When the Pittsburgh Pirates sign or trade for a pitcher, we all take notice. Of course, when you take A.J. Burnett and Francisco Liriano from 5.00+ ERAs to All-Star caliber arms (and Burnett even made the ASG last year), your bona fides are well established. Make no mistake that it’s a full organizational effort in Pittsburgh that helps turn these talented, but struggling arms into strong rotation (and sometimes bullpen) assets, but one guy tends to get the bulk of the credit as the face of the revolution: pitching coach Ray Searage.

Searage joined the team as the pitching coach in 2011 and he has been the point man for pitching during their incredible turnaround from bottom-feeder to contender. Jon Niese and Juan Nicasio instantly became more fantasy relevant the second they reached Pittsburgh. Niese because he was already a solid major league starter (career 3.93 ERA, three season at 3.71 or better) who could jump into mixed league viability with some refinement and Nicasio because he’s a live arm (mid-90s heat, filthy slider) who could be a few tweaks from being the next Burnett/Liriano.

One of the risks when we see something like this from a team is to just assume it’s always going to work. Reputations can foster laziness so I wanted to look back at Searage’s track record since joining Pittsburgh and see just how well he was doing with the reclamation projects. I found nine instances of eight starters (remember, Burnett left and came back) over the years and looked at their performance in both K%-BB% which highlights skills and ERA+ which measures performance relative to league context.

ERA+ is measured on a scale where higher is better and 100 is average. K%-BB% is simply the rates subtracted and again, higher is better. Average has grown from 10% to 12% league wide since Searage took over, but we’re more focused on what the individual pitcher is doing there as opposed to league averages.

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The term means “ambulance dogs.” It’s what the World War I Germans called the dogs they sent into No Man’s Land during lulls in the fighting to find the survivors. And that’s where we are and what we’re doing right now. Our draft and auction battles are over. (Don’t know about you, but it started to feel like a war of attrition to us.) The in-season strategizing hasn’t really begun yet. All the able-bodied players, so it’s thought, are on someone’s roster. Meanwhile, No Man’s Land is littered with the corpses of the guys that nobody wants—the 25th men, the back-of-the-bullpen mop-up pitchers, the mid-level prospects, the 5th starters on bad teams. Can there possibly be, sheltering in some muddy and verminous shell hole, somebody who doesn’t just have a pulse, but is actually fit enough to be on the front lines of tomorrow’s combat?

How about Matt Wisler? Wisler is owned in only 2% of Yahoo leagues and 2.3% of ESPN leagues. Fewer than a quarter of NFBC standard-issue leagues (30 rounds, 15 owners) got around to drafting him. Even on the surface of the stats, it’s a little hard to explain why he wasn’t taken more often. Wisler’s a 23-year-old right-handed pitcher who was universally recognized as one of the top 50 or so prospects in baseball a year ago. He’s got a full repertoire of pitches, though he’s mostly a fastball-slider guy. Originally drafted by the Padres, he was the key to the Craig Kimbrel trade at the start of the 2015 season. He began that season in the minors, got called up to Atlanta in June, and performed creditably if not Fantasy-usefully in 19 starts (8 Wins, 5.94 K/9, 4.71 ERA, 1.46 WHIP), including 4 Quality Starts in his last 5 outings. It’s a no-brainer to project improvement across the board. You like Anthony DeSclafani? What round did you take him in? The 16th or 17th round, we’re guessing. If you got him at an auction, what did you pay? $3, are we right? Well, Steamer projects about the same season for Wisler as it does for DeSclafani. Read the rest of this entry »

My twitter feed is blowing up with questions about pitching. I can’t get to all of them in crazy detail without cloning myself, so what I’ll do instead is something that’s a little more like what we do on The Sleeper & The Bust, the podcast Paul Sporer and I run — I’ll try to put together a few quick facts and an opinion that should help you make your decisions.

So let’s all take a ride, take a ride on the omnibus.

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I just spent that last two weeks on vacation with my family. Hoping to escape the dreariness of the wettest Seattle winter on record, we embarked for the warm and artery-clogging bosoms of New Orleans and Miami. The first week of the season is always a cause for celebration in my house but I have to say watching the grand ol’ game with a mouthful of beignets made the start to this season even more special. I think players would be far more receptive to the tobacco ban if MLB replaced tins of Skoal with beignets from Café Du Monde or Morning Call.

I also picked up a pretty rad souvenir for my 8-month old son at the Miami airport. I know that Legos aren’t really age appropriate since he currently feels the need to fit absolutely everything he sees into his mouth so it’ll remain perched far above where his grubby little hands can reach for some time.

But it wasn’t all powdered sugar smiles and medianoches at mediodía. There was plenty of belt-loosening self-loathing, GERD, and of course, fretting over my fantasy teams. You see in my home league, a 14-team keep-6 now in its sixth year as a keeper format, I was the proud owner of both A.J. Pollock and Kyle Schwarber. And while I had tempered expectations for both entering this season, I didn’t expect to have to replace 1/3^rd of my keepers before the first week of April concluded.

So as with my son’s new Lego Ichiro, I’m tasked with piecing together a team from the waiver wire in the hopes that it’ll ultimately prove greater than the sum of its awkwardly shaped plastic brick parts. And with that in mind, I’d like to recommend a few players available in deep leagues to replace the Pollocks, Schwarbers, and Tyson Rosses of the fantasy world.

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On Monday, I unveiled the first edition of my American League starting pitcher tiers. Of course, it didn’t include every pitcher currently part of a team’s rotation. Don’t feel bad for them, as their day has come. Today, I’ll discuss the remainder of the crop that missed the cut. Do any of these guys have the potential to join the tiered?

Warning: this is a boring list. Try to stay awake while reading about these names.

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Hey, I’m naming my Wednesday piece now! It’s going to be called “Tipping Pitches”. It’s just a snazzy new name, it doesn’t mean I’m only going to be writing about Eduardo Rodriguez every week. But it will be my pitching-focused column whereas my other offerings at RG won’t necessarily always revolve around the mound. 

Whenever we see offseason movement for pitchers, we immediately analyze the park and league fit for the pitcher in question. And that’s understandable, those are big factors in how he might perform for the upcoming season, but one aspect that doesn’t always get its due as a factor is defense. It gets more attention when a pitcher joins a team with a good defensive reputation, but when a team adds a plus defender, I don’t think it’s always factored in for the pitchers on that team. Three pitchers stand out as major beneficiaries of defensive moves this offseason. Two saw their team add a defensive stud who should impact their bottom line while the third joined a team with a great defensive crew that is tailored to his game.

Garrett Richards gets Andrelton Simmons at SS

Richards probably doesn’t get enough credit for his 2015. He came in off the knee injury that cut his breakout 2014 short and was expected to miss upwards of a month at the outset. Instead, he didn’t miss any time and took 32 solid turns through the rotation. He wasn’t nearly as good as 2014, but regression was expected even with full health so the fact that the knee was likely playing a role at least early in the season should get him some benefit of the doubt. He still managed an above average 207.3 innings of work, a career-high.

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Since we share Oscar Wilde’s view that moderation is a fatal thing, and believe that Moore (Ray Moore, 1957, 11 Wins, 3.90 ERA, 1.355 WHIP) is Moore (Matt Moore, 2012, 11 Wins, 3.81 ERA, 1.348 WHIP), more or less, we filled out our already-crammed dance card on Sunday with an on-line auction in the Bluefish Blitz League. The BBL features among its owners some well-known Fantasy figures, and provides motive, means, and opportunity to be predatory if that’s your weltanschauung. It also has rules sufficiently different from anyone else’s to make preparation-from-scratch essential, even if you’ve already done so many drafts, auctions, and blogs that you can’t remember which leagues you’re in, much less which players you’ve got in each of them.

The rules: 20 teams, each with $250 in play money to spend on 9 hitters (i.e. a full lineup, including a UT guy), 11 pitchers, and a 5-man bench that can include pitchers if you’re so inclined. 5×5 with a couple of wrinkles on the hitting side: OBP, SLG, and NSB instead of BA, HR, and SB. Draconian innings-pitched limits at both ends (1000 IP minimum, 1458 [i.e. 162×9] maximum), and no more than 162 games played per each hitting position. Daily transactions of every conceivable variety are not only permitted but encouraged and applauded. The concept, obviously, is to approximate “real” major league rosters and team management.

It was, in some ways, gratifying to discover that these guys (or we guys, if you care to flatter us) don’t know anything more than you (or we, if you care not to flatter us) do if you’ve been paying attention. At about noon on Sunday, Ken Giles went for $19 in this league, while Luke Gregerson went for $6. At about 9 on Monday morning, Houston manager A.J. Hinch announced that Gregerson would be his closer. Even granting that Giles probably takes over as soon as Gregerson blows a save, we imagine that those prices would have been nearly transposed if the draft had been held a day later or Hinch had less of a flair for drama.

We didn’t set out to be contrarian in this league, but as it developed, we were. We decided that (1) the league rules made platooning and DFS-style day-to-day matchups a possibility for hitters, and (2) our unwholesome in-season obsessive attention to detail would enable us to optimize our hitting while not running afoul of the 162-game limit. We accordingly decided to pay extra for our bench players, and not to put any pitchers on our bench. We also decided to go with 6 starting pitchers. We thought that many teams would pursue this strategy, but only one did, at least in its pure form (the strategy, we mean, not the team).

Here’s our roster, listed in the order in which we acquired it. For a bit of context, Trout went for $59, Harper for $56, Kershaw for $52, and Goldschmidt for $50…

Drew Smyly, $15
Stephen Vogt, $10
Xavier Cedeno, $3
Chris Davis, $34
Corey Kluber $31
Cody Allen $24
Kole Calhoun $10
Ben Revere $13
Mark Melancon $21
Jose Quintana $11
Elvis Andrus $10
Randal Grichuk $8
Danny Valencia $2
Joe Ross $7
Trevor Plouffe $5
Pedro Alvarez $11
Brock Holt $3
Stephen Piscotty $5
Welington Castillo $2
Jonathan Schoop $7
Chris Owings $5
Zach McAllister $3
Matt Moore $7
Nate Jones $1

…which, now that we type it out in the merciless daylight after a night spent with this squad, doesn’t look as good to us as it looked in the smoky fluorescence of the tavern at 2 Monday morning while the bartender emptied the till and set the chairs upside-down on the tables. So we’ll see.

But one thing we did in this league may be of use to you and us down the road. A month ago, we identified some starting pitchers who qualified for the Holy Trinity and the Holy Quadrinity—two different approaches to granular stats designed to identify guys who pitched better than it might have looked like they did last season. With relief pitchers at something of a premium in the BBL, we took the same approaches to relievers who threw more than 30 innings in relief last year. Eight guys qualifed for both the Trinity and the Quadrinity. Two—uh, three–are closers (Zach Britton, Hector Rondon, and Gregerson). Two others are injured, and not in ways that bode especially well for their return (Carson Smith, Aaron Loup). The other three are Will Harris (well-known as a capable seventh-inning guy, and orphaned, a bit surprisingly, in the BBL, though we might have taken him at the end if Jones hadn’t been available); Xavier Cedeno (whom we got, contentedly, for $3, and who is a candidate to close some games for Tampa Bay); and Sean Gilmartin.

Gilmartin’s the really interesting one. He’s a former first-rounder who kicked around for a while as a starter until the Mets took him as a Rule 5 pick in December 2014. He was superb in long relief last season, and, though he’s left-handed, actually did better against right-handed hitters. The Mets optioned him to AAA a few days ago, evidently with the idea of making him a starter again. And indeed, it’s not clear why a left-hander who can get righties out and has a tepid fastball but a four-pitch repertoire wouldn’t fit in as a starter. Of course, that’s what the Braves and Twins thought when they had him. We nonetheless predict that the reconversion will work, and that he will prove to be a better pitcher than (former Rule Fiver) Logan Verrett, who’s his competition for the sixth-starter role. If, for whatever reason, Gilmartin gets summoned to start a game or games this season, we’re going to grab him, unless one of the bluefish grabs him first.

Yesterday, I unveiled my bold hitter league leaders, with the acknowledgement that these are a lot tougher to hit than the generic Bold Predictions. The pitching side of the ledger is a bit easier, but still difficult, of course. Given that there is more luck and factors outside the specific pitcher’s control involved that shape his surface results, it’s more conceivable that a non-favorite leads the league in a category.

In an effort to avoid double dipping and naming the same pitcher in two categories, there may have been a slightly better bold choice for a particular category. I opted to come up with different names in each. Also keep in mind that it is difficult to balance boldness with realistic. I eliminated many names that I didn’t think were bold, but maybe you do. I also eliminated names that have no real chance at leading in the category.

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Let’s not get worried about Madison Bumgarner because he walked five guys. He’s done that twice before and one of them was his first start of the season in 2013. That, you can pencil into a guy feeling his way back into his mechanics. That’s fine.

Let’s not get worried about Madison Bumgarner because he gave up two homers. He’s done *that* 23 times. Even the fact that it was Scooter Gennett and Jonathan Villar that homered shouldn’t bother us too much. His last official start was one in which he gave up three homers — one each to Enrique Hernandez, A.J. Ellis, and Justin Ruggiano. So sometimes the bottom half of the league can touch one of baseball’s best.

So let’s not really worry about Madison Bumgarner because of his results yesterday. Let’s worry about Madison Bumgarner because of his process yesterday.

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About four years ago, Matt Swartz helped me find that strikeout and walk rates posted during spring training for starting pitchers do have some predictive value. It’s very small, of course, but it’s there, and using the data improved the pre-season projection. The findings were validated when Dan Rosenheck completed an exhaustive study and discovered the same thing a year ago. It’s not the surface stats that matter, which we knew, but the underlying skill metrics, like strikeout and walk rates, that hold some value. It’s not much value, but it’s not nothing like some of us may have thought.

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