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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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 »