With nearly two and a half months left in the season, it’s time to either protect your pitching ratios if you’re at or near the top of the categories, or aggressively speculate on arms to hopefully gain additional points by the end of the season. One way to identify names to speculate on is by reducing the innings pitched minimum and checking out the SIERA leaderboard. That way you’ll get more recently recalled names in there too and although the sample size may be smaller, the wider search at least surfaces such names to further evaluate.

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I posted a preview of this in today’s SP Chart, but even that Top 75 has since changed so please use this as the reference going forward. Please feel free to post your questions & comments below, I’ll be in there responding all weekend. These aren’t meant o be ironclad through the rest of the season, any rankings update is a 4-6 week outlook for me so I’m not yet concerned about potential workload shutdowns and things of that nature. Additionally, this ranking specifically might have more of a 1-3 week shelf life with the Trade Deadline looming so I will run another update shortly after that if there are substantive changes across the league. I say “if” just because the deadline could be a dud if too many teams think they’re in it and no one really sells, but I don’t expect that as there should be enough true sellers already identified to facilitate some real movement.

Injured guys aren’t ranked outside a couple who are close to returning if I recall correctly. You can ask about someone, but if they’re not due back in the next week or two, I won’t really have much insight as it’ll be dependent on their health & return. There may be a few 6th-starter types ranked here as opposed to making sure I got 5 guys per team in the Top 150 as we don’t really need every Rockie on the list.

Without further ado:

Zebby & Sheehan added Saturday AM (7/19)

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Welcome back to the Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence. I should also note that I’ve updated the way I’m calculating the park factors for the two new minor league stadiums that the Athletics and Rays are playing in this year; I’m taking the one-year park factors from Statcast and regressing them towards neutral, with the one-year factors increasing in weight as more games are played in those stadiums (those series are still marked in yellow below).

Note: due to the All-Star break, the Week 17 Ottoneu matchup runs for 10 days from July 18–27. If your head-to-head league has a games started cap, the number of starts doesn’t change even with the additional days. That means you’ll have a lot more starts to pick from to hit your cap — you’ll want to be extra judicious when picking your starters this week. I’ve separated this weekend’s games from next week’s into two tables below for a little more clarity.

The All-Star break is here! That means it’s time to get polling. As has become an annual tradition, I’m going to start by comparing starting pitchers’ ERA to SIERA, pitting the SIERA overperformers against the underperformers during the pre-all-star break period. This is the poll I began with back in 2013.

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Below are the latest significant playing time projection changes for starters and relievers over the past week. The biggest news is Cam Schlittler‘s call-up, with his debut coming at the unfortunate cost of Clarke Schmidt’s UCL.

Had you been rostering and starting Tanner Houck on April 14th, you likely wouldn’t have started him in his next outing on April 20th, assuming you were paying attention. On the 14th, he got blown up by the Tampa Bay Rays and exited the game early in the third inning after 11 earned runs crossed the plate. If that performance deterred you from staring him on April 20th, you were likely doubly annoyed when he turned in a decent outing against the White Sox. But look a little closer, and you will see pitches that should have been down, left up in the zone. You’ll see strikeouts on pitches that hitters who are not on the White Sox may have put over the fence. Who am I to call a good start bad? Houck got it done, but in this article, I’ll dive a little deeper to put it in context with his previous two starts in this final installment of The Three Appearance Analysis.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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On Sunday, I read the following comment on Rotoworld about Chase Burns‘ start:

His fastball was located well, but, as has been true in his first two starts, he doesn’t get tons of whiffs on the pitch. He had eight whiffs on 55 total fastballs in this one, with a whopping 16 foul balls. His fastball has below average extension and simply isn’t as elite of a pitch against big league hitters who can handle high velocity.

Sure enough, his four-seamer has generated just a 7.6% SwStk% despite the pitch averaging a scintillating 98.2 MPH. So it got me thinking about perceived velocity, which extension affects. If a pitcher is throwing 95 MPH, but the batter perceives the pitch’s velocity to actually be 97 MPH, or perhaps 93 MPH, that should matter, right? I would therefore think the gap between perceived and actual velocity would influence the pitch’s whiff rate and the pitcher’s strikeout rate. So I decided to dive in and find out if that theory is true.

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Last week, I reviewed how the top hitting prospect have performed in the Majors this year. Today, let’s flip over to the pitching prospects. This time, I’ll be using the Post-Spring Training Top 100 Prospects Update, instead of the preseason list.

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What happened!? That’s the question we ask the morning after a stinker performance by a starting pitcher when we’re looking over our fantasy results from the night before. It’s not an easy question to answer, and even when you come to a conclusion, someone else may have a completely different perspective. This article series serves as the starting point for answering that question in the context of three individual outings. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to the Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence. I should also note that I’ve updated the way I’m calculating the park factors for the two new minor league stadiums that the Athletics and Rays are playing in this year; I’m taking the one-year park factors from Statcast and regressing them towards neutral, with the one-year factors increasing in weight as more games are played in those stadiums (those series are still marked in yellow below).