Jason Hammel was never an elite prospect with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, but there was a level of expectation for production that he seemed to fall short of which eventually led to his being traded to Colorado. Predictably, he didn’t flourish there (though he also wasn’t a nightmare, either) and was again traded, this time to Baltimore in 2012. To this point in his career, Hammel was a slightly below league average arm who lacked that reliable offering to thwart lefties consistently and he wasn’t anywhere near dominating righties as a way to make up for it. The move to Baltimore started to turn that tide.

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Most of you know that I love tracking pitches as if they were players. Jeurys Familia‘s slider just got overtaken by the one by thrown by Sergio Santos in whiff rate! David Robertson‘s knuckle curve is now number one in the game by whiffs, not Craig Kimbrel’s! With at least 20 balls in play, no pitch has a bigger grounder rate than the sinkers by Javier Lopez, with Chad Qualls, Charlie Morton, Brad Ziegler and Brad Hand rounding out the top five.

Anyway, I fired up my favorite query for you, and thought I’d point out some notable pitches.

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Prior to just a few weeks ago, Chad Bettis was an absolute after thought; he had struggled in previous chances in the bigs, even when pitching in relief, and didn’t seem to be a part of Colorado’s plans. A couple Rockies injuries and some ineffectiveness later, and Bettis has a sub-3.00 ERA in four MLB starts and a near 4/1 K/BB ratio. In order to get a better sense of what Bettis has been doing, I watched his start from last Sunday against the Giants, where he struck out seven in over eight innings of work.

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When the Dodgers signed Brett Anderson to a one-year, $10 million dollar deal this offseason there was a tinge excitement because a well thought of arm was headed to a well thought of organization and maybe we hoped Andrew Friedman and Co. could somehow keep Anderson healthy. He was also getting away from Coors Field. For what it’s worth, his groundball-heavy approach found some success with the Rockies, but obviously from the fantasy perspective, he is far more interesting in Los Angeles.

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Strikes are good. Your favorite starting pitcher throwing a higher rate of them is a wonderful sign. In fact, I like to identify high strikeout starters with control issues as breakout candidates. Control is much easier to improve upon then strikeout rate and it tends to get better with maturity. So let’s take a look at eight American League starting pitchers throwing a higher rate of overall strikes than last season. For context, the league average Str% is 64.2%

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Yes, the best in-season ERA estimator is strikeouts minus walks. You can use that tidbit to find a few sleepers in season, for sure.

But when you look at Matt Shoemaker and Phil Hughes right now, you realize there are perils when it comes to using the stat in the offseason. And really, you may start to see some of the limits of the stat even when it comes to in-season work.

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The Braves started the year with the low-upside and low-downside combination of Eric Stults and Trevor Cahill, but have now moved to two younger starters to hold up the back end of their rotation, one of which was expected and one of which is a surprise.
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The batted ball distribution metrics, for both pitchers and hitters, are some of the most stable statistics around. A pitcher’s ground ball rate stabilizes after just 70 batters faced, which is basically just three starts. So what this means is that when we see a significant change in a player’s batted ball mix, we have to take it seriously. Let’s take a look at the starting pitcher’s who have enjoyed the largest surges in their ground ball rates and see if we could uncover an explanation.

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Strikeouts are highly desirable from starting pitchers — not exactly an Earth shattering revelation. Unfortunately, everyone wants them, meaning they aren’t often readily available on the waiver wire. With that in mind, I glanced over the leaderboard for strikeout rate among qualified hurlers searching for some potential buy-low candidates. A trio of pitchers stood out to me. Clay Buchholz, Carlos Carrasco and Stephen Strasburg are all posting significantly worse ERA marks than their ERA estimators suggest they should be. Each pitcher, somewhat predictably, has an elevated BABIP, but all three also rank in the bottom 10 among qualified starters in left on base percentage. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that I loved Carlos Carrasco heading into the 2014 season. His spectacular performance over his final 10 starts last year vaulted him into the not actually a sleeper sleeper territory during this year’s draft season. By this I mean that he was hyped as a sleeper by just about everyone, but that meant that everyone who paid attention knew how awesome and legit he was and bid him up to or drafted him at fair value. But his first eight starts of this year have not gone the way we all expected. His ERA sits at a disappointing 4.98 and he has averaged just about 5.4 innings per start.

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