We know that average fastball velocity rises as the season progresses. And of course, velocity is highly correlated with strikeout rate. Sometimes velocity increases as a result of improved/changed mechanics, while other times pitchers might suddenly feel healthier than they had earlier in the season. Players are always dealing with aches and pains, the majority of which we never hear about. Since velocity stabilizes quickly, we should take surges very seriously. They could portend or confirm better performance. So here are your American League starting pitchers who have enjoyed at least a two mile per hour jump in velocity since April over the last two weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

What do you think is higher: seasons played by or DL stints for Jaime Garcia? That’s probably an easy one. What about Garcia’s innings v. DL stints? I’ll tell you that he has thrown 660 innings, but that probably still doesn’t help much. Garcia broke in during the 2008 season with 16 innings of work, but then missed all of the 2009 season with Tommy John Surgery. He has run the gamut of devastating pitcher injuries with the TJ, a torn labrum, and then last year’s Thoracic Outlet Syndrome.

Any one of those on their own can derail a pitcher’s career, but together they form the second worst trio imaginable outside of the Kardashian clowns. And yet like Caitlyn Jenner, Garcia has emerged from the trio’s wrath better than ever. Garcia has had success before. He returned from TJ in 2010 and enjoyed a strong rookie season with a 2.70 ERA in 163.3 innings. Coming into 2015, he’d amassed a 3.50 ERA in 594.7 innings, good for a 108 ERA+.

Read the rest of this entry »

Taylor Jungmann was the 12th overall pick of the 2011 draft out of the University of Texas. I had pretty high expectations for him, but that’s heavily influenced by my watching him dominate at UT (1.85 ERA, 0.97 WHIP and 356 Ks in 356 IP) with a few sprinkles of favorable bias* due to my being an alum, too.

*said bias wore off as he started his pro career and I tabbed him as a fifth-starter in this year’s SP guide “barring significant advancement of either the slider or changeup”. 

Pinning relatively high hopes on the 12th overall pick isn’t that crazy, but being drafted there was actually seen as something of a fall as Kiley McDaniel noted in his prospect write-up this year:

He slipped that far despite a 6’6/220 frame, track record and mid-rotation stuff because scouts were scared off by his short, abrupt, awkward arm action, which the Brewers corrected after signing him.

The minor league numbers were unimpressive as were the reports tied to them. McDaniel mentioned how his velocity dipped after the “corrected” arm action as he lingered in the high-80s/low-90s back in 2012, but a few more tweaks had him at 90-93 last year. Jungmann has been a great example of why minor league numbers aren’t always useful as a scouting tool, especially if it’s your only one. And let’s be honest, for a large majority of you, it was your only avenue outside of reading reports like McDaniel’s from March.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems Michael Wacha’s solid season has largely gone unnoticed among a sea of excellent pitching performances this year. His value is largely buoyed by the win column (12) because of a relatively modest 7.61 strikeouts per nine innings (K/9), but his 3.09 ERA and 1.09 WHIP are nothing to sneeze at — they rank 21st and 18th, respectively, among all qualified starters.

Wacha has largely taken teammate Adam Wainwright’s path to success this year: walk very few batters, induce a lot of ground balls and limit hard contact. Wainright has historically been more effective in limiting baserunners — only recently did his strikeout rate fall below 8.0 K/9 — but Waino has also been around a while. He really didn’t hit his stride until his age-27 season.

Technicalities aside, Wacha and Wainwright don’t have a lot in common. Waino throws sinkers, cutters and curves; Wacha lives primarily off a four-seamer while peppering in the occasional cutter, curve and change-up. However, Wacha improved one of his secondary pitches this year, and it helped him join an elite, albeit somewhat contrived, group of pitchers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rookie hitters are performing better this year than they ever have in the free agency era. Right now, rookie non-pitchers have a 93 weighted runs created plus, one better than in the second-best year for rookie hitters (2006). That’s also impressive because there are only four years in which rookies have managed a wRC+ over 90.

We spend so much time drooling over rookies that this might be a sobering result. The best rookie class of all time is still 7% worse than league average with the stick. You *could* use this to argue that rookies are a bad scene in redraft leagues.

Of course, that number is an overall number. If you focus on the rookies that have done well, they were almost all well-regarded, right?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a H2H league owner, September could be a frustrating time. It’s when veterans sometimes take a seat as their out of contention teams choose to give young hitters a look and young pitchers reach their innings limits and get shut down. The worst part of it is that these may have been the players that helped you achieve the best record in your league, yet come playoff time, you can’t even count on them to contribute to your championship run. So let’s discuss some of the pitchers who are definitely or possibly on an innings limit. Whether their teams decide to skip a start here and there to keep the innings down or just shut him down with two weeks or so to go, I don’t know. But either way, an innings limit would take a bite out of the pitcher’s value the rest of the way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ignoring those who reinjured themselves or were moved to the bullpen, all of the American League starting pitchers who underwent Tommy John surgery last season have now returned. Typically, I ignore these pitchers in fantasy leagues during their first year back and then analyze their results and velocity when forecasting their performance the following season. But a blanket ignore on every TJ surgery returnee might not be prudent, as evidenced by the superhuman Jose Fernandez, whose performance suggests that he hasn’t skipped a beat. So let’s take a look at our three.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back on June 18th, we hit the waiver wire in search of some arms and came up with six names to consider. We’re headed back to the wire again, but first let’s check in on the six pack of guys recommended last month.

A mixed bag of results with DeSclafani and Young really plummeting, Latos and Hahn (injured, unfortunately) pitching really well, Hendricks holding a great WHIP with a passable ERA and Gallardo giving a strong ERA to counter his god-awful WHIP. Of course, if there wasn’t a good bit of risk tied to these guys, they wouldn’t have been on the wire in the first place.

Let’s see if we can find some more gold or at least a bunch of cool silver. The threshold these guys have to pass through to be included is to be on rosters in fewer than 50% of ESPN and Yahoo! leagues. I don’t have a firm baseline for CBS leagues mainly because I don’t think they have a place where you can scroll through players with all the ownership rates right there, so I get my pool of potential pitchers by scouring ESPN/Yahoo! roster rates and then check the rates on CBS. If someone is north of 75% at CBS, I usually pass (although Gallardo was 77% there in June’s waiver piece), but ideally they are at 65% or lower there.

Read the rest of this entry »

He did once. Can he again?

Ian Kennedy has been one of the least valuable starting pitchers of 2015, a fact probably unsurprising to San Diego residents and his fantasy owners. Of all pitchers who have thrown at least 60 innings and generated negative wins above replacement (WAR), his ratio of strikeouts to walks (3.18 K/BB) and xFIP (3.83) rise to the top of an admittedly short list.

Still, his rate of strikeouts per nine innings (8.31 K/9) ranks 36th among all starters, and his walks-per-nine (2.62 BB/9) is nothing to sneeze at, either. It’s easy to see why fantasy owners hold out hope: his adequacy in preventing baserunners points to reasons why his 4.58 ERA is, perhaps, too high.

Unfortunately, Kennedy is a fly ball machine who has (almost) never enjoyed the friendly confines of a pitcher’s park. Per ESPN’s Park Factors, Kennedy’s home parks have mostly benefited hitters:

Read the rest of this entry »

The short answer for why we missed on Jacob deGrom on the way up was that he improved each of his pitches as he ascended through the minor leagues, often by changing the grip. He’s back to his old tricks, as only Anthony DeSclafani’s slider has gotten harder this year, and the other guys throwing the Dan Warthen-branded Mets slider are all doing pretty well with that pitch.

So let’s look at movement and velocity changes on pitches and see if we can spot the next deGrom, hopefully in time to have him on our roster before the true breakout.

Read the rest of this entry »