About a week ago, I went over the stats I use when examining hitters during the offseason. Today pitchers take center stage. With Pitchf/x and now Trackman publicly available, I find it quite a bit easier to evaluate pitchers and the changes they make. For pitchers, I have one sparkling new main source and one old standby.

Pitchers are so much easier to evaluate compared to hitters. If a pitcher gains a couple ticks on his fastball, we know right away within a couple of pitches. If a hitter can no longer catch up with a 96 mph fastball, it may take a few months to know for sure and even then, we may not be sure why. Here are the tools I use to help find pitchers who have changed for the good or the bad.

Pitch Type Metrics

Ever since helping Eno dive into pitch-type metrics, I’ve determined that I will evaluate pitchers using this type of data. Even though it took a while to hammer everything out, the final results have been extremely promising. We can now determine what each small pitch change will mean for each pitcher and how pitchers can improve their results. The complete write up of the process is available, but here is a quick summary.

• The key change is to give each pitch an ERA value (pERA) based on the pitch’s swinging strike and groundball rate. All the values are based off the average values for starting pitcher. Closers will have higher grades because their stuff plays better coming out of the bullpen.
• The pitcher’s control is determined from their walk rate which is separate from the pitch grades.
• I’ve put each pitch on the 20-80 scale with 50 being average, 80 great, and 20 horrible. For starters, target pitchers with three average or better pitches. For relievers, they just need two pitches.

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The Texas Rangers signed Andrew Cashner to a one-year deal for $10 million dollars on Friday. It’s tough for a one-year deal to be really bad, almost regardless of the cost because the commitment is so short, but I’m not seeing too much upside here for Cashner or the Rangers. The 30-year old righty showed promise after being installed into the Padres rotation full-time back in 2013, posting a 2.83 ERA and 1.11 WHIP in 298.3 innings (45 starts) over two seasons. But it all started to come unglued in 2015.

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There is no denying that this year’s free agent class is weak, especially compared to recent years that all had multiple big-ticket stars. Yoenis Cespedes moves the needle as do Edwin Encarnacion and closers Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen, but that’s about it in the top tier. The weakness of the free agent market offers hope at a robust trade market this winter. The league tilted toward a have/have-nots setup this past year with 11 teams finishing at least 20 games out of first in their division, up from seven each of the last two seasons.

The contenders will be looking to buy from the pretenders while the pretenders will be get a chance to stockpile young talent for their next big run. The turnaround time in baseball has shortened as teams are open trusting young players much more these days. There are many huge names who could feasibly be moved and while most of them won’t be, I think we will see some superstars change teams via trade. I’ve plucked three interesting pitchers and mapped out a trade path for each. I’ll have a trio of hitters soon, too.

Chris Sale

• To StL: Sale

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I’ve had a strong opinion of Sean Manaea and Kevin Gausmann which is significantly below the industry’s opinion of the pair. I believe while they have some plus tools, those tools don’t work together well. I did a quick look at the pair to see if I should alter my opinion of them based on recent performance.

Kevin Gausman

My previous beef with Gausman was that his fastball is not effective even though it comes in averaging 95 mph. To see if anything has changed, I watched the soon to be 26-year-old’s start on September 27th versus the Blue Jays

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A few days ago, I made my first attempt at trying to determine a pitcher’s value knowing their pitch grades. Since it was published, I have made some adjustments to the pitch grading scale. With the new scale in place, I have been working on comparing grades a pitcher previously received to their actual performance. The results have been extremely disappointing.

In the original article, created a framework to grade individual pitches with an ERA equivalent value (pERA) and a scouting grade on each pitch. While I liked the overall framework, one part really bothered me and I will address the issue first.

The change was to put some consistency in pitch grades, especially with fastballs. The problem was that a pitcher’s fastball is getting graded because of its velocity, but that velocity changes depending on if the pitcher was a starter or reliever. Relievers can really ramp up their velocity when moving to the bullpen.

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When I started this series which attempts to determine the projected fantasy value for prospects, I knew today’s step would be the hardest. The issue was converting various pitch grades (and control) into a workable framework for a pitcher’s overall production value. I thought I may not end up with a workable answer, but the following results have promise beyond just grading pitches.

I was able to piece together work from various articles and gave each pitch a grade based on the ERA scale. Combining per-pitch-ERA’s with a control value, it looks like we can estimate a pitcher’s overall value.

A pitching prospect is usually given a value on each of their pitches and a command and/or control grade. For example, the MLB.com’s grades for their top rated pitcher, Lucas Giolito, are:

Pitch: Grade
Fastball: 80
Curveball: 70
Changeup: 55
Control: 55

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We’ve done a good thing for those of you that still care about fantasy baseball right now. The Auction Calculator now has 2016 stats as an option so that you can look backwards at what has just happened. That’s going to be part of our effort, on the way to the end of the year, to look at last year to learn more for next year.

This is an important part of fantasy that usually gets ignored. Not only does the league itself change year to year, so retrospection is important in that way, but we can learn things about fantasy itself that will improve our ability to value players going forward.

The fourth-best player in the game last year, by this list, has already inspired a possible change to the auction calculator going forward. Let’s see what else it jars loose.

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Let’s finish up my preseason starting pitcher strikeout rate articles by looking at those I identified as possessing significant downside, as hinted at by my xK% equation. It’s a very different list than the one generated by the upsiders, as these tend to be the pitchers with high strikeout rates with seemingly the only direction to go moving forward is down.

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Joe Camp won his league, probably because he reads us and listens to our podcasts here, I dunno, but that’s my guess, totally not because he’s an Associate Professor of electrical engineering. Anyway, he won his league, and his leaguemates started chirping about a couple trades he made that year that may have appeared lopsided at the time — my personal opinion is that vetoes suck, and are a dampener on league activity, and we should all be active and talking to each other as much as possible, so if you were on it, you would have made that lopsided trade first — and so Mr. Camp set out to prove he would have won the league anyway.

The way he did it? He took the worst team in the league and replaced everyone on the team with the best free agent pickups of the year. He then compared that team with everyone’s originally drafted teams. The free agents easily won — 96 points to 87 for the best drafted team.

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Let’s continue the strikeout rate theme by reviewing my list of starting pitchers my xk% equation deemed holding strikeout rate upside in 2016. In the original article, I expressed that the list of names was rather boring, so let’s see if that turned out to be the case or if any gems were uncovered.

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