The second “half” is almost underway, as we still have nearly two and a half months of more baseball to look forward to. It might be hard to believe, but if you’re still within 20 points of a money spot, you probably still have a shot. Here are four American League starting pitchers who should improve their ERAs during the second half and therefore might good acquisition targets.
There was a two or three week stretch in the offseason where the Rotographs crew split up as many starting pitchers as we could cover and gave them some individual attention. Today I want to revisit one of the guys I covered, Jordan Zimmermann.
In my offseason post on Zimm, I noted how consistent his numbers had been from 2011-2013 aside from his win total. His ERA, WHIP and strikeout rate had essentially been stagnant, but a spike in win total last year to 19 helped him have the best fantasy year of his career. The problem was that he’d be hard pressed to repeat that win total, and, sure enough, he only has six wins at the break.
The 19 wins pushed him into to the top ten starting pitchers according to ESPN’s player rater last year, but he had been more of a top 25 guy prior to that point. To be a top ten guy again, or really even to crack the top 20 again, Zimm was going to have to find a way to offset a lower win total. My theory was that he needed to throw his changeup more. As I detailed in the original post, Zimm has the high fastball velocity and changeup movement to make his changeup one of the rare changes that can generate grounders and whiffs at a good rate. If he’d throw it more than 5% of the time, maybe he could increase his strikeout production while maintaining his excellent rate stats. So has he? Read the rest of this entry »
Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs should be in the middle of a breakout season. At least, that’s what his peripherals seem to suggest. Through 96 innings, Skaggs has posted a less-than-stellar 4.50 ERA. His 3.55 FIP, however, suggests that he should have been much better over the first half of the year. The main reason for the difference between the two stats appears to be Skaggs’ ability to pitch with men on base. Skaggs will have to figure out how to keep runners from rounding the bases if he wants to post a second half breakout.
In need of another catcher? Rummaging through the discount bin in the hopes of finding an undervalued arm? That’s funny — we’re looking at the same things this week in another edition of the deep league waiver wire.
Read the rest of this entry »
Last year, I polled you wonderful readers asking which group of pitchers you expected to perform better during the post-All Star Break period. The two groups were composed of the pitchers whose ERAs were most disparate from their respective SIERA marks. While a one year sample wasn’t going to prove anything, I was curious what you all thought and what would actually happen. Do I put too much faith in SIERA? If the SIERA beaters from the first half still significantly outperformed the underperformers, then perhaps I either have to rethink the way I evaluate pitchers or those specific pitchers were doing something not being captured by the metric.
I asked twitter what I should write about, and the requests were too many to get to. So I thought I’d get to as many as I could, and the only grouping I could find was starting pitching. So let’s take a look at these guys without spending three thousand words on them! I’ll try to be succinct.
(Okay, I lied, I picked the pitchers because I love pitchers.)
After talking a bit with Eno Sarris about his pitch type benchmarks, we decided to change up the process a bit. Instead of taking the full average of all of the pitches thrown in a category, we limited the pool to only pitchers who had thrown 20 innings from 2011 to 2013. And we limited the number of pitches we counted to ones that had been thrown 50 times. Hopefully this takes out gimmick pitches and small sample anomalies, for the most part. We’re focusing now on regularly-thrown pitches from somewhat-established pitchers.
We also decided to take the median value within each pitch type. This is a better representation of what’s out there — the old way could have allowed the very excellent pitches to pull the benchmarks north of what could actually be considered an average pitch. We also decided to show you where the 40% benchmark was — the ‘good’ but not ‘above average’ pitches. There are a lot of pitches thrown here that are neither ‘show-me’ pitches nor are they ‘strong’ — think ‘useful.’
Eno will take a look at Matt Cain to bring this all into focus after the new table of benchmarks.
As a rather big fan of Carlos Martinez, it was disappointing to see him relegated to bullpen duty to start the season. Fortunately, that created a bit of leeway to get him on the cheap once he became a starter. I grabbed him right when the Cardinals opted to go with him over Tim Cooney, who I also own in dynasty and think will be a good starter if he gets his triple-A homer issues under control, and I have enjoyed a solid couple of weeks out of Martinez.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been looking for an excuse to write about Mike Foltynewicz for awhile now, seeing as he’s an absolute flamethrower and everybody likes a prospect who can light up the radar gun. Unfortunately, that excuse has yet to surface, as Foltynewicz is having one of those seasons that is neither good nor bad enough to warrant a full-length write-up.
On the other hand, I didn’t come into the season with any plans to write about Foltynewicz’s Triple-A teammate Nick Tropeano. After occupying the No. 10 spot on Houston’s Top 15 Prospects list last year, Tropeano failed to make this year’s list. I suspect this has little to do with Tropeano’s own development and more to do with the addition of guys like Mark Appel and Josh Hader to the system, along with Vincent Velasquez’s return from Tommy John surgery, etc.
The Cubs have new pitchers, yes, but do we care? They opted for the better prospect bat as they traded away their two best pitchers, and it doesn’t even look like the best arm they got back — Dan Straily — is going to be promoted to the big leagues right away. So what’s going on in the Cubbie rotation, and should mixed leaguers care?