Archive for Starting Pitchers

Las Vegas seems to think that 2016 might just be the year when Cubs fans finally celebrate a World Series win in the streets of Wrigleyville. Stacked with a potent lineup from top to bottom and arguably the best starting five in baseball, Theo Epstein’s deity status could extend westward some 850 miles come October. But while there’s no position battle in the rotation to speak of, injury concerns, like curses, are real something to write about.

John Lackey joins Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, Kyle Hendricks, and Jason Hammel in a formidable rotation that ZiPs projects for nearly 17 WAR. But they also enter 2016 having pitched a combined 6,674.1 career innings. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at who stands to step in should any of the Cubs’, let’s go with, seasoned starters miss some time.

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We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

Few teams got quite as much from their rotation as the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2015, and repeating that success will be paramount if they hope to win their first division title since 1992, finally avoiding the coin-flip of a Wild Card game. Last year’s rotation threw 967.1 innings, seventh in baseball, and they backed a 3.53 ERA up with a 3.34 FIP, good for the sixth-highest Wins Above Replacement among all major league rotations.

That group boasted a sky-high ground-ball rate and did well to suppress home runs as a result, and their primary subtraction was the only pitcher in the group with a fly-ball tendency. Gone is J.A. Happ and perhaps the Pirates Pixie Dust they sprinkled him with, with the lefty hoping his newfound approach can produce results in Toronto, too. A.J. Burnett is gone, too, leaving the Pirates preciously thin on starters with initialed names.

Of course, there’s still a lot to like at the top, some intriguing arms on the way, and what could wind up being one of the better relief squads in the National League.
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Two years ago, I shared with you an updated version of my xK% equation. The formula uses a trio of strike type rates found at Baseball-Reference.com, including a pitcher’s looking, swinging, and foul strike percentages, along with his overall rate of strikes thrown. With an adjusted R-squared of 0.913, it explains a very higher percentage of a pitcher’s strikeout rate. Its best use is early in the season when the plate appearance (the K% denominator) sample size is still small, as xK% uses total pitches as the denominator, so we can reach a reasonable sample size to analyze much more quickly.

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The worst kept secret in the fantasy sports industry is that the people in it are amazing. A little over a year ago, with the help of some friends (with fantasy benefits), I entered the industry with a silly little podcast, a website, and no real expectations that it would ever turn into anything more than a hobby. I was pleasantly surprised to find out how helpful and encouraging the majority of the fantasy industry is. No one ever said no to an appearance. I was given a ton of advice on what works and what doesn’t in the industry. You read what these people write and listen to what they have to say, but what you don’t realize is that they are just as cool in real life as they appear to be from the outside. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, I shared with you an updated version of my xK% equation. The formula uses a trio of strike type rates found at Baseball-Reference.com, including a pitcher’s looking, swinging, and foul strike percentages, along with his overall rate of strikes thrown. With an adjusted R-squared of 0.913, it explains a very higher percentage of a pitcher’s strikeout rate. Its best use is early in the season when the plate appearance (the K% denominator) sample size is still small, as xK% uses total pitches as the denominator, so we can reach a reasonable sample size to analyze much more quickly.

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When we looked at movement and velocity with respect to changeups, curves, sliders, and rising fastballs, we found that more movement was almost always better. It gets a little bit more complicated that than that — drop is mostly better for swinging strikes and horizontal movement was better for grounders, and the effects are not super large — but it’s a decent pole to hang on to in the storm that is projecting pitchers.

We can then easily do the query that asks: which pitches changed the most from last year to this year?

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We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

The Red Sox were supposed to be quite good in 2015. They failed for a number of reasons. Yes, the lineup underperformed, but the pitching staff was the most glaring issue. For as long as a year, it was glaringly obvious that the Sox would trade for Phillies ace Cole Hamels. They never ponied up the necessary prospects. The rotation posted a 4.39 ERA – seventh worst in the majors. The bullpen was comparably bad with a 4.24 ERA – fifth worst. In retrospect, they needed a lot more than Hamels.

Boston hopes that regression and two very big offseason acquisitions stabilize both units. We’ll see, won’t we?

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What was Wade Davis like as a starting pitcher? Boring, hittable, and barely a major leaguer. As a reliever? Possibly the top player at the position. Davis has an interesting history – he was a mediocre starter, then a good reliever, then a bad starter, and then an elite reliever. Some thought that second stint as a starter would go a lot better.

Compare that to Carlos Carrasco. He scuffled as a starter, pitched well out of the pen, then pitched just as well back in the rotation. Why did it turn out differently for Carrasco? Today we’ll examine that question and talk about the types of players who benefit from stints in the bullpen. But mostly, we’ll look at the more common trend of pitchers getting stuck in relief.

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We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

Position battles? Not so much. Like with the cross town Mets, we’ll mostly talk about depth today. The rotation in particular looks brittle, and the options beyond the sixth guy are kind of terrifying.

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Before I try to do this in a (slightly) more scientific way, let me say that you can easily create tiers via the sniff test. Take a look at the pitching pool and try to assign groups labels, like ‘ace’ and ‘front of the rotation’ and ‘mid-rotation’. It’s what we do when we are trying to talk about prospect pitchers and where they might slot in later, it should come fairly naturally, and it will help you make sense of your specific player pool. It’s a worthy exercise no matter how rigorous the background work was.

Now let’s try to apply a more reasoned approach to the matter.

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