Archive for Starting Pitchers

If there is such a thing as a flyball revolution for pitchers, it appears that Blaine Hardy wants to be a part of it.

The Tigers’ 31-year-old reliever-turned-starter induced grounders at a mere 33.0 percent rate last season, but this season, he has gone extreme with a 24.1 percent rate. That might not seem like a good career move for someone who coughed up seven home runs in 33.1 innings a year ago, but he is making it work. In his 20 innings to date, Hardy has allowed two homers and a .143 Iso (which is 23 points below the American League average).
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Back from Portugal! Thankfully, technology is amazing and I haven’t missed a baseball beat. Before I left, I listed and discussed the starting pitchers who had posted significantly worse wOBA against marks than their Statcast xwOBA marks. So today I’ll look at the pitchers on the other side of the coin, those who have most outperformed their xwOBA marks, and therefore may be in for some serious regression.

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Mike Minor

A few days back, I released my latest pERA grades and Minor was projected for 3.47 ERA while his actual ERA (5.59) is two runs higher and one run higher than his FIP (4.41) and xFIP (4.32). His SIERA is the lowest at 3.85. Which metric should be believed?

Starting with the lucky pitcher trio (BABIP, HR/FB, LOB%), not one stat sticks out though each one is above average.

BABIP: .324
LOB%: 68%
HR/FB: 12.9%

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Earlier this week, I found most of Tanaka’s struggles occur with men-on-base. What I didn’t know if these differences were predictive or due for regression. After diving into the numbers, struggles with men on base aren’t exactly predictive except for those with extreme windups.

The narrative concept behind this study is that a pitcher has a windup talent level and a throwing from the stretch talent level. I’ve always thought Daniel Mengden’s great windup would keep hitters off guard.

He loses all the deception from the stretch. My theory has been borne out with a career 4.99 FIP with runners on base and 3.42 FIP with the bases empty. Joey Lucchesi is another pitcher with a unique windup and he has a 3.40 FIP with no runners on base but it jumps to 5.14 with runners on. The windup advantage for these two pitchers is an obvious item to point to when explaining their stats.

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Getting through a lineup three times is a bit of a lost art these days with both the rise of the bullpens and starters going 100% every at-bat from the jump which often drains the tank right around the time that batters are getting a third look. We often hear about the guys who struggle the third time through and we don’t always see those who are good at it highlighted for the success. Of course, the studs of the game do it well and that’s what makes them the studs, but there are definitely some surprises having TTT success. Let’s look at both ends of the spectrum today, starting with the duds.

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Masahiro Tanaka decided to create more questions than answers in my life. I just released my first 2018 pERA run and Tanaka’s pitches and control point to a 2.88 ERA but he’s posting one nearly two points higher at 4.95. I dove into his stats hoping to find a simple answer, instead, I found someone struggling out of the stretch while throwing harder. While it explains his struggles, I am not sure any of it matters. At least not yet.

The first item I checked for with ERA and estimators diverge is a high BABIP which was only at .243, about 30 points lower than his career average (.276). Nope, not BABIP.

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For much of his career, Jeremy Hellickson has been a fantasy afterthought, but in the midst of his ninth season, he is getting some owners to take notice. He is owned in a majority of the leagues on CBSSports.com and Fantrax, and he is not just being picked up for Tuesday night’s matchup against the lowly Padres. On both of those sites, Hellickson was owned in roughly 50 percent of leagues during the previous weekly scoring period. Even on ESPN.com, where leagues tend to be shallower, Hellickson currently has a home in 46 percent of leagues.

The 31-year-old is simply off to a great start to his 2018 season. Since joining the Nationals’ rotation in mid-April, Hellickson has been steady, allowing three runs or fewer in each start, adding up to a 2.20 ERA and 0.86 WHIP. He has been pitching in the zone (45.2 percent) more often than in any season since he lost rookie eligibility in 2011, and among pitchers with at least 30 innings, only Miles Mikolas has a higher first-strike rate than Hellickson’s 71.1 percent. His improved control is serving him well, as he is allowing contact on pitches in the strike zone at a lower rate than he has compiled in any full season. Hellickson’s strikeout rate of 21.5 percent may not be a head-turner for fantasy owners, but it, too, is higher than any rate he has had over a full season.
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Andrew Heaney

The Andrew Heaney breakout is in full swing with him posting a 10.3 K/9 and a 3.35 ERA. It was tough to find any support for a Heaney breakout going into this season with his injury history and subpar 2017 production.

Heaney’s health has been the number one concern since having Tommy John surgery early in 2016.

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Long has the relationship between pitcher performance and batted ball metrics been dubious. The Sabermetric community has a solid understanding of why, fundamentally, a pitcher is good or bad. Strikeouts are good. Walks are bad. Hits by pitch are also bad. Home runs allowed are especially bad. So on, so forth. And by no means are batted ball metrics useless. It’s how we know ground balls allowed are superior to fly balls allowed, for example.

The community had hoped, however, that more granular batted ball metrics would help us better explain some of the more nuanced elements of pitcher performance, including those related to luck, such as batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and the percentage of home runs per fly ball (HR/FB). Since their introduction to the public sphere in 2015, and even with the inclusion of more granular Statcast data in 2016, any relationships that might exist between the physics and outcomes for batted balls during an individual pitcher’s season are still poorly explained. The following table depicts the correlations between pitcher BABIP and various batted ball metrics, sorted by the strength of the relationship (all qualified seasons, 2007-17, n = 898):

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A few days back, I noticed Domingo German’s fastball velocities and spin rates were unique. Since starting, his sinker (or two-seamer) was faster and had more spin than his four-seam fastball. This setup rarely ever occurs. Pitchers try to get as much velocity and spin as possible on their four-seamer with the intention of generating swings-and-misses up in the strike zone. A sinker usually has less of both to help create sink and the resulting groundballs. Throwing a higher spin sinker than a four-seamer historically is not helpful.

Normally, the other Jeff examines one-offs, but I was dumbfounded when I saw German has this feature. Here the two pitches in action.

Sinker

Four-seamer

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