If you use large samples and go looking for pitchers with many different plus pitches by whiff type that aren’t yet fully appreciated by the masses, you’ll get guys that we’ve been talking about all year here: Carlos Carrasco, Garrett Richards, Homer Bailey, Jake Arrieta, and Marcus Stroman, to name a few.

But if you relax the samples a bit — in this case down to thirty pitches thrown per category — you get some names that might be interesting to dynasty leaguers looking to the future, or deep leaguers looking for a sneaky late-season play. Or even mixed leaguers looking for names to stash for next year.

So here are a few interesting pitchers that have at three non-fastball pitches that qualify as ‘good’ by the benchmarks set by Jeff Zimmerman and I.

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The other day, while looking for starting pitchers to stream in one of my leagues, I stumbled across Michael Wacha on the waiver wire. (This league only has one DL slot, so players who miss considerable time are often dropped.) I was pretty pumped about this and picked him up immediately.

I told my co-owner Seth, and he was significantly less excited than I was. “He’s not going to pitch enough to matter,” he said. Wacha’s rehab assignment after missing nearly three full months was limited to just one 34-pitch start in Double-A, and he tossed just 50 pitches in his return to the major-league rotation. With so little time left in the season, I figured we should probably look into whether Seth was right. Would that roster spot have more value if we continued to use it for streaming?

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Derek Holland is back. Two starts in, things look pretty good. He still owns a 4.30 career ERA, and is coming off of major knee surgery. Is there anything in his profile that should make us worry?

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Usually all topics for posts come to me while in that hazy state between sleep and not sleep. On many an occasion an idea has snapped me out of that haze and sent me reaching for my phone in order to email the idea to myself so it can be remembered in the morning. But with football season in full swing, most ideas from the haze involve an oddly shaped brown ball right now. With my inbox devoid of any baseball ideas, it was time to scour random groupings of stats hoping something would stick out.

The first hopeful source of inspiration was my recently updated “contact management” list where each pitcher’s OPS allowed on only batted balls is calculated relative to league average (sOPS+). After sorting the list to display the starters with the most plate appearances against in an effort to make sample size less significant, Chris Tillman was the first pitcher who has allowed a lot of balls in play to have an sOPS+ on batted balls that was quite a bit away from average. With 100 being league average, Tillman’s sOPS+ on batted balls is 77. That makes him a top 15 starter in that category among qualified starters. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a couple of pitchers this week. Between an extended Labor Day weekend and a computer crash, I could only view two guys.

Kyle Hendricks

Why I watched: A rookie with a 1.91 ERA who doesn’t throw over 90 mph

Game Watched: 8/29 vs Cardinals

Game Thoughts
• Man he throws slow. He has one huge set of balls to keep throwing his fastball in their, which he does with confidence. His sinker was 86-87 in the game I watched. He just isn’t going to strikeout many batters as seen by his 15% K%.

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With the minor league regular season now over, this marks the end of this series but you can read the previous pieces here: the Impact Catchers, the Impact First Basemen, the Impact Second Basemen, the Impact Third Basemen, the Impact Shortstops, the Impact Corner Outfielders, the Impact Center-fielders, the Impact RH Starting Pitchers (Tier 1) and the Impact RH Starting Pitchers (Tier 2). Keep an eye out next week as my annual “A Minor Review of…” series gets under way and reviews the 2014 season for all 30 clubs. Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (do we have any rock-dwelling readers?), then you should be well aware that I have an infatuation with Carlos Carrasco. It actually began last year, when I commanded you dear readers not to sleep on him in April, recommended him to deep leaguers over the summer, and then despite finishing the year with a gruesome 6.75 ERA, continued the love fest heading into this season.

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A quick look at the player page of James Shields might lead you to believe that he has returned his draft day value for his fantasy owners. His ERA is only a tick higher than it was last year, his WHIP is exactly the same, and his K-BB% is virtually the same. But he’s only been the 39th best starting pitcher according to ESPN’s player rater despite being the 17th pitcher taken on average back in March. To be fair, there is value in a pitcher not being a bust. Shields owners are surely happier with what they’ve gotten out of him than are the owners of pitchers that he was sandwiched between in final ADP, Homer Bailey and Matt Cain. But because it might appear that Shields has been as good as people expected him to be and because he’s been good for four years now, his ADP is likely to be near the top 20 among starters again next year. And it would be a mistake to pay that price. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a few exciting names up today. You’ve got your Maikel Franco in Philly, your Joc Pederson in Los Angeles and your Daniel Norris in Toronto. They’ve been called up to the bigs! But, due to innings limits on young arms, and roster crunches on teams now as much as 50% larger, it’s fair to ask. Will any of these youngsters play regularly?

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If you took a risk on Scott Kazmir on draft day, he has without a doubt surpassed every expectation you could have had for him this season. His rebound season last year was nice, but was not exactly too useful from a fantasy perspective. The peripherals suggested he should improve this year and he has certainly lived up to the pre-draft hype that some industry experts had for him.
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