The 2017 season has not been kind to Blake Snell. The 24-year-old southpaw has been demoted to the minors multiple times while putting up ghastly numbers in the majors including a 4.42 ERA, 4.52 BB/9 and averaging just 5.4 innings per start. However, Sunday’s excellent outing of 7.0 IP, 0 ER, 2 Hits, 2 BBs, and 7 Ks against Seattle has been raising eyebrows, hinting at Snell’s massive upside we saw when he entered the major leagues in 2016. The question is, what did Snell do in this outing to succeed and can we expect this level of production to return in future starts?

Let’s dive into Sunday’s game against the Mariners to determine if Snell can be a dependable pitcher down the stretch. First here’s a quick overview of Snell’s approach for the afternoon.

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Few things are more frustrating in fantasy baseball than watching your pitcher struggle to put hitters away. He consistently gets ahead in the count and into two-strike situations, but regularly fail to finish. This is obviously even more crucial with runners on.

This is a particular struggle of youngsters if only because you will eventually be pushed to the bullpen or weeded out entirely if you don’t eventually learn to get outs with two strikes. When a young arm shows that ability early on – I say “ability”, but it’s usually a single pitch doing the heavy lifting so maybe it’s better stated as the ability to execute their out pitch – it curbs the prevalence of those disaster outings that can tank an ERA.

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If you’ve followed baseball over the course of of the past few seasons, you’ve probably noticed the new data available to us with the advent of Statcast. This has led to the development of new metrics to measure player performance, with xwOBA being one of the most notable. If you’re familiar with xwOBA, you have likely seen it used to examine the quality of contact made or induced by hitters or pitchers.

Today, I want to look at the pitcher side of things. While it is generally accepted that some pitchers are better at inducing weak contact than others, to this point, the baseball community is still working through the best ways to process the implications of the relatively new data available to us.  As Craig Edwards wrote yesterday on the main site, there isn’t a strong relationship between weak contact year to year.

Acknowledging all of this, I want to look at pitchers who have recently improved the quality of contact they have allowed. There are a couple assumptions to acknowledge here (included at the bottom of the following table). First, I am only looking at pitchers with over 1000 pitches in 2017 before the All-Star Game. Additionally, I am only including pitchers who have thrown 500 pitches since the All-Star Game.

My intent with this is to try to get a better look at starting pitchers, who have made more than a couple of starts, and remove relief pitchers. I have also limited the group to players who’s post All-Star Game expected wOBA is less than the sample average at the time of the break (this works out to be around .315, for reference). The last stipulation I have included is that I am only showing pitchers who have seen an improvement of .010 or greater in their expected results (10 points or greater). The reason for this is simple, I would rather show 25 results than 45.

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Jose Berrios was a heralded prospect coming up through the minors for the Minnesota Twins. The big expectations were unmet a year ago as he struggled mightily through his MLB debut. He managed just a paltry 5% K-BB rate en route to an 8.02 ERA and 1.87 WHIP in 58.3 innings of work. He admits to not being as mentally prepared as possible for the big leagues, something that plagues countless rookies and even many veterans over the course of the season. Pitching can be as mentally grinding as it is physically.

The heartening aspect of Berrios’ 2016 season is that he continued to excel in the minors. In 111.3 innings, he posted a 21% K-BB, 2.51 ERA, and 0.99 WHIP, finding consistent success even as he shuttled between Rochester and Minnesota (three stops in each). His success in the minors kept expectations high for the 23-year old right-hander. He didn’t break camp with the club, instead logging six strong starts at Triple-A Rochester (20% K-BB, 1.13 ERA, 0.81 WHIP in 39.7 IP) before his May 13th season debut.

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I wasn’t a fan of Danny Salazar heading into the season. In fact, I foolishly made the bold prediction that Jaime Garcia would outearn him. HA! It wasn’t due to doubts about the quality of his stuff, obviously. It was concerns about the health of his arm paired with a walk rate that spiked in 2016. And I was right to question his health, though last year it was his elbow which worried me, this time he landed on the DL for his shoulder. And before hitting the DL, his ERA swelled to 5.40. But after missing over a month and a half, Salazar has returned to make five starts and has absolutely dominated like a completely new man. Or maybe just the man we always dreamed he could be.

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Note: I was wanting to do Anthony Banda and Reynaldo Lopez but the camera angles for them are horrible so far. I do hope to write about them soon. In the meantime, check out newcomer Nick Pollack’s piece on Lopez. 

• Brandon Woodruff

• The 24-year-old righty started at the back end of several preseason top-100 lists. So far he’s made two starts for the Brewers and I watched the one on August 9th.

• Definite thrower. Everything is coming in at full effort. He just challenges hitters and hopes they miss.

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As we march toward the final month of the season, we will continue to see many new faces in starting pitching rotations. Let’s discuss a trip of such in the American League.

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I’m already thinking about 2018. It’s not that my teams are doing poorly; they’re fine, for the most part. It’s that the economist nerd in me, when thinking abut fantasy baseball, most often evaluates the disparities between perceived and actual values, and how long, if ever, it takes for the market (aka fantasy owners) to come to equilibrium, to use economic parlance.

For example: you may or may not be aware that Kevin Gausman, despite his atrocious start to the season, has been magnificent the last five weeks. In seven starts from July 2 onward, he’s posted a 3.24 ERA (supported peripherally by a 2.81 xFIP and 3.40 FIP) with 11.4 strikeouts and 2.6 walks per nine innings. The strikeout rate is fueled by a 15% swinging strike rate (SwStr%), which have come consistently, ascending into double-digit percentages in all seven starts (and in eight of his last nine). His strikeout-to-walk differential (K-BB%) by month: 2.0%, 8.8%, 9.2%, 23.4%, and, in one August start, 28.0%.

Meanwhile, he’s inducing ground balls almost half the time (49.5% GB). You could say he’s due for batting average on balls in play (BABIP) regression, and he probably still is. His BABIP constantly hovering above .349 does not inspire confidence, but few pitchers have ever been BABIP’d so hard in a single season — I discussed this phenomenon in regard to Robbie Ray. All said, while there’s no guarantee his BABIP regresses before October, Gausman still shows the promise we once expected of him — perhaps more — and it’s going largely unnoticed because of his downright repulsive first half. (He’s baseball’s #12 starter the last month.)

Such is the gist of this post, in which I’ll briefly touch upon players I anticipate to have average draft positions (ADPs) in 2018 that will lend themselves to relatively low-risk, high-reward opportunities in standard mixed leagues. Whether such expectations become reality is another story; that’s why I’m relying on ownership levels as a proxy for perceived value. All ownership levels likely retain some amount of draft day inertia, for better or for worse — in other words, leftover ownership (or lack thereof) in abandoned leagues — so take it all with a grain of salt.

Please note this is, by no means, an exhaustive list — just the first few players who come to mind, mostly because I’ve paid close attention to them all season.

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It’s been a big year for hitting without a doubt, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t seen some great pitchers emerge. Guys like James Paxton, Alex Wood, and Luis Severino are winning leagues for people, but there are also plenty of intriguing arms who aren’t necessarily toting gaudy bottom line results. However, their skills and stuff set them up to be next year’s version of those guys and they are the ones you can buy now for a big 2018 payoff. We’ll span league depth with a couple deep league considerations, too.

Danny Salazar | Indians

Danny Salazar has been peak Salazar since his return from the DL and I’m pretty excited about his prospects down the stretch and beyond. He’s allowed just three runs in 20 innings since returning, with 28 strikeouts, five walks, and eight hits! We talked about him on the podcast right around his return, I wrote up his first and second starts in the Roto Riteup, and then Eno wrote up his new approach. We saw what he can do in 2015 with a 3.45 ERA, 1.13 WHIP, and 195 strikeouts in 185 innings. Since then, his walk rate has spiked to 11% and he’s been DL’d with both elbow and shoulder injuries, but he’s still just 27 with top-flight skills.

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We are in the dog days of the season now. Some of you have already transitioned to fantasy football (how dare you!), some of you are trying your best to stay engaged, but summer activities are tough to ignore, and then the rest of you are fully engaged – meticulously staying abreast of every bullpen change, every lineup move, and prospect call-up. I want to take a quick look at eight interesting starters and even those of you in the latter group hopefully garner something useful about these intriguing names.

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