Yesterday I gave you seven NL pitchers who have fared much better at home and as such should be considered in only their home venues. Today I’ve got six five more from the American League. This strategy is best deployed in mixed leagues, but I broke the list up by leagues just because it would’ve been too huge for one piece.

UPPER TIER

Garrett Richards, LAA (2.28 ERA split) – Richards had one of the worst starts of the year when he went to New York and dropped a 0.7 IP/6 ER turd on fantasy rosters everywhere. That start influences his road work a good bit, but even removing it only gives him a 4.00 ERA on the road. He’s had some good starts on the road, but he has consistently been sharp at home. His 2.53 ERA comes with a 0.99 WHIP and 22% K rate compared to 1.48 and 16% on the road. He’s allowed more than 3 ER just once at home and he still fanned 11 in that game (4 ER v. CLE). The Angels have just 19 home games left this season, one of the lower totals in the league, accounting for 45% of their remaining schedule.

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A common misnomer in fantasy baseball is that the rate stats are tough to move late in the season. The idea is that the denominator of innings gets too big to push the needle substantially with just a month and a half left. While it is true that wholesale changes to your ERA or WHIP this late in the season are unlikely barring some kind of Kris Medlen 2012 or Carlos Carrasco 2014 type players in your rotation, the reason you can still make a significant move is because the categories are often tightly bunched so you don’t necessarily need wholesale changes.

For those curious or who don’t remember the particular, Medlen had a 0.92 ERA in 78.7 IP from August 5th through the end of the 2012 season while Carrasco rejoined the Cleveland rotation on August 10th of last year and put together a killer 10-start run with a 1.30 ERA in 69 IP. Those two won people some titles for sure. I’m sure someone will have a similar kind of electric finish to the season, but trying to guess exactly who is a fool’s errand, but there is an avenue to explore for some potential ERA value. Some pitchers are markedly better at home and spot-starting them exclusively in their friendly confines could yield big returns.

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Last week, I discussed the five starting pitchers whose fastball velocity had experienced the greatest surge over the previous two weeks. So today, I’ll check in on the decliners. Since velocity trends upward as the season rolls on, a significant decline in velocity at this time is concerning and could signal a serious issue.

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We’re just about ready to close the book on another season, and as we’re well into the throes of the 2015 stretch run, we need every bit of fantasy ammunition, each spare part we can scrounge from the waiver wire dumpster.

As a reminder, the players recommended in this space are best suited for mono formats, and the ownership percentages are by way of CBS.
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Here’s the saddest thing about velocity changes in pitchers: it looks like you’re screwed either way. Velocity is mostly good for results, but Tommy John pitchers both a) threw harder across pitch types when they were healthy and b) showed velocity loss the year they had surgery. So, either way according to Jon Roegele’s research at least, it could be seen as a negative even if you show up as a velocity gainer on our lists today.

On the other hand, it’s probably better to combine velocity loss with things like a drop in zone rate and an inconsistent release point — things that Josh Kalk put into his injury zone work — and not just rely on velocity loss alone.

That said, a tick on the gun is still worth something in run prevention. And so let’s look at which pitchers are happy or hurting on the radar gun.

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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.

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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+.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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