Archive for Starting Pitchers

Velocity changes between seasons, or even games, are well reported on thanks to Jeff Zimmerman’s velocity tracking document.

Fastball Velo changes, ’16 adjusted up

C Anderson +2.4
Estrada +1.8

Cain -3.2
Santiago -2.8
Adleman -2.4https://t.co/Qr33MW0GYN

— Jeff Zimmerman (@jeffwzimmerman) June 7, 2017

Velocity is very important to the success of pitchers – as I’ve written about with respect to my Stuff metric, and as highlighted in this great article by Mike Fast from 2010, every little bit of velocity matters. Within pitchers – those who lose velocity become shells of their former selves – like Eno Sarris wrote about Matt Harvey before this season started. While a Velocity drop between games is an indicator that someone might be hurt, a velocity drop within a game might indicate that a pitcher is becoming fatigue – a big sign of possible future injury.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I put a list of 20 hitting tidbits covering topics and players you might’ve overlooked two-plus months into the season. I’m following that up with a pitcher version today and I was considering doing these on a weekly or bi-weekly basis depending on how useful y’all found them. Let me know in the comments what you think.

Did You Know…?

• OK this first one is crazy. Grab a seat for this doozy. You’ll never believe that Clayton Kershaw is the top pitcher in baseball so far!
• Ervin Santana has a .153 BABIP… One. Fifty. Three. No one has ever come close to posting a full season at that clip
• Sid Fernandez’s .196 BABIP is the best single-season mark (min. 100 IP) since 1960

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I wrote about some pitchers at the top of my two-month pERA ranking. Today, I am going to examining some starting pitchers (min 5 starts) who are the other end of the spectrum. These pitchers have struggled and I will try to determine why.

Note: For reference, here are the articles in which I created the framework for the metric (full list).

Rich Hill (#165, 6.01 pERA): Hill throws two pitches and both have taken a significant step backward. Starting with his fastball, it’s 1.5 mph slower. This move is not a game changer, but for a pitcher with just one other pitch, any fastball degradation could kill his overall value.

Read the rest of this entry »

This past year, I created an ERA estimator which utilizes each pitch’s groundball and swinging strike rate and combines them for an overall pitcher ERA estimator (pERA). It’s time for a 2017 update. Today, I will go over some of the starters (min 5 starts) which stand out near the list’s top (full list).

Dallas Keuchel (#1, 2.14 pERA): Even though I expected Keuchel to be somewhere near the top of the list, I didn’t expect him to have the top spot. Two changes to his pitch repertoire have reversed his fortunes.

Read the rest of this entry »

David Price and James Paxton are back from DL, but Masahiro Tanaka has the 2nd-worst ERA among qualified starters (6.24), Matt Harvey aka The Dark Knight isn’t far behind at 5.43, and stable assets like Julio Teheran and Jose Quintana (the righty/lefty version of one another) have been buried in a heap of home runs. Even as we get some studs back, pitching remains a landmine-riddled hellscape. We’re on pace for the 2nd-most starts of 5+ ER since 2009 with 322 already. There were 937 all of last year.

Sitting around and complaining won’t do us any good, though. We have to remain diligent on the waiver wire and trade block to counterbalance the blowup starts that are seemingly impossible to avoid for more than a few days at a time regardless of who makes up your pitching staff. Today, I have three AL arms I’m looking as potential long-term* pickups. I tried to span shallow to deep league availability, too. I’ll have NL arms tomorrow next week.

*long-term at this point is a month to six weeks (speaking of which, there will be a new SP Update in a couple weeks)

Sean Manaea

Manaea walked five in his first start off the DL, but has been sharp ever since including a brilliant three-start run. He faced both Cleveland and New York on the road as well as hosting a red-hot Toronto offense, allowing a combined three runs against them. He has a 2.70 ERA and 0.93 WHIP with 34 strikeouts in 30 innings since returning. Over the five starts, he has a swinging strike rate below 14% just once (9% v. BOS) and a filthy 18% rate in his last two starts.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are 10 qualified starting pitchers with an xFIP under 2.80 in the last 30 days.

Among them are predictable names like Chris Archer (2.52), Clayton Kershaw (2.53), Chris Sale (2.64), Johnny Cueto (2.74), and Zack Greinke (2.76).

The other five aren’t as well known, and therefore, they are more intriguing.

Being in the top 10 xFIP leaderboard for a month is not necessarily a huge accomplishment. However, xFIP has one of the highest correlations with future ERA of all pitching metrics, so it’s among the most relevant numbers to examine when searching for potential breakouts or analyzing the legitimacy of poor or plus performance.

Below is a table sorted by the top 10 qualified starting pitchers in xFIP over the last 30 days*, with the best statistic in each category highlighted in yellow, and the worst statistic in each category highlighted in red: Read the rest of this entry »

6/4/17

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER18!

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer
• @enosarris
• @jasoncollette

Strategy Section:

OWNED BUT DO YOU START? (7:20)

• Gio Gonzalez at LAD, TEX
• Jose Quintana at TB, at CLE
• Masahiro Tanaka BOS, BAL
• Robbie Ray SD, MIL

SHALLOW (14:25)

• Adam Wainwright at CIN, PHI (15:02)
• Sean Manaea TOR, at TB (17:05)
• Antonio Senzatela CLE, at CHC (18:40)
• Drew Pomeranz at NYY, DET (18:34)
• JA Happ at OAK, at SEA (18:14)

Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Biagini (Blue Jays)

Toronto took Biagini in the Rule 5 draft before the 2016 season and the selection is now paying dividends. He started this season as a reliever but transitioned to being a starter in early May. Since then, the 27-year-old has posted a respectable 3.86 ERA (3.21 FIP). I watched his last start at home against Texas and here are my thoughts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Identifying pitching breakouts as they happen can be hard. Anticipating them, even harder. Savvy readers of sites such as this rely on plate discipline metrics, batted ball data, and other indicators designed to tease out luck from results in order to uncover which performances have staying power and which are fleeting. And while we’ve arrived at the point in the season when most pitching rates have stabilized, a simple change in pitch mix can render those indicators obsolete. Think Matt Shoemaker and his splitter, Jake Arrieta and his cutter, Max Scherzer and his curveball, or Sonny Gray and his slider.

If you can spot a pitcher pulling unexpected arrows from his quiver as he does it, then cheers to you. But it’s difficult to do that at scale. While trying to anticipate a change in pitch mix before it happens may seem futile at times, doing so is a bet on potential. And what we talk about when we talk about “stuff,” is really potential. One of the components upon which that potential relies, aside from command and health, is an optimal pitch mix.

To identify which pitchers could benefit by throwing their more effective offerings a little more frequently, we have a number of tools at our disposal. Today, we’ll use some of those tools to identify the league’s underthrown four-seam fast balls and sinkers and the pitchers who underthrow them.
Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of January, I introduced the latest hitter version of xHR/FB, featuring the Statcast fueled metric, Brls/BBE (barrels per batted ball event). I failed to discuss the pitcher side of the ledger, but their barrels against are tracked too, of course. While I haven’t performed any sort of analysis or run a regression, I have to assume that just like for hitters, Brls/BBE allowed by pitchers are going to correlate rather highly with their own HR/FB rates. Unlike for hitters though, it’s probably very inconsistent from year to year, which is why I never bothered to look into it.

Read the rest of this entry »