Archive for Starting Pitchers

Last week, Eno Sarris posted what he called a starting pitching omnibus. He chronicled some thoughts on a handful of pitchers with more volatile stocks in the early goings. It covered a couple of the pitchers I’ll discuss today, sort of by coincidence, sort of by not-coincidence because Eno has hyped these guys since who knows when.

The reason why it is, indeed, sort of by coincidence is because two of the pitchers to follow twirled serious gems last week. And, amazingly, the trio of them all pitch in the same seemingly desolate, perceived-to-be-hopeless part of town. And by “part of town,” I mean Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia.

Vincent Velasquez, Aaron Nola and Jerad Eickhoff comprise three-fifths of a pitching staff that leads the MLB in WAR, with 2.7. Sure, there was some sleeper hype in the rotation (that happens to be fronted, in name only, by Jeremy Hellickson, by the way), but to expect it to lead all of baseball in anything at any time would have been asking a lot. Yet, here we are, watching the Phillies’ dividends on rebuilding occur in real time. It warrants a dig deeper.

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It has only been three starts, but already after starts one and two, my FanGraphs colleagues have sounded the alarm bells on Felix Hernandez. Now it’s my turn to speculate after outing number three. I greatly dislike speculating and do my best to avoid temptation. But when the signs are there, it’s difficult to ignore them.

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We’re not even two full weeks into the 2016 season. I’d give the typical blanket small sample sizes warning, but instead I’d advise reading Mike Podhorzer’s piece from earlier in the week. I agree with the premise of doing nothing, but Mike discusses exceptions (injuries) and readers also brought up exceptions and reasons for making early-season moves in the comments. I routinely draft one to two players who are disabled-list eligible in my leagues so that that I can speculate on players who flash something intriguing in the season’s first few weeks. Chris Tillman is just the type of player I’m talking about. I’m writing this article in advance of his third start of the season Thursday night, so the PITCHf/x data and numbers are from his first two starts. As you’ve probably guessed, the PITCHf/x data is enticing.  Read the rest of this entry »

Intro

Towards the end of last season, FanGraphs partnered up with SaberSim, a site that provides daily baseball (and hockey) projections fueled by a game simulator. While the raw projections available on FanGraphs and the SaberSim site itself are helpful in their own right, digging into some of the player and game projections, both for the current day and next, can help illuminate players to target for your season-long and DFS lineups.

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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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