With the season winding down, let’s take a look at the National League starting pitcher tiers. September is near, and that brings the promise of prospect call-ups once rosters expand. While one or two September call-ups could make a difference down the stretch, the rookies who may decide your league have likely already been in the majors for a while now. Where do they rank among the top players at the position? Let’s find out.
It’s been about a month since the All-Star break, so our leaderboard splits can allow me to look at a pitcher over the last month and compare them to their first half numbers. Yes, arbitrary endpoints. But! Strikeout rate stabilizes in about a month, so at least it’s not the worst arbitrary endpoints ever chosen.
I took a look at the pitching mixes for qualified pitchers over the last month, and then compared those mixes to the first half. Let’s highlight the biggest movers in the major pitch types, starting with sliders today.
If you’re a returning customer to the DLWW, then you know the drill: we’re here to talk about the barnacles that crawl at the bottom of the ship’s keel, the biofouling whose consideration is merited, by and large, by the dearth of available options in the deepest of formats. Such are the circumstances that invite us to take a look at whether the following two hurlers offer any SP help in NL-only leagues.
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Yesterday, I used my updated xK% formula to identify several pitchers who potentially have some strikeout rate upside. Today I will check on with the pitchers on the other side of the list — those whose xK% marks are most below their actual strikeout rates. These are some of the more interesting names.
This week’s Change is about a missing changeup. Mike Minor’s changeup, to be specific. It’s half the pitch it used to be, and as a lefty facing many righties, that’s a big problem. Sure, the curve/cutter combo could be enough for Minor to continue being a major league starter, but as he’s in the midst of a bout of homeritis (that has plagued him on and off in his career), it’s worth asking about that changeup in the context of his current results.
Is it the change that changed how we feel about Mike Minor?
This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending SaberSeminar in Boston. This is the second consecutive year I have been able to go, and I would highly recommend that you attend in future years if at all possible.
There were many great presentations, but one in particular stood out to me because of the potential relevance to fantasy baseball. Our very own Tony Blengino gave a spectacular presentation on the best and worst pitchers in the history of baseball at contact management (aka inducing weak contact). As far as I can tell, Tony took the HITf/x data, to which us normal people don’t have access, and calculated how each pitcher performed when allowing the various batted ball types. He then combined the performance on various batted ball types and scaled to 100 like we do here with things like ERA- and wRC+. I’m positive I’m simultaneously butchering the methodology while leaving significant portions of it out. Forgive me. For a little more insight, read Blengino’s recent posts on limiting hard contact for AL pitchers and NL pitchers.
This got me all fired up to get back home and see if I could calculate something like what Tony came up with so that we could use this as a fantasy tool. I was thinking this could be a new mechanism by which we could determine a player’s ability to induce weak contact. That’s a drum that Michael Salfino has long been beating by looking at ISO allowed. Salfino has rightly pointed out that hit quality (measured by ISO allowed) is more meaningful than the hit itself (measured by BABIP). Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been a while, so it’s time to take another gander at starting pitcher xK% marks using my updated formula and compare those to actual strikeout rates. While strikeout rates do stabilize relatively quickly, there is still luck tied to sequencing that the formula attempts to strip away. These are the more interesting names that xK% suggests could enjoy a strikeout rate improvement the rest of the way.
Back in early March, we took a look at why pitchers work on new pitches and the ones that were doing so during Spring Training this year. Both Jensen Lewis and Josh Zeid offered their thoughts as pitchers that have gone through the process of adding a new pitch at the major league level. Martin Perez, Sean Doolittle and Jake Odorizzi gave quotes to writers in camp explaining why each was adding a new pitch in 2014.
Adding a new pitch does not guarantee success nor will it instantly improve the prospects of one’s career. The previous article cited examples of how new pitches aided Wade Davis, Kevin Correia and Ross Detwiler while it had a negative effect on Clay Buchholz.
Now that the season is three-quarters complete, we have enough of a sample size to ask the simple question: did the new pitches help?
As we continue to get closer to September, the real fun begins. While rosters haven’t expanded just yet, injuries and ineffectiveness have motivated teams to give their youngsters an opportunity. And that means a wealth of new names have been appearing in your free agent pool and will keep doing so. Let’s take a gander at three of those new names and decide if they are worth gambling on.
Like a pack of ragged animals picking through the trash bins of a poor neighborhood, us dumpster-divers come to these pages in search of the leftover scraps from the fantasy table. It’s coming to the end of the line in 2014, so let’s not waste any time looking at two deep-leaguers who could offer help in NL-only leagues.
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