By simply taking the difference between a starting pitcher’s SIERA and ERA, you could quickly identify which guys are likely to be overvalued and undervalued in next year’s drafts and auctions. We do still have a couple of weeks left this season, so things can and will change. But it’s unlikely to change so dramatically so that the players discussed will finish out the year on the opposite list. So let’s talk about some of the biggest SIERA overperformers as these pitchers may be next year’s busts.

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This is a weekly series on players I have selectively watched while exercising. Usually, I will concentrate on lesser known players or rookies just getting their first call ups.

Kevin Gausman

Why I watched: A highly touted prospect.

Game Watched: 9/1/14 vs Twins

Game Thoughts

• His fastball is elite. He normally throws it around 94-95 mph, but can change speeds to launch it up to 97 mph. It sometimes has some release side run which makes it about unhittable. For a 4-seam fastball, it gets a good number of groundballs (43% on the season) mainly because he pitches low in the zone.

• Well, that is about it for good news. His other pitches, a change/splitter and slider, are horrible. He couldn’t throw either for strikes and they just don’t have good movement. His change/splitter gets a bit of swing-and-miss because everyone seems gearing up for his fastball which he throws almost all the time. He throws his fastball 72% of the time which is good for the 8th most in the league (min 80 IP).

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The Royals recently promoted 2014 draftee Brandon Finnegan to the majors to be a lefty out of the bullpen. So far the 21-year-old has thrown just a couple of relief innings. What I wanted to do is push the limits to discover what type of pitcher Mr. Finnegan may be in the future given this small sample of information. Today, I am concentrating just on his fastball.

Eno has been doing quite a bit of pitch benchmarks and I helped him out with some values. After using these values for a few months, I noticed heavy flyball pitchers like Chris Young and Danny Duffy had vertical movements, as defined be Pitchf/x, near or above 10. On the other end of the spectrum, ground ball pitchers, like Justin Masterson, had a vertical component near or below zero. By knowing the amount of downward break on fastball, I hope to get a range on their ground ball rate (GB%).

Additionally, a fastball is thrown fast with the hope to induce some swing-and-miss. So, additionally I looked to find the average swinging strike rate (SwStr%) just by knowing a pitcher’s velocity. Since velocity stabilizes quickly, just a few pitches will give us an idea of the pitcher speed and hopefully the average amount of swing-and-miss from their fastball.

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Collin McWho? That was the question I asked in early May when Collin McHugh had made just three starts. But at the time, he had allowed just six runs over those starts, while posting a sparkling 23/4 K/BB ratio in 19.1 innings. It was a small sample size to be sure, but it’s hard to fluke your way into a 30.7% strikeout rate. So we all took notice and wondered where this performance came from.

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On Monday I wrote about Chris Tillman’s success the third time through the lineup this season and how that seemed at odds with his established ability to limit hard contact. It turns out there isn’t much of a relationship between those things, so it’s likely that Tillman is due for some regression when facing batters for a third time in a game going forward. It’s likely because excellent research done by Michael Lichtman shows that a pitcher’s past deviations from the typical decline in performance each time through the lineup is not predictive of future performance. He estimates a pitcher would need about eight full seasons of significantly deviating from the average decline each time through the order before that data would become reliable in a predictive sense.

With that said, let’s look at the starters who have been the best the third time through the lineup this year. Most are regression candidates, but there are a few exceptions. Read the rest of this entry »

Blue Jays starter Marcus Stroman has arrived. OK, that’s not entirely factual. Stroman arrived as a starter in late-May, and has turned in an incredibly strong rookie season. But after Monday’s complete game shutout, Stroman has been hard to brush aside. Over 114.2 innings, the 23-year-old Stroman has a 3.53 ERA and a 2.87 FIP. Those are numbers we expect to see from a long-time veteran, not a rookie. While he still has a few more starts left, it’s worth it to look at how well Stroman compares to some of his more recent colleagues.

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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 »