Talk to any pitcher about command, and you might be surprised how imprecise they feel they can be. “I have command to one part of the zone, low and away,” said Javier Lopez. “Almost everyone has better command to one side of the plate or the other,” said Zack Greinke. Even Corey Kluber, who has great command of his breaking ball, said that he only aims his breaking ball for the beginning of the break, and then is at the whim of the actual break he gets for where the ball ends up. When Ben Lindbergh asked PITCHf/x how far the glove moves from target to ball on the average pitcher, they told him the glove moves 13 inches. When I asked for leaders on 3-0 counts, it was Dallas Keuchel… with a nine inch average.

So command is a general thing. And yet… there is such a thing as the useless pitch, the pitch with so little command that it serves no purpose. Pitches 2.5 feet from the center of the strike zone are balls 97% of the time. They very rarely get swings, and unless the pitch is behind the batter, they can’t serve much of a purpose if they don’t entice the hitter at all. The idea of the noncompetitive pitch was first mentioned by Jessica Mendoza and then statified by August Fagerstrom.

I ran correlations between non-competitive pitch percentage and walk rate (r2 = .085), strikeout-minus-walk rate (no significance), and soft hit rate (no significance), so at best, it’s a casually interesting way to try to quantify that elusive skill we call command. Let’s see what the leaderboards can tell us about this year’s best and worst at avoiding the noncompetitive pitch.

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Introduction

I plan for this new series, Mixing Fantasy and Reality, to examine in detail how real happenings in baseball affect fantasy valuations. I had several projects I have worked on like xBABIP values and velocity differences in which I plan on including. The MASH Report took up quite a bit of my time compiling and tracking all the injuries and I didn’t have time for other outlets. Today marks a new beginning where I have an opportunity to make additional information available. This series will run on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

I am not going to completely ignore injuries. If a major injury happens or I think one will happen, I will include the information. Additionally, every Thursday I will write a detailed article exclusively on a few in-depth injury topics like my HURT and PAIN reports.

As for future articles, the format will likely be two to four main areas of discussion and maybe some interesting tidbit not found elsewhere. I am not sure if I will have a set topic rotation or if I will just follow the news. For a few articles, I will need to set some ground work to reference in future articles, so don’t expect all the articles to be full of background information like the first few. I hope you enjoy the change and let me know if you have any suggestions.

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This week I’m feeling a little shallow. The two players I’m covering are probably unavailable in very deep leagues but are certainly under-owned in smaller leagues. I’m talking 14, 15, or maybe even 16 team leagues with small benches. To my friends playing in those deepest of deep leagues, I’ll get you next week.

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Welcome to the final American League starting pitcher tiers of the season. The trade deadline deals resulted in several pitchers departing to the National League, with precious few arriving. With only about two months left in the season, potential innings limits are going to play a major role in rest of season value.

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This year, as always, we found the run-up to the MLB trading deadline absorbing and diverting. And this year, yet again, we were struck by the unexploited entertainment potential of the event. Everyone knows that there’s a market for the manufactured drama of big-league sports transactions. We inhabit a world in which 3 million Americans watch the NBA draft, and another 3 million—actually, it’s probably the same 3 million—are willing to sit in front their TV or computer screens on a Saturday afternoon and watch NFL teams make their 5th-round draft choices.

You couldn’t make the MLB draft similarly compelling, of course. NBA and NFL draftees go directly to the teams that select them. They’ll be playing, and often starting, for those teams a few months later. MLB draftees serve (usually years-long) minor-league apprenticeships. This absence of immediate consequences makes the baseball draft dicier as a viewing spectacle.

Not so the last week of July for MLB. Practically every deal that gets done has, and is intended to have, an immediate effect. The Cubs and Rangers double down. The Yankees and (it appears) the Royals muck their hands. As it stands, the process unfolds glacially, and we ourselves kind of like it that way. But we guarantee you that there are handsomely-compensated consultants brooding as we write about how that gradual unfolding can be turned into a one-day extravaganza. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a sucker like me, you constantly pin your hopes on the latest Rockies phenom hoping that he will finally be the one to tame the beast that is Coors Field. After all, there are only 29 other teams full of pitchers playing in exponentially more friendly ballparks, so why not intently focus on the toughest pitching environment we’ve ever seen in the game and hope to find the diamond in that rough?! (Cool life, Paul.)

The latest Great Coors Hope is Jon Gray.

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After missing the entirety of the 2015 season and nearly two-thirds of this season, former top prospect Tyler Skaggs finally made his triumphant return from Tommy John surgery on Tuesday. Though the surface results are meaningless, he did go seven innings, striking out five, while issuing just one walk. The now-25-year-old showed serious strikeout ability in the minors and his ground ball spike in 2014 was intriguing. And although his strikeout rate slipped in 2014, his fastball velocity jumped three miles per hour, which is almost unheard of when it’s not related to a move from the starting rotation to the bullpen. So we had the makings of a true sleeper here. Now that he’s back, is he worth rostering?

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We go way back with Jose Urena. We drafted him in January 2015 for the very first team we co-owned. Undaunted by his disappointing performance as a reliever at the start of that season, we rhapsodized about him in May 2015, just before the Marlins re-promoted him and plugged him into their rotation. Further undaunted by his disappointing performance in that role, we effused about him just this past March. And now, still undaunted by his disappointing performance as a reliever in the majors earlier this season, we again wax enthusiastic as he rejoins the Marlins’ starting rotation.

The book on Urena has been well-thumbed, but just in case you haven’t been to the library: 24-year-old Dominican, torrid fastball in both its two-seam and its four-seam variants, indifferent secondary arsenal, good control but misses too few bats for a guy who throws that hard and doesn’t do so great when he throws softer. He’s pitched well, if not always overwhelmingly so, in the minors, but hasn’t (until now—see below) approached seven strikeouts per nine innings since rookie ball in 2010. When he got demoted to triple-A the end of May this season, his career MLB record stood at 2 Wins, 6 Losses, a 5.82 ERA, and 4.39 K/9. Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, strikeouts minus walks was the best way to look ahead for a pitcher. It focused on the things that a pitcher could control and left the rest to league averages, and therefore it was a strong ‘one number’ to look at.

We are in the midst of turmoil, though. In the middle of the biggest year to year increase in home run rate, we’re suddenly looking at pitchers with home run problems and wondering which ones will continue to be ridiculously ‘unlucky’ and which ones will shortly conquer their gopher problem. Don’t worry, the pitchers themselves are doing the same thing.

The good news is that we have new tools to help us figure out which home run rates are more likely to regress. The home run is the result of the correct launch angle and the correct velocity. We know that 25-30 is the ideal home run launch angle, but for these purposes, I expanded it to 20-35 to get a broader range. We also know that 95+ mph in those zones leads to home runs, so I included a ranking of exit velocity in that band.

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Yesterday, I discussed some of the starting pitchers whose xK% significantly exceeded their actual K% marks, suggesting strikeout rate upside over the rest of the season. Today, I’ll check in on the opposite end of the spectrum, looking at those fantasy relevant starting pitchers whose strikeout rates are far exceeding their xK% marks.

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