On the surface, Brandon McCarthy wasn’t much of anything last season. His 10 wins, 175 strikeouts, 4.05 ERA, and 1.28 WHIP over 200 innings marked him as a fantasy replacement level pitcher. Which, in a sense, was fine. Nobody was spending money on him headed into the season. He performed exactly as expected, right? Not so much.
Only seven starters had changeups with better whiff rates than Chase Anderson in 2014. That’s enough to put him on my radar in the coming year. But how excited we should actually be about him depends on more than just that one fact.
As our own Brad Johnson stated today, one of the reasons pitchers are difficult to evaluate in their inconsistencies. One of the biggest reasons for the inconsistencies is pitcher health. While a few hitters can lose an entire season because of injury, it is just a fraction compared to pitchers who have to sit out. To help understand each pitcher’s injury risk, I will release my 2015 starting pitcher rankings.
I have been releasing the values for a few seasons with accurate results. Last season, I estimated 50 of the 128 pitchers who threw 120 innings in 2013 would end up on the DL. I was a little low since 53 starters made a least one trip. It work out to 41% or 2 out of every 5 starters. The percentage always seems to hover around 40%.
This might be something fantasy baseball players accept. Jon Lester posted a 2.46 ERA, a 1.10 WHIP, and 220 strikeouts in 2014. He finished as the sixth-best starting pitcher, per Zach Sanders’ end-of-season rankings at the position.
But maybe some rotisserie and head-to-head managers don’t. After all, Lester was the preseason consensus No. 44 SP at RotoGraphs. He outdid his FIP, xFIP, and SIERA by more than half of a run. This past season was awesome. Its awesomeness is distinctly different from the results in his past couple of seasons. He hadn’t been about this awesome since 2009 and 2010 – coupling 220-plus strikeouts with an ERA that was at least 25% better than league average. His numbers have never looked as good as they did this year. His average velocities dropped a tad this past season. There’s room for doubt.
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?