Two things make it hard for me to justify spending precious auction dollars on starting pitching. I touched on this topic in my conclusion to yesterday’s Madison Bumgarner post, so let’s just pick up where I left off.
A 7.25 ERA in a season can do wonders for your sleeper status. Mike Fiers can attest to that. Fiers was limited to just 22.1 major league innings in 2013 after a batted ball struck and broke his arm, but that was enough time for him to allow eight home runs and 18 earned runs. It’s a pretty alarming streak, especially for a former 22nd-round draft pick who tops out just shy of 90 mph. Perhaps that’s why I can’t find Fiers in the top 250 for 2015 on ESPN or anywhere else I look.
It was a tough year for my fantasy teams and various preseason predictions. But there was at least one bright spot and it came in the form of Carlos Carrasco. I had been touting him since April of 2013 and I proved to be a year early. We have written a lot of Carrasco this season, and for good reason.
Lance Lynn did it. He held down left-handed batters a little more often in 2014. Those freaks hit .243/.325/.372 in 378 plate appearances, for a .314 wOBA (26 points better than last year’s rate, which was also an upgrade to the previous season’s), against the St. Louis Cardinals’ right-hander this year. That, my friends, is about league average for batters from the north. And that is really all this hurler needed in order for him to be good instead of fantasy-league-average, or even league-average. He overcame his fatal flaw.
As a result, Lynn was, for fantasy baseball players, a top-25 starting pitcher by the standards of Sr. Zach Sanders. Overall, the pitcher struck out men less frequently this year, but he still fanned more than 20% of those he faced, and, once again, he also walked them less often. These leaps forward helped him to post a 2.74 ERA, a 1.26 WHIP, and, yet again, 15 wins. He earned double-digit dollars in mixed leagues in a season for the first time.
It is no secret around these digital pages just how big of an Andrew Cashner fan I am. That being said, yet again his season was cut short due to injury. This year it was elbow soreness that caused him to miss three weeks in late May and early June. Just two starts after being activated, Cashner once again found himself on the disabled list, this time with inflammation in his shoulder. Given his extensive history of shoulder issues, the San Diego Padres played it safe and kept him on the shelf for over two months.
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If you’ve had the misfortune to be stricken by amnesia, allow me to remind you – Madison Bumgarner was fantastic this postseason. Per a pet statistic called ChampAdded, he was responsible for about 90 percent of the Giants’ World Series victory. In a sense, I’ve already written about Bumgarner this winter. Now is a good time to share the results from the question I asked one month ago – how much would you pay for him?
Oakland Athletics pitcher Scott Kazmir did it again. After an amazing comeback in 2013, Kazmir proved his gains were legitimate. Kazmir not only improved his ERA and FIP during the second year of his comeback, but managed to stay healthy enough to log 190.1 innings. The only time Kazmir have ever thrown more innings was back in 2007. On top of all that, Kazmir is 31, meaning he’s not necessarily a candidate for decline just yet.
We can’t just push aside Kazmir’s past, though. Injuries defined his early career, forcing him out of the game during the 2011 season. That year, he was topping out at 88 mph on his sinker, according to BrooksBaseball.net. While the comeback has been inspiring, Kazmir is still an issue with a lot of baggage. Can fantasy owners trust him moving forward?
After undergoing Tommy John surgery over the summer of 2012, Drew Hutchison returned to the mound the following year, making 15 starts in the minors. Then in 2014, he arrived to spring training supposedly throwing harder. The positive news got me excited, and intrigued me to the point that I boldly predicted he would win a rotation spot and earn positive 12-team mixed league fantasy value.
We’ve already spent some time with Tanner Roark’s breakout season and it’s mostly about that two-seamer and getting strike one if you ask him. Let’s focus on those things first.
The bad news first. First strike rate isn’t super sticky year-to-year. The correlation is .479 year-to-year, meaning that this year’s first strike rate describes 23% of the variance in next year’s first strike rate. That’s as weak as the year-to-year relationship of home runs per nine innings, or a little bit less than half as strongly correlated as strikeout rate.
Roark may have been above-average in that regard for two years, but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily going to manage the feat again next year. If you throw 70% strikes on the first pitch, maybe batters start swinging more at the first pitch and then maybe you start throwing fewer first pitch strikes. However it works, this isn’t a skill we can bank on in a 200-inning sample.
The 2014 season was a cruel one for Justin Verlander. To the fantasy baseball players who owned him for most of it and drafted, bought, kept, or traded for the formerly elite right-hander, the 2014 season felt approximately as cruel.
The pitcher surely expected more after a relatively – extra emphasis on relatively – disappointing 2013 effort that saw his walk rate jump above 8% and his average heat velocity dip below 94 mph for the first time since 2008 on his way to a 3.46 ERA and 1.31 WHIP. He and fantasy owners didn’t get it, though. The 4.54 ERA (117 ERA-, his worst mark in the category since his debut season), 1.40 WHIP, and 17.8% strikeout rate tell the tale of a mostly abysmal season, in fact.
Now what? The last time Verlander had fantasy owners this puzzled was, incidentally, after his 2008 campaign. The next year turned out to be pretty good. That hurler was 26, however, and his four-seam fastball averaged 95.6 mph. This guy will be 32, and … who knows?