Changing a pitcher’s pitch mix seems to be the newest path to success. Having a pitcher utilize his two to four best pitches can help him focus his arsenal for peak results. Finding these pitchers can be a huge advantage and the great and wonderful Eno Sarris used the original work to find Carlos Carrasco. I’m going to step an owner through the procedure using a few examples from the news so they can find their own diamond in the rough.

The basic idea behind changing a pitcher’s pitch mix is to have them throw as many effective pitches as possible. The original studies focused on above-average pitches. This is a simple method and one I use when examining a pitcher. The pitcher’s pitch results can be found by going to their page at FanGraphs, clicking o the Splits tab, then the Pitch Type Splits tab (example).

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Normally I don’t write about bad players. It’s more of a truism than anything: writers like to analyze the breakout or peak-performance potential of top prospects or, alternatively, red flags associated with the game’s premier talents. Rarely do we write about objectively bad players.

Through 120 Major League innings (and change), Robert Stephenson has been an objectively bad starting pitcher, having compiled a 5.10 ERA, an anemic 1.63 strikeout-to-walk ratio (K/BB), and 0.1 WAR. A former 1st-round pick and a consensus top-100 prospect for four consecutive years, Stephenson quickly fell from grace after a catastrophic small-sample debut in 2016. Entering his age-25 season, though, he still has plenty of time to turn things around.

That’s the beauty of baseball: an objectively bad player can become an objectively good one, sometimes overnight. 2017 was a banner year for post-hype prospects, all of whom seemed, at one point or another, destined for eternal mediocrity and former-prospect bustitude. I think Stephenson can become an objectively good pitcher, but it’ll take work.

Here’s a top-10 list, presented ordinally and without the statistic by which I’ve ordered it, of pitchers who accomplished something in 2017, from a list of hundreds of other data points:

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On Tuesday, I hopped over to the pitcher side of the ledger to discuss nine fantasy relevant starting pitchers with strikeout rate upside this season. I used my xK% equation and compared what the formula spit out to what the pitcher’s actual strikeout was. Today, I’m going to share the ten pitchers who most outperformed their xK% marks.

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I’ve spent nearly the entire off-season discussing hitters, as Statcast and xHR/FB rate took over my life. Let’s move on to pitchers for now, and begin with another of my xMetrics, xK%. I updated the metric’s coefficients last season and it’s probably the best xEquation out there given its sky high adjusted R-squared.

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2/12/18

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
• @justinmasonfwfb – Producer/Co-Host
• @pitcherlist – Guest (& RG Contributor!) Nick Pollack

During the show, we discussed how their Twitter handle was ThePitcherList while the website was just Pitcherlist.com and literally after we recorded Nick found out that they finally got PitcherList for their Twitter handle so that’s pretty cool! But I wanted to say something in case folks were confused while listening.

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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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