Archive for Starting Pitchers

I promised an update to the May rankings and it’s here! When ranking 125+ players (130 last time, down to 125 here), I obviously don’t have up-to-minute stats and performance memorized on everyone so while I felt pretty good about the groupings everyone was in, there were some individual rankings that needed work. I also added another tier at the top for the stone cold fantasy aces. It’s a tight group, but it gets them separation from the must-starts because I think people still bug out when seeing Chris Sale and Tyson Ross in the same tier and I understand that.

I do think the Must-Start tier is important, though, because one of the unintended consequences of the information age for fantasy baseball is the overwhelming desire to see every start as actionable. Some guys you just have to start through the ebbs and flows of a season, even after a few clunky starts. Not every bad start is the beginning of the end for a pitcher. Conversely, every gem from some 4th or 5th starter isn’t the emergence of a new stud.

I can’t imagine it’d really be possible to do, but I’d love to see a study on team ERAs in fantasy pre- and post-internet. I’m sure pre-internet saw established guys given a longer leash as there were often weeks in between updates (the first fantasy league I was ever in started in 1989 and ran stats every other week) and similar time periods between pickups. Anyway, here’s the update! As always, heed the tier over the # ranking and let me know what you think in the comments down below!

• March rankings
• Early-May rankings

The tiers are as follows:

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Having morosely completed our efforts to determine the over-under on A.J. Pollock’s rest-of-season plate appearances—100, and we’ll take the under—we attempt to identify starting pitchers whose fantasy-relevant stats belie their actual performance so far this season. We think that pitchers who aren’t being hit hard, but have high BABIPs and home-run-to-fly-ball ratios, have been unlucky rather than bad, and that their luck will change. Those are the guys you might want to trade for. And we think that the guys who are getting hit hard but have low BABIPs and HR/FB% have been lucky. Those are the guys you might want to unload while the unloading is good. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I looked at Statcast’s expected metrics to identify hitters who may improve or decline from their current ISO marks. Today, let’s talk pitchers. I’m simply going to sort the Expected Stats leaderboard by difference between wOBA and xwOBA and discuss the fantasy relevant starting pitchers with the biggest negative gaps between wOBA and xwOBA (higher wOBA than xwOBA). Remember that xwOBA fails to account for home ballpark, defensive support, quality and opposition, and perhaps other factors I’m not able to come up with at the moment. It’s why I stick to the extremes, as even with all factors accounted for, it’s highly likely these guys are still due for the same directional move in wOBA, though perhaps not to the same degree.

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Note: This post was scheduled for the early morning, but didn’t go through. If I do this again it the future, it will post in the morning. 

A look at the most interesting pitching performances from last night and what I’m looking forward to on Wednesday’s slate.

About Last Night

Some quick thoughts on the most interesting starts of yesterday:

Jordan Lyles (7.3 IP/0 ER) was perfect for 22 outs before a Trevor Story base hit. A walk to Pat Valaika immediately after ended his excellent day. It was Lyles’ second strong start since joining the rotation, but his big outing further underscores the issues against righties for the Rockies offense. Their 64 wRC+ versus righties is dead last in the league and their 25% strikeout rate is fifth highest. As for Lyles, he is throwing 94 mph (a career-high) and his curveball is working as well as ever. He was second to only Thor with 16 swinging strikes on Tuesday. He’s got the Dodgers and Nationals both on the road in a two-start setup next week. Let’s give him a shot.

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In my last article, I did a Quick Look at Freddy Peralta and found his fastball fascinating. He manipulated the pitch to provide the look of different pitches by changing his grip. What I wanted to know is if he could get by with just a good, varying fastball.

First, everyone needs to take a trip over to Peralta’s game page at BrooksBaseball.net and examine the pitch groupings. Usually, different pitches form clusters when examining variations in break, velocity, and spin. Ignoring the possible changeup, he has two groups, fastball and curve. His fastball has an estimated spin which varies from 1300 rpm to 2500 rpm. Its velocity differs from 88 mph to 97 mph. The spin values on Brooks are interpreted based on the ball’s break. The spin rates may be off because Peralta releases really close to home as Jeff Sullivan documented.

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Freddy Peralta

• I got swamped last night during my chat on Peralta questions. I just didn’t know much about him so I went and watched his debut.

• It looks weird in that he is nearly falling down on every pitch and just averaging 90 mph on his fastball. It reminds me of high pitchers trying to reach 85-mph.

• Fastball: It sat at 87-95 mph with some nasty glove-side run. It could be considered a cutter at times. He used it like Mariano Rivera did by changing the spin. Partway through the game, MLB Gameday started labeling some of his pitches as cutters. It was not two separate pitches since there was no unique spin-velocity grouping

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Some good pitchers, despite being good pitchers, throw bad pitches. And there are bad pitchers, too, who throw good pitches. Both are true, and one could make an argument a Venn Diagram of the two groups may overlap significantly, and that overlapping area is the group of pitchers toeing the line between breaking out and being unusable for fantasy purposes.

It stands to reason, then, that good and bad pitchers could benefit from easing off or completely abandoning their bad pitches. It’s one thing to evaluate a pitch based on its underlying metrics — its swinging strike rate (SwStr%), its ground ball rate (GB%), its velocity, and so on. It’s another thing to evaluate the pitch objectively by looking at its weighted on-base average (wOBA) allowed, which, I hope, in an adequately large sample, can indicate a pitch’s quality regardless of its peripherals. In theory, the larger the sample size, the greater the probability a pitch’s outcomes will converge with its inputs, such that the caveat “regardless of its peripherals” doesn’t actually mean anything. Given enough pitches thrown, the aforementioned underlying metrics will adequately inform the wOBA allowed.

Using PITCHf/x data from the last two years, I looked for (1) good pitchers who throws pitches that allow (2a) extremely bad wOBAs with (2b) unusually low BABIPs. Incurring high wOBAs on low BABIPs is less than ideal; if BABIP is subject to high variance and generally converges on the league average, then a bad pitch being “lucky” by BABIP suggests things will only get worse.

This post was going to be about several pitchers, each with their own problematic pitches, but I became too passionate about this single case. This is about Dylan Bundy, his abhorrently bad four-seamer, his fantastic slider, and how much his pitch selection is suffocating his potential. Ultimately, it’s about adding by subtracting.

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For the vast majority of the season, I completely ignore ERA, instead relying on SIERA for rest of season projection purposes. While this method is far better than looking solely at ERA, what about the pitchers you expected to be good, but have been terrible, with weak skills to match? These are the guys whose SIERA confirms they have pitched poorly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will continue posting such weak skills. So let’s discuss three starters we expected better from, but whose current skills don’t provide much hope for a rebound.

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If you scooped Fernando Romero off your waiver wire on Sunday night, you were paid immediate dividends as the 23-year old righty threw six scoreless innings in St. Louis on Monday night, allowing just three hits and three walks while striking out nine. He now has 11.7 scoreless innings to open his MLB career and has many wondering if he can be a game-changing rookie for both the Twins and your fantasy team. He has consistently been a Top 10 entrant in Twins prospect lists for the last couple years including 7th by Eric last year and will place top five for this year’s list, which is coming soon. Let’s take a closer look at the electric righty.

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Strikeouts are up again this season, but there’s another trend affecting pitchers that has received less attention. As we approach the six-week mark of the 2018 campaign, pitchers are notably wilder than they have been in a long time.

For each season between 2011 and 2016, the average Zone% for the major leagues hovered between 44.2 and 44,8 percent. Last season, pitchers were less wild than they had been since 2010, locating in the strike zone at a 45.0 percent rate. So far this year, pitchers are wanting to have much less to do with the strike zone, as their collective Zone% has dropped to 43.4 percent.

Subpar control is not an early-season thing. Last March and April, pitchers combined for a 44.8 percent Zone% and in the previous March/April, pitchers were practically trolling hitters into swinging, posting a 47.3 percent Zone%. Another thing that mark from 2016 shows is that there is still plenty of time for Zone% to regress to its norm this season.
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