Let’s do one final rest of season xK% update. If you recall, my xK% equation uses Baseball-Reference.com metrics to calculate a pitcher expected strikeout rate. It’s missing a sequencing component, though who knows if that’s even a skill. But even without accounting for such, it has proven to be one of the best expected metrics we have developed, at least by R-squared. So let’s begin with the fantasy relevant starting pitchers whose expected strikeout rates are well above their actual marks, suggesting significant upside over the rest of the season.

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Maximizing the upside of your lineups is crucial to having success in DFS tournaments. Oft-discussed strategies like stacking and targeting home run hitters are important for upside, but another strategy is to target bad bullpens.

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There was a time, many, many years ago, when I would never roster a rookie starting pitcher. This was when I first began playing fantasy baseball in the late 1990s. Whether it’s because rookie starters now seem to enjoy more immediate success than in the past or we just do a better job evaluating pitchers in general that enables us to separate the wheat from the chaff, I no longer avoid rookie starters, and have not for a while. I already discussed selling Michael Fulmer two weeks ago, so that leaves us with just only a couple of rookie American League starters we truly care about, one of which is Blake Snell.

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Redraft leagues that permit trading take you places you wouldn’t otherwise go, although the same can be said of kidnappers. In a no-trading league, wherever Clayton Kershaw or Paul Goldschmidt or any high- or mid-priced player is at the end of the draft, that’s where he’ll be at the end of the season. In a league that permits trading, though, if you’re the Kershaw owner, you will be fending off suitors like a romance-novel heroine. You might be offered, say, Danny Salazar and Carlos Rodon—to take two names that, as you’ll see, aren’t chosen at random–for Kershaw, and you’re going to have to do some spadework to figure out if the deal might be worth your while.

We ourselves, as we’ve mentioned, play in just one trading league. That would be the Bluefish Blitz league, in which trading is not just permitted but encouraged, and not just encouraged but virtually compelled. We have survived our own pluperfect stupidity in this league—we’ll tell you at the end of this installment about the dumbest thing we did—and, rising on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things, have assembled a roster that, when you squint hard at it, appears to be marginally competitive. And now, having spent more waking hours in the past month devising, contemplating, proposing, and receiving trade offers than we have on personal hygiene, we’ve reached the conclusion that we’re one good starting pitcher away from actual contention. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you judge a pitcher’s true talent? Think of Bud Norris, who recently added a cutter and finally ditched that change that was never any good. Think of Sonny Gray, who’s seemingly lost command of his vaunted curveball. Think of Michael Fulmer‘s new changeup. Matt Shoemaker‘s recent (re)dedication to the splitter. Rich Hill‘s constant injuries. Junior Guerra’s nasty stuff, discovered after a move from behind the plate to behind the rubber.

These changes are so radical and so abrupt that it seems too simple to settle on one number to judge them. So these ranks are futile!

At least these ranks are based on a few numbers in an intuitive way. The base list was sorted for strikeouts plus pop-ups minus walks, for sure. That’s an easy way to ignore balls in play and focus on the the three outcomes that we think pitchers can really handle best. Then I added a list that featured exit velocity in the ideal launch angles, because there’s some evidence that pitchers can suppress their exit velo.

And then, when I encountered a name that has seen a change in production recently, I looked at their game logs. I did! Not only to see what their recent work was like, but then to also check if any of those changes in production were related to large changes in pitching mix.

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If you follow me on Twitter, you know how this ends. Statistically speaking, though, you probably don’t follow on me Twitter, so you probably don’t know how this ends. Then again, maybe you really do know how this ends, because when you clicked this link, you probably had to read the title first. Or maybe you didn’t! Honestly, I don’t want to pigeonhole you. Maybe you’re the kind of person who clicks links all willy nilly with zero regard for content. I’m sure SEO folks love you but also lose their minds trying to understand you.

No matter. Let’s pretend you didn’t read the title. Now you’re presented with blind résumés. Can you guess who Players A and B are?

Did you have to cheat? It may actually be more difficult than you thought. You know the names already, but perhaps you got them out of order: Kyle Hendricks is Player A and Tanner Roark is Player B. But look at that! Hendricks and Roark are almost perfectly identical within every metric. Roark even edges Hendricks in xFIP, innings per start, and WAR per start. It’s kind of a big deal, given Hendricks is owned in more Yahoo! leagues than Roark (85% to 78%).

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His rookie season didn’t get off to a good start, but Sean Manaea has pitched much better since making a change to how he throws his changeup. Eno tweeted a pic of the old and new grip in late May. The lefty’s 5.24 ERA is bloated due to his first three starts prior to throwing his new changeup, but he’s been fairly good since. Dylan Bundy has battled injuries and totaled 65.1 innings — this total includes his Arizona Fall League work in 2015 — from 2014-2015 after undergoing Tommy John surgery on June 26, 2013. The righty isn’t likely to be a major impact player the remainder of the year, but he could help a bit and his keeper-league stock is up. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2013, I have polled you dashingly attractive readers on which group of pitchers you think will post the better aggregate ERA post all-star break. The two groups were determined based on ERA-SIERA disparity, pitting the underperformers versus the overperformers during the pre-all-star break period.

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The All-Star break is a time to furiously send trade offers before those bottom half teams check out, or at least try to entice them back to their computers for one last look at their teams so that they might help you improve yours. But we’re all in different types of leagues, so instead of a few mixed-league buy low players, I thought I would try to dream up some buy-low players for every situation. I won’t cover all of you, that’s impossible with the proliferation of fantasy baseball styles these days, but maybe I’ll cover more of you.

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Waiver wires – like the southwest being obliterated by consistent triple-digit temperatures – are bone dry at this point. This is why every top-100 prospect who comes up gets obscenely bid up in FAAB proceedings just in case he’s ready to dominate immediately. Perhaps the ripest avenue for talent still left at this point is the disabled list, and specifically, pitchers on the mend. Let’s check in on three Tommy John returners working their way back and see if they can be our second-half saviors, especially as we seem to lose a top arm every day over the last couple of weeks.

Alex Cobb | Tampa Bay Rays

I’m starting with Cobb almost to just get him out of the way. I’ll state out front that I don’t draft TJ returners in their first year back (though I won’t completely ignore them on the wire at this point in the season). Not only are they rarely anywhere near as good as their peak, but even in those instances where they are really good, they frequently run into setbacks which often results in another DL stint (see also: Darvish, Yu this year and Fernandez, Jose last year). Cobb has all that and the fact that the Rays are notoriously deliberate with pitchers working against him.

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