings using just the drafted teams (nine pitchers, 14 position players). I took these draft values and compared them to the actual final values for each of the four roto leagues (12-team AL and NL-only and the two 15-team mixed leagues).

Some specific notes on these leagues. First, they are deeper than most leagues so every player who might be good is already owned. As for the timing of the mixed draft (the other three were auctions) happened a few weeks before the other three. Additionally, only the 23-man rosters were used used for the projected standings. Each team had an additional five or six-person bench.

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Alex Reyes was considered to be a top-5 prospect coming into the 2017 season. Then his elbow gave out and he eventually needed Tommy John surgery. He’s nearing completion of his recovery and the Cardinals are considering when he’ll return and his role.

Wanting to protect their top prospect as much as possible, the Cardinals have set a soft target of May 1 as a likely return date for Reyes. What hasn’t been so explicitly defined, though, is what role he’ll fill upon that return.

Long term, the Cardinals have every intention of using Reyes to anchor their rotation. MLB Pipeline recently ranked Reyes as the seventh-best right-handed pitching prospect, and he likely would have been higher on that list had he not just missed a full season.

But given the recovery process Reyes has undergone over these last 12 months, the Cardinals intend to be cautious in 2018. Their preference, as stated multiple times this offseason by president of baseball operations John Mozeliak, would be to have Reyes first come out of the bullpen.

For fantasy owners, they could take a chance on having an elite arm as a starter or reliever. With so many possible unknown outcomes, the following is a breakdown of 2018 value.

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The 2018 Pod Projections are now available! For the first time, the package includes NFBC ADP, along with all historical Pod-developed xMetrics. My projections are based on the methodology shared in my eBook Projecting X 2.0, and the process continues to evolve and improve (thanks Statcast!). Given the hype and the difficulties of translating performance from a foreign league, it was obvious who the first player for this series should be — Japanese uber-athlete Shohei Ohtani.

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Last week, I profiled Jose Quintana as a pitcher’s whose ADP and our auction value differed. In my analysis, I noticed that his swinging strike rate (SwStr%) and strikeout rate (K/9) didn’t move in tandem. Here are the pair plotted against each other.

And here are his historic values showing he doesn’t have a propensity to have a higher strikeout rate than his swinging strike rate suggests.

Quintana’s projections seemed based off his strikeout jump, not his swing-and-miss numbers. Steamer has him pegged for a 9.1 K/9 for 2018. Today, I’m going to look to see if just looking at strikeouts rates and not swing-and-miss totals is the correct procedure moving forward.

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A few weeks ago, I took a deep dive on Luke Weaver, budding Cardinals No. 2 and Adam Wainwright torch-taker. I came out of it reluctant to invest in him at his hefty asking price: per National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) average draft position (ADP) data, 27th among starting pitchers and 105th overall. His lackluster swinging strike rate (SwStr%) indicated to me he could not sustain his lofty 28% strikeout rate (K%) when pitchers of similar SwStr% caliber had strikeout rates ranging from 18% at worst to 25% at best. The best, in that instance, was Aaron Nola. I doubted Weaver could compare so favorably, primarily because Nola steals strikes in a way few others can.

What I failed to do — what I should’ve done — is check. Duh! I should’ve checked how often Weaver earns called strikes. So I did, and I came away feeling even more scared than before. Turns out, I’m an idiot who botched some simple arithmetic: Weaver falls just outside the top quartile of pitchers in stealing strikes, as opposed to literally 3rd-worst like I claimed in the previously linked Tweet. That would’ve been really bad. Still, this miscalculation and subsequent mischaracterization of Weaver’s ability sent me on a quest of ultimately marginal value.

The more I looked at Weaver’s plate discipline peripherals, the more I realized Weaver doesn’t coerce many swings-and-misses out of the zone. He’s actually pretty bad at it. That means he generates most of his success in the zone, which, to me, seemed unusual. I was nervous that thriving by threading the needle — i.e., pounding the zone (assuming some semblance of command) and hoping for whiffs — might be a dangerous way to live, or that, at the very least, a young pitcher for whom the proverbial book on him isn’t out yet might be subject to regression in this particular area. The freshly FanGraphs-retired Eno Sarris thought thriving in the zone is better than thriving outside the zone:

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I’ve updated my starting pitcher rankings with commentary on the top 100. Beyond the top 100, I grouped guys into tiers. These are the same tiers I used in the Fantasy Black Book (available now!) and different guys within those tiers are definitely comparable to guys found in the Top 100, but it just becomes difficult to differentiate so the Top 100 really focused on the guys I’m drafting/targeting right now.

If you like somebody in one of the lists better than someone I have in the 80-100 range, that totally makes sense. It’s very fluid there, just as it is in the middle grouping of the pitchers ranks (from around 30-75), which I’ve termed The Glob™.  This ranking outlines how I’m attacking The Glob™.

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