Archive for Starting Pitchers

Rookie hitters are performing better this year than they ever have in the free agency era. Right now, rookie non-pitchers have a 93 weighted runs created plus, one better than in the second-best year for rookie hitters (2006). That’s also impressive because there are only four years in which rookies have managed a wRC+ over 90.

We spend so much time drooling over rookies that this might be a sobering result. The best rookie class of all time is still 7% worse than league average with the stick. You *could* use this to argue that rookies are a bad scene in redraft leagues.

Of course, that number is an overall number. If you focus on the rookies that have done well, they were almost all well-regarded, right?

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If you’re a H2H league owner, September could be a frustrating time. It’s when veterans sometimes take a seat as their out of contention teams choose to give young hitters a look and young pitchers reach their innings limits and get shut down. The worst part of it is that these may have been the players that helped you achieve the best record in your league, yet come playoff time, you can’t even count on them to contribute to your championship run. So let’s discuss some of the pitchers who are definitely or possibly on an innings limit. Whether their teams decide to skip a start here and there to keep the innings down or just shut him down with two weeks or so to go, I don’t know. But either way, an innings limit would take a bite out of the pitcher’s value the rest of the way.

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Ignoring those who reinjured themselves or were moved to the bullpen, all of the American League starting pitchers who underwent Tommy John surgery last season have now returned. Typically, I ignore these pitchers in fantasy leagues during their first year back and then analyze their results and velocity when forecasting their performance the following season. But a blanket ignore on every TJ surgery returnee might not be prudent, as evidenced by the superhuman Jose Fernandez, whose performance suggests that he hasn’t skipped a beat. So let’s take a look at our three.

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Back on June 18th, we hit the waiver wire in search of some arms and came up with six names to consider. We’re headed back to the wire again, but first let’s check in on the six pack of guys recommended last month.

A mixed bag of results with DeSclafani and Young really plummeting, Latos and Hahn (injured, unfortunately) pitching really well, Hendricks holding a great WHIP with a passable ERA and Gallardo giving a strong ERA to counter his god-awful WHIP. Of course, if there wasn’t a good bit of risk tied to these guys, they wouldn’t have been on the wire in the first place.

Let’s see if we can find some more gold or at least a bunch of cool silver. The threshold these guys have to pass through to be included is to be on rosters in fewer than 50% of ESPN and Yahoo! leagues. I don’t have a firm baseline for CBS leagues mainly because I don’t think they have a place where you can scroll through players with all the ownership rates right there, so I get my pool of potential pitchers by scouring ESPN/Yahoo! roster rates and then check the rates on CBS. If someone is north of 75% at CBS, I usually pass (although Gallardo was 77% there in June’s waiver piece), but ideally they are at 65% or lower there.

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He did once. Can he again?

Ian Kennedy has been one of the least valuable starting pitchers of 2015, a fact probably unsurprising to San Diego residents and his fantasy owners. Of all pitchers who have thrown at least 60 innings and generated negative wins above replacement (WAR), his ratio of strikeouts to walks (3.18 K/BB) and xFIP (3.83) rise to the top of an admittedly short list.

Still, his rate of strikeouts per nine innings (8.31 K/9) ranks 36th among all starters, and his walks-per-nine (2.62 BB/9) is nothing to sneeze at, either. It’s easy to see why fantasy owners hold out hope: his adequacy in preventing baserunners points to reasons why his 4.58 ERA is, perhaps, too high.

Unfortunately, Kennedy is a fly ball machine who has (almost) never enjoyed the friendly confines of a pitcher’s park. Per ESPN’s Park Factors, Kennedy’s home parks have mostly benefited hitters:

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The short answer for why we missed on Jacob deGrom on the way up was that he improved each of his pitches as he ascended through the minor leagues, often by changing the grip. He’s back to his old tricks, as only Anthony DeSclafani’s slider has gotten harder this year, and the other guys throwing the Dan Warthen-branded Mets slider are all doing pretty well with that pitch.

So let’s look at movement and velocity changes on pitches and see if we can spot the next deGrom, hopefully in time to have him on our roster before the true breakout.

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If you didn’t consider either the Aramis Ramirez or Scott Kazmir trades last week the first blockbuster of this year’s deadline deals, then you can certainly cross that event off your list now. Johnny Cueto leaves the only team he has played for and travels West to the darling Kansas City Royals. Does Cueto’s value “receive a big boost”, as one popular fantasy news site suggests?

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Let’s take a gander at the American League starting pitcher leaderboard for SwStk% over the last 30 days. Since that time span typically comprises just four to five starts, such dominance could get lost in the full season numbers. So I’ll highlight some of the more interesting names among the leaders.

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I like a lot of pitchers who have unperformed this year. With strikeout and walk rates (K%, BB%) of 20.5 percent and 7.0 percent, respectively, Drew Hutchison delivers everything I want from a mid-rotation fantasy starter. With a 5.19 ERA and a 1.47 WHIP, however, he delivers a flaming bag of feces to my doorstep.

The same can be said for Taijuan Walker who, after a terribly rough start to the season, dazzled for seven straight starts before recently tossing three stinkers. With plate discipline ratios better than Hutchison’s and just 22 years old, Walker demonstrates the skill set and ceiling that have earned him consensus top-20 honors on prospect lists from 2012 through 2014. Yet his 5.06 ERA and 1.29 WHIP have left fantasy owners not only disappointed but also reeling.

Hutchison and Walker share a common trait: their ERAs dwarf their fielding independent pitching (FIP) statistics. FIP was designed to demonstrate a pitcher’s true performance in light of the events he can control — that is, events independent of balls put into play at the mercy of the defense supporting him (among other things).

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If you sort Yahoo!’s player page descending by ownership, Justin Verlander shows up on the second page. That means, at 70-percent ownership, he ranks in the top 50. Julio Teheran shows up there, too, at 73 percent. What the two have in common: more than 1,000 other players have been more valuable than them.

Verlander deserves an ounce of clemency: his 31 innings haven’t allowed him ample time to generate value. His 6.62 ERA, sixth-worst among all pitchers who have thrown at least 30 innings, really damages his stock.

Then again, so would his 5.01 xFIP, good for ninth-worst. Or his 6.06 FIP, good for fifth-worst. He has simply done nothing to inspire confidence in anyone, yet because of name recognition alone he’s owned in far more Yahoo! leagues than the pitchers I’ll present now.

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