As Charlie Morton embraced his two-seam fastball and turned into a severe groundball pitcher, he has become a solid, but underrated fantasy asset. In 2013-14, Morton put up a 3.52 ERA and 1.28 WHIP in 273.3 innings of work for the Pirates. He began the season on the DL recovering from hip surgery. It was his eighth trip to the DL in eight seasons, including five in the last three. Health will always be a concern with Morton, but his talent deserves attention.

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Where have Collin McHugh’s strikeouts gone? Only Shane Greene, Jesse Hahn, Alex Wood, and Phil Hughes have seen a sharper decrease in strikeout rate since last year without a change in role. We’ve covered most of those guys in one way or another over the last few weeks at The Change. Now it’s time to focus on McHugh, to see what we can learn.

McHugh is still top 30 in swinging strike rate. He’s 65th in strikeout rate. Something is amiss here.

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Yesterday, I discussed four starting pitchers due for an improved walk rate moving forward, according to my expected walk rate equation. Today, I’ll highlight another four pitchers, this time a group who is at risk of suffering from an increased walk rate over the rest of the season. These pitchers all sport xBB% marks well above their actual marks.

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I don’t discuss it as often as my xK% equation, because the R-squared is significantly lower, but my xBB% formula is still useful to calculate and analyze the results. Even for hitters, strikeout rates have always been easier to predict from an equation than walk rates. Odd. Anyway, let’s take a look at the four starting pitchers whose xBB% marks are most below their actual walk rates. This could signify improvement on the way, which would bring both ERA and WHIP down.

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Every spring training, we make a big to do about fastball velocity. We may even remember to monitor it for the first start of the season. Whose velocity is up, hinting at a breakout? Whose velocity is down, suggesting either a hidden injury or a disappointing year is on the way? Then we totally forget about it and rarely discuss it again. Velocity does rise throughout the year, but some pitchers gain more than others, obviously. Sometimes better health or a slight tweak in mechanics mid-season could increase velocity, aside from just the warmer weather that generally lifts all boats. So here are seven pitchers whose fastball velocity has jumped in May, compared to April.

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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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