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.
Tiers are named for the best characters on the brilliant FXX show, Man Seeking Woman.
We are now two months into the season and I’ve definitely evolved my thinking on a number of pitchers. I try not to overreact and change my outlook start-to-start, but we’re getting a relatively worthwhile sample on the books and pitchers are always changing so if you stay married to everything you thought in March, you’re going to get left behind on guys for better and worse. Here are three guys I’ve really changed my tune on so far (and they’ll weirdly all lefties).
Steven Matz is Really Good
I hated Matz’s draft slot coming into the season. I thought he was being way overdrafted as the 30th SP off the board and it was more because of his health than his skills. It felt like a lofty draft status based on six MLB stats. Coming up through the minors, he put up great numbers, but only once topped 106 innings in a season. He was pummeled in his debut after being pushed back to April 11th, but he’s been damn near unhittable since: 1.13 ERA, 0.85 WHIP, 49 Ks and 7 BBs in 48 IP. He has three scoreless starts and three where he allowed just 2 ER. A balky elbow caused another layoff in the midst of this run, but he has shown no ill affect with two brilliant starts since returning.
I figured it was time.
I used strikeouts minus walks for the first sort because that’s been shown to be the best in-season predictor. I then eyeballed fastball velocity and pitching mix. There are a few places where I went with upside because I saw these as mixed league rankings. If you’re in a deeper league, look past the prospects and instead consider the veterans that are pitching now.
Feel free to argue a guy up or down. I may make the move!
I know some tiered rankings have come out this week, but I wanted to take you in a little different direction this week. Next week I will have the first base tiered rankings up. This week, I wanted to explore a new statistic I came up with that will probably not help you win your league. It is simply a fun way to look at pitchers in a different light, so I hope you enjoy reading about it as much I enjoyed exploring it.
I am fortunate enough to have Jake Arrieta on one of my teams, so I have been able to look at his starts individually. I started to notice that even though he was giving up very few hits, he seemed to be giving up a lot of walks along with a high number of strikeouts. This got me wondering if Arrieta was turning into a modern day Nolan Ryan, where he was not going to let you make contact even if that meant walking the hitter. Turns out there are better comps to Nolan Ryan, but I’ll get more into that later.
Initially, I thought I could look at contact%, but that looks at every single pitch and that is not really what I wanted. I wanted to see which pitchers allowed the least amount of balls in play on average. So I created the Nolan Ryan percentage (NR% for short). To calculate NR%, you simply add K% and BB%. Nothing complicated. Nothing groundbreaking. Just a fun way to see which pitchers are like Nolan Ryan in terms of either striking out or walking most of their hitters.
Read the rest of this entry »
SaberSim Daily Projections
Daily projections require a great deal of context in order to project each specific game. SaberSim daily projections account for lineups, starting pitchers, and bullpens, as well as more nuanced factors like weather, umpires, park effects, home/away, handedness splits, and more. Even within these specific factors, there’s a tremendous amount of detail involved, and constant room for tweaks and improvements. For instance, the park effects are not applied broadly, but rather based on how they affect each individual outcome (BB, K, 1B, 2B, 3B, HR) for left-handed and right-handed batters.
Last year, I determined that pitcher batted ball distance allowed was correlated with HR/FB rate to a reasonable degree. This was fairly obvious, though the correlation was much lower than I expected, and less significant than that of hitters. It’s why I rarely discuss pitcher batted ball distance, along with the fact it doesn’t correlate from year to year all that well. But the correlation is there and it does convey meaning. We could run the same analysis for pitchers, comparing their distances with HR/FB rates to identify those due for improvement or regression. So today I’ll look at American League starting pitchers with highly inflated HR/FB rates, but distances that suggest major improvement is on the horizon.
While some of these players will obviously improve due to how high their HR/FB rates are, you might wonder if that improvement means a 10% mark going forward or a 14% mark the rest of the way. This analysis should help form those expectations.
Show of hands, please: Who thought, back in February, that we’d be approaching Memorial Day with the Baltimore Orioles in possession of the second-best record in the American League? Uh-huh; not many of you. Now: Who thought instead, three months ago, that the 2016 Orioles would be fortunate to end the season with 75 wins? A few more, and we are among you.
We won’t revisit our thinking, if you can call it that. We will point out, though, that the Orioles will certainly come partway back to earth. First of all, none of the other teams in the AL East are going to be pushovers. More importantly, the Orioles have been somewhat fortunate so far this year, just as they were somewhat unfortunate last year. Their record today is 26-17; their Pythagorean projection (we’ll assume you know what we mean) has them more like 24-19. Conversely, the 2015 Orioles finished 81-81, whereas their Pythagorean projection had them more like 83-79—which, over 43 games, makes for 22 wins. The small difference between the seasons can be fully accounted for by the acquisition of Mark Trumbo and the advent of Kevin Gausman. Read the rest of this entry »
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Head to the pitching waiver wire, and you might remember this classic line from Coleridge’s tale of the albatross and the sailor. Yes, there are many pitchers you can choose from. They all have their flaws.
One of the most common mistakes when facing this situation in a single-season league is to reach for the young guy. Yes, prospects have that fresh feeling, and their upside reaches to the top of any rotation. To dream upon a golden arm and maybe, just maybe, be rewarded with an Asgardian hero like Noah Syndergaard!
Of course, reality is much more sober. More than half of all prospect pitchers — and even half of the very best — don’t provide their teams with more value than a middle reliever. Baseball will chew up the biggest of arms.
So consider instead the veterans that have improved their performance this year, in the order in which I would rank them.
Kendall Graveman (3% Yahoo, 1.6% ESPN, 11% CBS) – on its surface, Graveman’s 5.48 ERA is enough to scare off most casual fans. And his 5.91 FIP and 4.33 xFIP suggest there’s little to see here. Yawn. Move on, right? Well, maybe. But depending on your league size, Kendall Graveman could be a surprising source of productive innings moving forward.
First, the bad. I’ve already touched on his disappointing ERA and the indicators that support it. He’s also walking more batters than he did last year. In fact, his 3.59 BB/9 would be by far the worst of his career, including his time in the minor leagues. After his start on Thursday, his Zone% is sitting at 42%, a 4-point drop from his 2015 rate. And then there’s the home runs. His HR/FB% is a ghastly 25%. As you might suspect, this is where we start looking for upside.
When I first began playing DFS, I approached it with the belief that a good projection system is all that is needed to be successful. I still believe that accurate projections are very important for all forms of fantasy baseball (I run a sports projections site, after all), but over the past year or so that I’ve played DFS, I’ve come to better understand the deeper level of strategy needed to be successful in large-field DFS tournaments (commonly called GPPs).
