Rubby de la Rosa twirled a gem Monday night.* It was a night of several unlucky fantasy pitching performances: Corey Kluber, Chris Sale, Matt Harvey and John Lackey together struck out 34 batters and allowed only three runs in a combined 32 innings pitched, and the Twitterverse made sure everyone knew.

Yet there was de la Rosa, plugging away against the Marlins (and against Dan Haren, who admirably tossed eight innings of two-run ball in defense), needing only 94 pitches to get through a full nine innings of play. Rubby, too, settled for a no-decision, his due to a poorly timed two-run homer allowed to J.T. Realmuto in the 7th inning.

I was reluctant to invest in Rubby at first, remembering his wholly disappointing 2014 season. (In his defense, he was never really a touted, let alone highly touted, prospect, even within the Dodgers and Red Sox systems, so the term “disappointment” is used loosely here.) However, I have bought several shares of Rubby in the past couple of weeks due in large part to a smattering of injuries but also a series of respectable performances by de la Rosa.

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Our deep league trek this week takes us to two hurlers who have found their way into their respective teams’ rotations and stand to pick up wins for their fantasy owners. As a reminder, the recommendations in this column are mostly for mono leagues, and I use CBS for the ownership percentages.
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I have essentially stripped the terms “buy low” and “sell high” from my vocabulary, so I now prefer to call the former buy low guys acquisition targets. One would think that offering for a player off to a slow start would have to come at some sort of discount, even if a minor one. And since slow starts are usually just that and have little predictive value for the rest of the season, getting anyone at a discount to his pre-season value should yield a nice profit.

As usual, the easiest way to identify your targets is to calculate the difference between a pitcher’s ERA and SIERA and then sort. Those pitchers with SIERA marks most below their ERAs are typically your targets, though that’s not automatically the case. Often times a pitcher could be carrying an ERA over 7.00, but still sporting a 4.50 SIERA. Sure, he’s been unlucky, but he also hasn’t been very good either! So you still don’t want him on your team.

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Sometimes it is hard to remember that Tim Lincecum used to be one of baseball’s best pitchers. The back-to-back Cy Young Award winner in 2008 and 2009 enjoyed two more excellent seasons immediately after with Cy Young finishes in both, but fell off a cliff at age-28 and has remained in the canyon with Wile E. Coyote ever since with a 4.76 ERA in 539.3 innings over the last three seasons.

The early returns have been Vintage Lincecum from a results standpoint (2.00 ERA, 1.19 WHIP), but is there change we can believe in or is this just a solid run for him? After all even in the midst of a 4.74 ERA in 155.7 innings last year, he still had a random six-start run of 1.49 ERA in the early-summer. Of course it did feature his no-hitter and another outing against the offensively-challenged Padres (15.3 IP of 3-hit, 1-run ball in those two outings alone).

Are we seeing something different or is this something that would barely hit our radar if it came in mid-June as his run did last year? Let’s see what we’re dealing with here.

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So here’s this starting pitcher who arrived in the Major Leagues in 2013 at age 23, made 10 starts, 7 of them Quality Starts, and posted the best ERA of any rookie starter in the American League. Yet he got not a single Rookie of the Year vote, and was paid no pre-season attention by the Fantasy experts in 2014—he wasn’t even taken in the 15-team, 29-round Tout Wars mixed draft. And the experts were right: he started the 2014 season 0-6 before being sent to the minors. Of course, he got no support from his hitters (12 runs in 7 starts).

But he did in fact pitch pretty badly: he’s fortunate his record wasn’t minus 1-6. But then the guy gets it together in Triple-A, comes back up for good in July, and makes 15 starts, 10 of them QS. Nonetheless, he was again almost universally ignored in drafts this year. Maybe that’s because he had a terrible spring training, though that may have been due to the injury that has kept him on the disabled list for the first month-plus of the season. But he’s finally healthy, and has made two minor-league rehab starts. Unfortunately, the first one was dismal. Fortunately, the second one was superb. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year Shelby Miller had a sophomore slump that saw him be worth 0.5 WAR over the course of 31 starts, a very poor number for such a highly regarded prospect coming off of an impressive rookie campaign. Miller was able to net a more respectable ERA than his WAR would suggest, for the second year running, but his strikeouts were down and walks were up, which we all know and understand to be a very dangerous and ominous combination.
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I’m enamored with Jimmy Nelson. I’ll get that out of the way immediately. Fair or unfair — and rational or irrational for that matter — I am a sucker for big pitchers, and Nelson fits the bill at 6-6 and 245 pounds. He’s built like a workhorse and has avoided any significant injuries. That said, he’s yet to eclipse the 200-innings mark. After pitching 180.1 innings across Triple-A and the majors last year, he’s in a position to make 2015 his first season of reaching or exceeding 200 innings. As you’ve probably guessed as a result of sharing my infatuation with Nelson, I expect them to be very good innings. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re a month in and it’s time to update the NL SP tiers. A month can and definitely has changed things, but we need to be careful not to overreact to what we’ve seen so far, for better or worse. It’s a fine balance, though. We don’t want to overreact, but if we stay married to all of our preseason notions too long, we could miss the boat on guys, again for better or worse.

For May, I’ve got 10 tiers covering 70 names. I realize that there are 75 guys currently in rotations, but 10 of them just didn’t make the cut. Meanwhile, five injured arms not currently in rotations did merit a spot, thus the 70 count. I don’t yet have a fun theme for naming the tiers, but if the tiers are named by the time you read this, it means I came up with something and didn’t edit out this sentence.

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The other night was just another typical evening for Clay Buchholz. Five earned runs, including four early, caused frustrated fantasy owners to see 7.11 ERA, 1.74 WHIP in the box score. A quick Twitter search for Buchholz shows the bandwagon (if there was one) has emptied fast. Mass media is feeding the frenzy, especially with the Red Sox performing so poorly over the first few weeks of the season. Buchholz continues to say things about not getting breaks, such as “…ground balls when you want to get them hit at guys for double plays. It seems like the ball is finding a lot more holes right now.” But is he lying?

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It’s no secret that CC Sabathia has struggled mightily since 2013. It’s also no secret that his troubles have coincided with a swift decline in fastball velocity. Check out his velocity trend since 2011:

Last season he lost over two miles per hour off his fastball to a mark that dipped below the important 90 mph threshold. And yet despite the obvious signs of decline, I remained stubbornly optimistic, thanks to a still respectable SIERA. I (foolishly?) boldly predicted that Sabathia “reminds us of his glory days and earns top 40 starting pitcher value” this year.

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