Sonny Gray | 3.34 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 23% K, and 7% BB in 29.7 IP

Gray has only made five starts, but he’s looking as sharp as ever. He missed all of April, but he certainly looks health right now. His velocity is at a career-best 93.4 mph (94 w/the four-seamer; 93 w/the sinker). Here’s what else I’ve seen in the stats and video of his last two starts:

• He’s using the sinker more than ever and working both fastball iterations down in the zone at a career-high clip, too.
• His fastballs are down in the lower third of the zone 52% of the time and they are fueling a career-best 59% groundball rate.
• The slider has always been a weapon, but it’s been a plus-plus monster and generated 9 of his 11 strikeouts on Wednesday.

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Dinelson Lamet (Padres)

Note: The camera angle was a little off, so my takes on his horizontal breaks may be off also.
The 24-year-old righty throws out of a high 3/4 arm slot. He’s a maximum effort guy and at times falls off to the mound’s first base side.

• Fastball (4-seam): 95-98 mph and straight. For such a basic pitch, it is not even near the strike zone at times and he threw too many away. I’ve read several souces the pitch breaks late break but I could never see it.

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5/25/17

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, 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 SLEEPER18!

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Leading Off: Question of the Day

• Which surging vet do you trust most: Jason Vargas, Ervin Santana, or Mike Leake? (4:10)

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Last season the Cubs pitching had a great BABIP, .255, the best in MLB by quite a margin.  This has been attributed to superior defense and great pitching. Both of these seem like good enough explanations. This season, with roughly the same team, their BABIP has dropped to .286, effectively league average.

Now, there is a lot you may assume from these numbers. You may think, of course, BABIP is so unpredictable. Of course a team that was above average one season would return to average the following season.  Fair enough, you could say that. Some argue their outfield defense has taken a step back. That might be true.

These are all guesses and assumptions, but fortunately we have a few more tools for evaluating quality of contact, so let’s see what they may tell us about this Cubs pitching staff. We can use Statcast to evaluate quality of contact. When we do so, it paints a bit of a different picture.

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Last week, I discussed five surprising American League starting pitchers sitting among the leaders in SwStk%. All of them had enjoyed surging versus 2016. Today, I’ll discuss pitchers on the other side of the coin, surprises toward the bottom of the SwStk% leaderboard, all of whom have suffered declines compared to last season.

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Note: I am using velocities from BrooksBaseball.net which has corrected their values from the 2016 to 2017 transition.

Dylan Bundy -2.5 mph (2016 FBv: 94.8mph, 2017 FBv: 92.3 mph)

Bundy’s decline is being obscured by the fact he relieved in 2016. Owners can see the 2017 drop and chalk it up to the normal velocity difference between starting and relieving. After removing the 2016 relieving values, his velocity is still down 2.5 mph.

For reference, here are his 2016 stats as a starter all of his 2017 ones.

Bundy’s approach and results are almost a textbook example of fastball velocity loss. The swinging strike rate on his fastball has dropped from 8.2% to 4.8% and therefore his strikeout rate dropped. Bundy realized his fastball isn’t the same, dropped its usage (61% to 50%) and relied on breaking pitches more.

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For a full primer on the process behind these rankings, check out episode 458 of The Sleeper & The Bust.

I decided to go a different route than the traditional 1 to whatever listing and went a step beyond the tiered rankings which allow for more nuance than just a numbered ranking, but still feel inadequate to tackle the many challenges of in-season pitcher management. I do still have tiers, but they are much different tiers and so they aren’t just talent-based groupings. They are more about usability in the fantasy game.

I have five different levels for active arms and then injury and minor league groupings for those we’re waiting on. We always talk “rest of season” when looking at deals and pickups, but I think we have to be more short term than that, especially with pitching. This doesn’t mean I’m wildly shifting rankings and my outlook on pitchers after every start, but rather I’m acknowledging that the landscape is going to shift so much throughout the six month season that trying to focus beyond a month or two is foolhardy.

The tiers are as follows:

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The leaderboards at FanGraphs is a fun place to poke around. Behold this list of pitchers:

What do they all have in common? Aside from having thrown at least 20 innings, these are the only hurlers in baseball who rank in the upper half of the stats I first look to when evaluating pitchers. Namely, they all boast better than average K-BB%, GB%, Z-Contact%, and swinging strike rates. There are some obviously great pitchers on this list but I’m not interested in talking about Clayton Kershaw, Jon Lester, or Carlos Martinez. Though if you’re a little frustrated with Lester or CarMar, I both empathize and suggest exercising a little patience. Rather, I’d like to dive deeper into some of the list’s lesser-owned and lesser-known players who won’t cost nearly as much to acquire.  Read the rest of this entry »

We all know that names like Chris Sale, Danny Salazar, and Chris Archer are going to rank among the top tier in SwStk%. So let’s instead discuss the surprising names inside the top 20 in the American League of SwStk% that have all enjoyed surges from last season.

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Having last week identified some hitters who seem to us to have been lucky or unlucky so far this season, and then suggested what their trade value might be if their luck evens out, we now work the same magic with starting pitchers. These guys’ granular stats, we posit, indicate that they’ve pitched significantly better or worse than their Fantasy-relevant numbers suggest that they have.

We propose that they’ve been unfortunate, and that their fortunes will change. So we ask ourselves (1) who are these guys? (2) what will their stats look like over the rest of the season if their luck balances out and their full-season numbers are about what they were projected to be? and (3) what other pitcher’s expected performance will our guy’s rest-of-season stats resemble?

Our methodology is simple. We first tried it last year, with some success, and then in the preseason, where it would have pointed you towards Dallas Keuchel and away from Julio Teheran. So it shows promise. To find guys who’ve been lucky, we look for starting pitchers who are the top third of their cohort in Batting Average on Balls in Play and in Flyball/Home Run percentage, but the bottom third in Hard-Hit Percentage.

We figure that a guy who’s not getting hit hard but giving up a disproportionate number of hits and home runs is a good candidate to turn his season around. And we turn the method on its head to identify the lucky guys who do get hit hard but—because they’re giving up fewer home runs and hits than they should be—don’t yet have the scars to show for it. We think those guys are headed for a fall. Read the rest of this entry »