Do you need starting pitching in your deep league? Of course you do! The tough decisions come when debating between a middle reliever who is going to give you solid ratios but reduce your win and strikeout potential or a bottom of the barrel starter who could potentially torpedo your ratios. This is where your place in those specific categories in key. Performing well in the ratios? Don’t blow it. Play it safe with a middle reliever. Already sitting at the bottom of the ratio categories? Might as well take the plunge, you can’t fall much further!

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If you followed the unveiling of our positional rankings updates then you probably have a good idea of how I feel about the NL pitching landscape, but a straight ranking of all starting pitchers is a little different than tiering the arms in one specific league. We’ve also gotten five or six more days of information since releasing those rankings. In short, I’ve made some changes. Nothing sweeping, just a few moves here and there in comparison to last week’s rankings. If you want to see how things compare to the previous months, they can be found here:

• March/April
• May

As in May, I’ve got 10 tiers, but I’ve bumped the total number of pitchers from 70 to 72. There are 75 guys in rotations at any point in the NL, but they aren’t all rank-worthy and in fact, this isn’t even 72 of the 75 as some of these guys are on the shelf or still in the minors. For the naming of the tiers, I’m choosing 10 of my favorite TV shows right now. They’re all funny, witty, smart shows, at least in my estimation. If you haven’t seen one of them, you should check it out. The shows used for each tier aren’t really related to the pitchers in the tier, but there were some happy accidents after I ranked the shows 1-10.

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When I comment on the shape of a pitch, I try to put it into two pieces of context: the league average movement on a pitch like that, and the rest of that pitcher’s arsenal. More on the second bit later.

Today, let’s look at some young pitchers with small track records — guys like Eduardo Rodriguez, Chi-Chi Gonzalez, Vincent Velasquez, and Lance McCullers — up against the average movement of the league’s pitches. Because we may not know a ton about outcomes right now, but the movement of a pitch probably only takes a few games to stabilize. It’s an aspect of the pitch, much like velocity, which stabilizes in three games.

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Yesterday, I put my xK% equation to good use by identifying five starting pitchers the formula suggests has strikeout rate upside. As usual, today I take a look at those with strikeout rate downside. These are the pitchers whose xK% are well below their actual K%.

Warning: these are very good pitchers!

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It’s been a little while since I last used my xK% equation to identify pitchers with strikeout rate upside. So now that we’re about a third of the way into the season, it’s time to take another look. The five pitchers discussed below all have xK% marks well above their actual K% marks. My equation isn’t perfect, of course, just like all formulas that act as skill estimators, but it should work pretty well at the extremes at predicting the direction of future stat changes.

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I’m a sucker for velocity. If a pitcher throws hard enough, I’m willing to forgive more warts on their profile. With that in mind, I’ve fully accepted Mike Foltynewicz as a viable back of the rotation, mixed league arm with upside. Deductive reading skills probably led you to the conclusion he throws hard, and your reading skills haven’t failed you. Among starters who have pitched a minimum of 40 innings, his 94.8 mph average four-seam fastball velocity ranks tied with Stephen Strasburg for the eighth highest. His two-seam fastball checks in with an average velocity of 94.4 mph, tied for the 12th highest mark. He throws his two heaters a whopping 74.1% of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re making our way around the diamond with our updated rankings and today we are diving into the starting rotation, a robust fantasy position with plenty of elite-level talent, but maybe a soft middle. Here are the positions we’ve done so far and you can also access them via the Positional Rankings in the right sidebar:

• Catchers
• First Basemen
• Second Basemen
• Shortstops
• Third Baseman
• Outfielders

We probably didn’t miss anyone here. If you think someone is missing, you can definitely mention him in the comments, but chances are he just didn’t make the cut.

I ranked 150, Zach ranked 122, Mike ranked 100, and Eno – yes Eno is here for the SP Ranks!!! – ranked 134. If they didn’t rank someone that one of the others did, he was given a +1 of their last rank as I’m sure you noticed in the other positions, but there’s a lot of different opinions with pitchers so it’s more prevalent here.
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Like most Americans of our generation, we remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we got the news about Kennedy. It seems like just yesterday. In fact, though, it was last week, and we were sitting at our computers, as usual, staring at baseball numbers, as usual. We froze with horror and disbelief as we saw that Ian Kennedy had pitched 3 2/3 innings, allowing 9 baserunners and 7 earned runs. Actually, now that we brood about it, that may instead have been May 17, when we were sitting at our computers, as usual, staring at baseball numbers, as usual. We froze with horror and disbelief as we saw that Kennedy had pitched 5 innings and given up 6 earned runs. Or, we wonder, as the mystic chords of memory begin to chime like Peter Buck’s guitar, was it instead May 12, when we distinctly recall freezing with horror and disbelief as we saw that Kennedy had pitched 4 2/3 innings, let 11 guys reach base, and surrendered 5 earned runs? No, wait—it might, after all, have been April 25, when Kennedy pitched 4 1/3 innings, with 9 baserunners and 8 earned runs the outcome, and we froze with horror and disbelief. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s rankings update time! As you may have consistently noticed as the updated RotoGraphs consensus rankings for hitters have gradually been released, two months of performance is hardly a large enough sample size to move the needle all that much for me. Unless there is a clear explanation for a change in performance and/or underlying skills, then more often than not, the player is going to revert to what you had him projected for in the preseason.

For pitchers, it’s essential to remember that ERA is not a skill. It’s just a result. So I don’t really care what a pitcher’s ERA is at the moment. What I’m really interested in is their peripherals and any changes in pitch mix and/or velocity. And even if their peripherals have changed, you then have to ask yourself if its sustainable. Again, more likely is that what we initially forecasted is what is going to be posted the rest of the way, though obviously this is not always the case.

As a reminder, the tiers are named after the best characters from the FXX show, Man Seeking Woman.

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It’s not often I have a streak of deep league waiver wire recommendations that have been so ridiculously poor. Let’s recap, shall we?

Last week, I recommended Marc Krauss. The very next day, he was DFA’d.

Two weeks ago, I recommended Drew Stubbs. He was option to Triple-A that night. But that wasn’t all. In that post, I also recommended Tommy Field. He was DFA’d last Saturday. Though I did end my blurb on him by saying, “This is not a long-term recommendation and his opportunity might be shorter than Stubbs’.”

Three weeks ago, I recommended Jackie Bradley Jr. He was sent back to Triple-A nine days later.

Oof, that’s pathetic. It either goes to show you how difficult it is to recommend these types of players or I have just done a terrible job sorting through the trash to uncover a gem. Probably a little of both. Here’s to hoping my streak has ended and better recommendations are in my future!

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