Archive for Starting Pitchers

Well, I used to be able to create starting pitcher disabled list (DL) projections with the average chance hovering around 40%. Until this past season when DL estimate was off by 18%.

Even though the rates have climbed the past couple of seasons, it was nothing like the jump this past season and I 100% blame the 10-day DL. All my work to this point is moot.

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While I normally examine pitchers in-season, a couple of late-season call-ups I missed deserved some analysis.

Note: All breaks are from the pitcher’s perspective.

Luiz Gohara

The 21-year-old lefty got my attention by showing up as the 38th ranked starting pitcher by our auction calculator. If I’m going to take a guy to be my #3 or #4 starter, I should know a bit about him. Here is my take on his last start of the 2017 season against the Marlins.

• He throws straight to home with no funky angles from a ¾ arm slot and doesn’t fall off the mound after his windup. He shows a little more effort from the stretch. With his simple delivery, he’ll not have as much of a platoon split.

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More often than not, I write to hype a player who has wowed me in one way or another. Sometimes, I have to put a damper on things. Through 20 National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) drafts, Luke Weaver’s average draft position (ADP) stands at a pearly 111th overall and 28th among starting pitchers.

Weaver’s 36-inning debut freaked me out a bit. It was evident he could capably prevent baserunners, or, through 20% of a season, he could at least fake it. His 3.34 xFIP suggested as much, even in spite of his abhorrent 31% ground ball rate (GB%). Everything else stunk — all the luck metrics broke the wrong way in a small sample — but it was enough to suggest a bright future for the former 1st-rounder was imminent.

I planned to avoid Weaver at all costs in 2017 because of his fly ball tendencies exclusively; I simply did not want to suffer the wrath of a juiced ball because some small-sample strikeout-to-walk ratio (K/BB) goodness seduced me. Turns out, batted ball metrics can also feel the wrath of randomness in small samples, as his ground ball rate spiked to an above-average 50%. Some of the luck metrics tempered a bit, and the result was a 29% strikeout rate (K%) and defense-independent metrics that suggested he should nearly have a flat 3.00 ERA. It’s almost like there’s a reason why this 24-year-old kid was drafted in the 1st round or something.

I’m here to pump the brakes. I’m not sold on Weaver’s peripherals. I’m willing to let you convince me otherwise, but allow me to explain.

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Entering the 2017 season, we were talking about two game changing trends – the home run surge and the 10-day disabled list. We’ve talked home runs to death. I think we all get it – players continued hitting record quantities of home runs. The 10-day disabled list also had a big impact on our fantasy games, and no team better exploited it than the Los Angeles Dodgers.

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Last time out, I looked at the pitchers I favored in the early NFBC market and today we’re hitting the other end of the spectrum. There are five Top 50 starters going in early NFBC drafts that I’m at least 10 spots lower on, including one who is nearly 25 spots different. By the way, we will soon have the NFBC’s ADP live on the site, so stay tuned for that!

PITCHERS THE MARKET FAVORS:

Luis Castillo – 36th for me; 26th in NFBC

I consider myself quite a big fan of Castillo (I mean, I do have his Fangraphs player id memorized… that’s a true sign of love, right?!?!), but the market has passed me by, at least in the early drafts. I understand the excitement over his elite stuff and sharp 89-inning debut, but he also rode a .198 AVG and 80% LOB rate to that 3.12 ERA. I regularly hear comps to Luis Severino, but those seem to conveniently forget the busted 2016 for Severino. Of course, there’s nothing that says he has to follow Severino’s path to pan out similarly, especially since Castillo debuted at 24, which is three years older than Severino’s 2015 debut.

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I wrote a feature for a forthcoming fantasy baseball magazine about players with the potential to make or break your season. Due to space constraints, some of the copy lay on the cutting room floor as the magazine shipped to print. Rather than let it go to waste, I figured someone may enjoy reading my leftover snippets for players with volatile outlooks for the 2018 seasons. (The rest you’ll find on physical and digital bookshelves sometime in spring.)

I’ll present each blurb as is and, afterward, provide links to relevant work I’ve written related to that player as well as any final thoughts I couldn’t originally fit into my word count limits. It’s worth noting the target audience includes fantasy baseball enthusiasts of all skill levels, some of which invariably fall short of those of typical RotoGraphs frequenters. Alas, I made my best effort to conduct worthwhile analysis without getting overly technical.

Ordered roughly by expected average draft position (ADP).

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In my Monday post discussing how park factors may affect Zack Cozart’s performance, I responded to a comment opining that “the Angels IF defense is going to be insane” with the following:

The offense should be above average and that defense and upgraded offense means potentially serious bumps to Angels starting pitchers.

I said that without actually doing any research on how the Angels defense performed in 2017 or looking into the batted ball distributions of the pitchers and how that matches with the strengths of the fielding unit. So let’s do that now.

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Last week, the Cubs signed Tyler Chatwood, who has had the unfortunate luck of spending the majority of his Major League career pitching half his games in the most offense friendly home park. He has still managed to perform respectably given the circumstances, posting a 4.31 ERA and 95 ERA- (5% better than league average where lower is better) over his career, which includes 142 innings with the Angels in his 2011 debut. Now heading into his age 28 season, let’s see how the park factors compare between Wrigley Field and Coors Field and why the move makes him a prime sleeper.

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Spin rate is becoming ever more important to baseball analysis now that we have access to more reliable measurement devices. Namely, Trackman. But there are other technologies as well which are being used by high school, college, and minor league teams. Trackman is the big name, though, since it has been adopted by MLB, NPB and KBO along with many colleges and even a few high schools.

Trackman uses Doppler radar to measure the movement of the ball. I want to paint a picture in your mind of what this may look like, in the eyes of the radar. Remember, we’re trying to track the ball here. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani will unquestionably be the toughest rank for anyone all year just for the vast number of unknown variables, especially since we’re not even sure where’s going to play yet. In my October SP rankings, I didn’t include Ohtani because we weren’t even sure that he was coming over 100%. Now that the posting system issue is settled and he’s officially coming over, I’ve dropped him into the rankings at 31. I’ve made plenty of changes to the October rankings as I’m in full research mode and will have an update after the New Year, but here’s a look at those just above and below Ohtani:

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