A pitcher’s excellent performance early in the season can obscure poor performance later on, as his stats slowly converge toward expectations. If you held onto Jordan Zimmermann too long, you suffered the consequences. The same applies for the opposite scenario; Matt Shoemaker has been one of the baseball’s better pitchers since mid-May after an atrocious start to the season.

Alas, the deeper we get into the season, the more important it becomes to check recent leaderboards. With the way player performance ebbs and flows during a season, a span of five or six starts can probably be considered a small sample size. Still, keeping an eye on these small samples can illuminate interesting trends.

For whatever reason, there seem to be a lot of unfamiliar or unexpected names on FanGraphs’ xFIP leaderboards under the “last 30 days” split. Let’s break them down!

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Adam Conley is having a pretty good season for a 26-year old in his first full MLB season. Adam Conley has looked great at points in this season, including 7.7 no-hit innings at Milwaukee in late-April. Adam Conley even brought a 2.59 June ERA into his final start of the month at Detroit. But Adam Conley has a problem. Well, two problems including that I won’t stop using his full name. Adam Conley can’t get through batting orders three times on consistent basis.

This was crystallized in his start at Detroit on June 28th. He only faced three guys for a third time, allowing a double, walk, and home run that finished off a five-run inning in which he relinquished his 3-0 lead. He had 62 pitches coming into the inning and left with 92. That’s right around his breaking point. He was better against Atlanta in his most recent outing, facing four guys for a third time and going strikeout, flyout, walk, and groundout. But situations like Detroit have been the norm for Conley this year.

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This week over at SaberSim, I released a tool that allows users to view more detailed projected performance for their lineups. Rather than just adding up projected points for each player, this new Lineup Analysis tool allows us to view mean, median, standard deviation, and percentile projections for the lineup as a whole. In other words, rather than combining each player’s distribution separately, SaberSim analyzes the performance of the entire lineup across each simulated game.

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Michael Fulmer opened the season as the Tigers’ top prospect. After just 15.1 innings over three Triple-A starts, the Tigers couldn’t wait any longer, recalling him to debut at the end of April. And boy what a decision that was, as Fulmer now owns a sparkling 2.11 ERA after yesterday’s start in 13 games.

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We—presumably like the Detroit Tigers, perhaps even at this very moment—have been brooding over what to do with and about Shane Greene. For the Tigers, this is one aspect of the broad and compelling question of what to do with and about their 2016 season, which is now in grave jeopardy. Over the past week, they’ve suffered the following indignities: (1) the rehabilitation, from a fractured elbow, of their fine hitter J.D. Martinez is proceeding only glacially, so they have to figure he’ll be out for another month; (2) Jordan Zimmermann, probably their best starting pitcher, went on the DL with a neck strain, which may or may not be the reason he had serious trouble getting outs during the preceding six weeks; and (3) Daniel Norris, a starting pitcher on whom they were counting, suffered an oblique strain and likewise went on the DL. The Tigers, according to Rotoworld, are “confident” that Norris will be back in two weeks, but that strikes us as magical thinking. The over-under, we think, is about a month.

Steven Moya should be an adequate or better substitute for Martinez, and the Tigers’ hitting is otherwise fine. But what’s the deal with their starting rotation? For one thing, they are fortunate that Michael Fulmer, in the first 12 starts of his career, has pitched even better than you’d have expected their top prospect to. Justin Verlander is the useful 3rd starter he’s been since he turned 30, though not the ace he was before that. The Tigers seem committed to Mike Pelfrey, to whom they gave a 2-year contract last winter. Pelfrey is a storied innings-eater, though it would be more accurate to say that the innings eat him. He’s got positive value if he keeps his ERA at about 4; at the moment, it’s 4.78, and his FIP is even worse. They’ve got to hope that Zimmermann comes back strong, though if he’s got an ETA no one’s told us about it.

Beyond that, there’s chaos. So depending on how you calculate it and the sunniness of your disposition, the Tigers, in the short and possibly the long term, need two and perhaps three starters. There’s of course always the chance of a trade—the farm system is thin, but not as thin as it was until recently, and there are a couple of good, very young hitters who could be attractive to a team that’s going nowhere. But meanwhile, let’s review the Tigers’ in-house options: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s your favorite time of the week, the moment we dive into the deep depths of the ominous free agent pool. Who will we find?! Will we discover hidden treasure?!

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We’re in the midst of a new frontier in pitching analysis. With Statcast giving us the exit velocity on batted balls, we can now test our theories about balls in play for pitchers. It’s long been thought that pitchers have little control over the ball in play, but recent research has begun to show that maybe pitchers have a little more to say about the ball once it leaves the bat than we thought before.

It’s a little scary, because we don’t have years and years of data to make sure that what we’re looking at is sticky, year-to-year. But we do have some idea of the meaningfulness of exit velocity for pitchers. It looks like something that can change rapidly, but is still meaningful in small samples. That’s probably because it speaks well to true talent, but true talent can change quickly for pitchers, because they can make an adjustment that changes their effectiveness completely. That makes the stat cool but also hard to use.

Also, it’s possible that the things that pitchers do to suppress exit velo are perhaps more subject to slight changes in your mechanics than the things they do to strike players out. For example, Rob Arthur outlined the factors as being “getting ahead in the count, low pitch velocity, low vertical pitch location, and precise horizontal pitch location.” Sounds like exit velo is a proxy for command, and we’ve seen what a little tweak to mechanics can do to command when we looked recently at Aaron Nola.

Still, we can look at the leaders for the year in exit velocity. Those pitchers may have better numbers than their strikeouts and walks suggest, and might be more believable than we thought. And we can also look at the guys that have improved the most over the last month and a half. Maybe they’ve made an adjustment!

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So far, this weekly column has largely focused on various general aspects of DFS strategy for the first half of the post, and specific projections for the day in the second half. Today, I’d like to switch gears a bit and discuss my process for building lineups in small (2-5 game) slates, using today’s early 3-game slate as an example.

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It’s that time of year again, American League starting pitcher tier update time! I still pay no attention to ERA, as it’s not a metric I use for evaluation and ranking pitchers for rest of season performance. Player movement between tiers will only occur when there’s a change in underlying skill, pitch mix, or velocity. Injured pitchers with non-arm injuries expected back relatively soon will remain in the tier they had been. Pitchers with arm-related injuries with up-in-the-air return dates have been removed. I just can’t speculate on that kind of stuff.

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We’re the guys who spurned a late-April trade offer for Drew Smyly, he of the 7-plus ERA over his last ten starts. So of course you want to listen to us when we suggest selling high on a starting pitcher, especially one who’s leading the AL in ERA and Quality Starts. Nonetheless, that’s how we see things with Steven Wright.

You probably know Wright’s story. He was on the road to being a career minor leaguer when, 1n 2011, he had a Pauline conversion to the cult of the knuckleball, made it to the majors at 28 in 2013, found his way into the Red Sox starting rotation last season, and pitched pretty well until suffering a concussion after being hit in the head by a fly ball during the other team’s batting practice—a first, as far as we know. This season, he’s been channeling the 2012-model R.A. Dickey: 2.12 ERA, 8 wins, and 12 Quality Starts in 15 overall. Plus, because he’s a knuckleballer, he’s not doing those horrible things to his arm and shoulder that regular pitchers do, and can last deeper into games (almost 7 innings per start) than other guys. Read the rest of this entry »