Archive for Starting Pitchers

And it’s evident you should now pay attention to him. Jeff Sullivan wrote about Miles Mikolas here — Sullivan does a good job of summarizing Mikolas’ skill set and how he’ll succeed stateside. Which is helpful. But, for fantasy purposes, it doesn’t help us a whole lot in terms of exactly what we should expect. Not that that’s Sullivan’s fault. He doesn’t keep a cross-league projection system in his brain.

So when you see a Tweet like this — from NEIFI Analytics, which FanGraphs has featured previously — it’s hard to ignore:

Congrats, Cardinals. Per NEIFI, Mikolas handily outperforms Jake Arrieta over next three seasons. Massive bargain, fantastic bet to be the most underrated FA of 2017 class.

— NEIFI Analytics (@NEIFIco) December 5, 2017

Then again, there are Tweets like this from ZiPS’ own Dan Szymborski:

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Alas, we have finally reached our final 2017 preseason article recap! Welllll, this one shouldn’t have been the last one, but no one wants to read a recap of my David Dahl Pod Projection, right? So we wrap things up by reviewing my Pod Projection for curveball aficionado Lance McCullers, who was coming off around 200 innings of 3.22 ERA ball supported by strong skills over his first two seasons. Health was a question mark, but there was no doubting his talent. Let’s remind ourselves what I forecasted for his 2017 performance and how he actually performed.

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I have never been supportive of pitch clocks. In fact, the first ever thing I wrote about baseball (formally), was an article in the Journal of Sports Sciences, illustrating how pitch clocks could elevate muscle fatigue in pitchers, possible contributing to increased injury risk. I also came up with a workload metric which factors in the time between pitches when calculating the number of Fatigue Units a pitcher can accumulate. I was pleased to read Travis Sawchik’s article on pace of play solutions, focusing on how it may be more on the batters than the pitchers when it comes to speeding up the games. Well, I was pleased until the last paragraph, where he proposed the ol’ 15 second pitch clock – but we’ll get there.

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Pitching blisters were an afterthought just two years ago but the reported instances have jumped the past two seasons. Detailed accounts were written by Eno Sarris here at FanGraphs and Ben Lindbergh at the Ringer.

Throwing a curveball may be to blame according to Sarris:

But we can’t dismiss that chart completely. The players who have gone down with blister problems have thrown curves 14.9% of the time, far above the 10-11% baseball as a whole averaged over that timeframe. The players who ended up on the list more than once averaged 18.9% curveballs. Enough to say there’s some smoke here.

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It’s time to recap some of my 2017 Pod Projections! This preseason, I begun the series with one of 2016’s most surprising pitchers, Kyle Hendricks. We all figured that even backed by the historically strong Cubs defense, he was quite a bit fortunate en route to a sub-3.00 ERA. But how much regression was I projecting and how did that compare to his actual results? Let’s find out.

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Yesterday, I recapped my comparison of the starting pitcher ERA Pod Projections vs Steamer projections in which I was more bullish. Today I finish reviwing the Pod Projections vs Steamer projections series by looking at the group of starters I projected for worse ERA marks. Since I mentioned in yesterday’s article that I projected a lower ERA than Steamer for the vast majority of starters (which is one of the reasons I performed so poorly in the results comparison), I only had 21 pitchers whose ERA I was projecting a higher mark for. So this group to review is much smaller and the gap in ERA between the two projections is as well.

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We’re winding down the recaps comparing my Pod Projections to Steamer projections and will finish things off by moving on over to starting pitchers. We’ll begin by checking in on the group of hurlers in which I had forecasted a significantly better ERA than Steamer. Let’s see how these pitchers actually performed.

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A few days ago, Travis Sawchik ask me to help find some comps for the Shohei Ohtani using a 2016 Davenport translation. The list of potential hitters with similar 2018 Steamer projections was impressive (Charlie Blackmon, George Springer, Mookie Betts, Carlos Correa, Yasiel Puig, and Aaron Judge). Additionally, I found pitchers who had similar 2018 projections to his 2016 translation but the list wasn’t as impressive (Jimmy Nelson, James Paxton, Jon Gray, Luis Castillo, Luke Weaver). Thanks to Dan “The Man” Szymborski, a 2018 projection now exists and results will be a little disappointing.

First, from what I heard from most fantasy websites, Ohtani’s will be two separate draftable players. Ohtani the pitcher and Ohtani the hitter. No site, that I know of, has yet to combine the two. If they did, they will likely have to count all the hitting stats accumulated by all pitchers. I hope this doesn’t ever happen.

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I’ve finally compiled the 2017 Disabled List (DL) information. The main change from the last few seasons is the transition from the 15-day DL to 10-day DL and the subsequent increase in DL trips. With the total trips up, the number of days lost is down which makes it tough to draw any major conclusions. It’s time to dive into the numbers.

First off, I collected the information from MLB.com’s transaction list. I like to use this list because it is easy to go back and check. I waded through it and it wasn’t pretty. It took me twice as long to compile the data compared to previous seasons. I would just like to give a big thank you to ProSportsTransactions.com for having most of the missing data.

With my venting out of the way, here is how the days missed for pitchers and hitters compare over the previous 4 seasons.

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Unless league rules require it or an owner plays in an NL West-only league, owners don’t use their starters in Colorado. This stance may be a little extreme but the league’s aces should be the only started used in Colorado. Pitching in Colorado adds one run to pitcher’s ERA. Owners know this but visiting team must send out a starter to get sacrificed. I’m going to go over some of the pitchers affected the most by being the sacrificial lamb.

This past season, I owned Jeff Samardzija in a couple of leagues. His 4.42 ERA was just above league average (4.36 ERA). The effect on my team wasn’t that much though. There is no way I was going to start him in Coors and I missed out on his 1.94 WHIP and 11.91 ERA over 11.1 IP. With the starts removed, his ERA dropped to 3.98. While not a great ERA, it represented the true effect it had on my team.

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