Each spring, a handful of storylines grab fantasy owners’ attention due to the vast difference in potential value on draft day. The stories could revolve around a spring position battle or the potential of a top prospect to steal a roster spot with a big spring camp. Sometimes its a rehabbing player who isn’t certain to be ready for opening day.

Perhaps an under-reported fantasy storyline is unfolding in St. Louis, and it doesn’t involve top prospect Oscar Taveras. The Cardinals suffered a blow to their starting rotation when left-hander Jaime Garcia experienced a setback with his surgically-repaired shoulder. He’s currently seeking a second opinion from Dr. James Andrews, according to ESPN.

The story isn’t really that Garcia re-injured his shoulder. Given his unfortunate injury history, the news was not shocking. It’s the repercussions of the injury that are interesting for fantasy owners. Right-handers Joe Kelly and Carlos Martinez now find themselves locked in a battle for the fifth starter role. And for the latter, the fireballing Carlos Martinez, such a transition to the starting rotation could significantly increase his fantasy value for the 2014 season.

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Starting pitchers are the best. For whatever reason — perhaps their true talent changes more year to year, or they have less control over their results than hitters, or injury is more pervasive — pitchers are harder to project than hitters. I personally believe it’s because the power of changing your pitching mix can make you a new pitcher.

Look at Dallas Keuchel. He used to have a meh curve, he ditched it for a good slider. How relevant are his past stats now? You move a pitcher from the tougher league to the easier one, and you have to guess at how much that will matter, to some extent. Because the defense behind them will change too. In Doug Fister’s case, it always seemed like he’d get better defense at his new stop. Is that the case? Or consider the case of Jose Fernandez and the lack of major league sample size. You regress him, and he’s still great. Or Masahiro Tanaka, the complete lack of major league stats.

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Is there a more fascinating rotation in fantasy than the one sported by the New York Yankees? All five projected starters carry compelling storylines into 2014, whether they’re attempting to stave off injury or prove themselves as capable big league hurlers as the team looks to return to postseason baseball.

There’s nothing wrong with being 33 years old, but the question for fantasy owners is how quickly CC Sabathia’s advancing years are diminishing his value. There’s plenty to be down about: the lefty last season posted the lowest WAR (2.7), highest batting average against (.267), ERA (4.78) and WHIP (1.37) of his 13-year career. Optimists might look at his 3.76 xFIP and believe he was cheated a bit on the 27 home runs he allowed, and less home runs would improve his strand rate, and a better strand rate would help bring down his ERA. But what’s most alarming to fantasy owners is the drop in strikeouts; his 19.3 percent strikeout rate was his lowest since 2004, his whiff rate dropped nearly two percentage points from 2012 and his average fastball velocity declined for the third straight season.

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The Pod Projection train has left the station and is gaining momentum, as today brings another forecast for your reading pleasure. The young Cardinals right-hander Michael Wacha dazzled over nine starts and 64.2 innings in his rookie debut and then impressed on the biggest stage in the playoffs, posting a 2.64 ERA in five starts. Not surprisingly, he is quite the target of many a fantasy player, as he’s currently the 17th starting pitcher off the board in NFBC leagues, going 92nd overall. Could he possibly deliver that kind of value to his owners?

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It had been a relatively quiet offseason for the Baltimore Orioles, but they’ve recently turned up the heat by signing Ubaldo Jimenez, Nelson Cruz and right-hander Suk-min Yoon over the past week. It’s been a flurry of moves that has personnel ramifications throughout the roster. However, perhaps the most significant addition comes in the starting rotation with former All-Star hurler Jimenez.

The rotation has proven to be an  a problem for the Orioles in recent years. No team has trotted out a worse collection of starting pitchers than the O’s over the last half-decade. Their 4.87 ERA and 4.82 FIP are the highest in Major League Baseball over that time frame. They’ve accumulated the highest home-run rate, the lowest ground-ball rate (which makes sense, considering the home-run rate) and the second-lowest strikeout rate. In short, it hasn’t been pretty and Orioles fans deserve a medal of some sort for coping with such dreadful pitching.

The organization is hoping to turn it around in 2014, though. The addition of Ubaldo Jimenez, the improvement of Chris Tillman, and the maturation of Kevin Gausman are all supposed to help right the ship. Miguel Gonzalez, Wei-Yin Chen and Bud Norris all simply need to not take on water, and the rotation has a decent chance at being league-average. Considering the potent lineup that now adds Nelson Cruz to the mix, the Orioles only need their starters to be average to compete for a postseason berth.

Of course, that’s not something on which I’m comfortable betting as draft day rolls around this spring.

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I didn’t spend the time to click through each team in the Steamer projections, but I’m guessing the Red Sox are one of few teams, if not the only team, to have the five guys projected to pitch the most innings each be projected for 2+ WAR. They may not have an elite starter, but their rotation has nice depth.

Although not elite, Jon Lester isn’t a bad first option. He’s going on six straight years of 190+ IP, and he topped 200 IP in five of those six years. From 2008 to 2011 he coupled the workhorse inning totals with a sub-3.50 ERA. But the wheels came off in 2012. He lost velocity, and his ERA ballooned up to 4.82 while his strikeout rate fell to league average. Luck also played a part in the down year as his HR/FB rate was about four points higher than his career average, which contributed to a career low strand rate that was about seven points below his career average.

Not that we should have seen such a blow up coming, but the signs were there in 2011 that Lester was in decline. His strikeout rate had hovered just above 26% in the two years prior to 2011, but it fell to 22.8% that year. That contributed to the highest ERA (3.47) of that four year stretch and the first time in three years that his SIERA was above 3.50. At that point it was probably safe to assume that a slow decline had begun. Given that Lester’s ERA finished at 3.75 last year, maybe we should have expected to land in the 3.60 range in 2012 if all else had been equal. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals starting rotation was already pretty good last year and they may be even better this season. The top four features one of the best young (and overall) pitchers in the game and a trio of strong veterans. It’s that last slot that will provide all the drama during spring training. And given the contenders, it’s one worth watching, even for shallow mixed leaguers.

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Despite dropping 100 games in 2013, the Miami Marlins managed to unveil one of fantasy’s hottest young starters, though the rotation behind him offers no other obvious must-draft guys. Still, there’s some talent in this group, and as fantasy owners, we’d be remiss not to do our due diligence in examining the guys slated — or possibly slated — to take the ball every fifth day in Miami.

The ballpark

Welcome to Marlins Park, a third-year stadium memorably described by Orel Hershiser as a place that looks “like a cruise ship had a baby with a spaceship.” Whatever its architectural trappings, however, this is a place that favors pitchers — StatCorner finds it depresses home runs significantly for both left- and right-handed hitters, and ESPN’s Park Factors ranked it middle of the pack in regards to runs scored.

The defense

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I’m always talking about how good a pitch’s peripherals are, on our podcast, or on the radio, or on twitter, so I thought I’d help you get a sense of makes a good off-speed pitch, when it comes to whiff percentages. Since some of the listings in different places are whiff per swing (more here), and yet our site uses swinging strike rate (swSTR%), I thought I’d make the benchmarks in swinging strikes. You can see the whiff benchmarks in this oft-linked post here. You’ll also get ground-ball rates there, which is an important pitch peripheral that I won’t talk about much today.

So what makes a good pitch, swinging strike wise?
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There’s no sense beating around the bush here: the 2014 White Sox don’t look like they’ll be very good. In fact, they figure to be downright unwatchable most of the time. That is, except for roughly 30 games.

The ones Chris Sale starts, specifically.

Chicago finished last season with the second worst record in the American League, ahead of only the lowly Astros. The team’s record (63-99) was barely worse than its Pythagorean record (67-95). It has also recently concluded an offseason in which its big acquisitions were Jose Abreu (a slugging Cuban import who may or may not be awesome) and Adam Eaton (a solid outfield prospect who has played exactly 88 games in the major leagues, for which he has accrued exactly 0.2 wins above replacement).

So, yeah, Chris Sale. Let’s start with him as we consider expectations for the White Sox rotation in 2014.

*I swear this will be the only terrible Sale-related pun in this post. Honest.

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