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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For many in my generation, when one thinks of starting pitching, the focus immediately turns to Atlanta. It’s been an overwhelming constant for the Braves, whether we’re talking Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Tim Hudson or (at least last year) Mike Minor. In fact, since The Strike, the Atlanta Braves have enjoyed the best starting pitching in Major League Baseball. Their cumulative 3.73 ERA is well-ahead of the pack, with the Los Angeles Dodgers being the only other team with a sub-4.00 ERA from their starters since the 1995 season.

Thus, it’s not surprising the Braves trotted out yet another effective rotation last year. Even without the injured Brandon Beachy, their rotation featured three top-30 fantasy starters in Mike Minor, Julio Teheran and Kris Medlen. The trio are poised to headline the rotation once again in 2014, so in terms of a fantasy outlook, there’s plenty to like.

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Last year, I was optimistic about Indians pitchers given that the team had a very speedy outfield to gobble up fly balls. But alas, the pitching staff allowed a .302 BABIP, eighth highest in baseball and the defense compiled a weak -4.5 UZR/150, ranking 26th overall. Although the defense will mostly be the same, so that won’t be one of the reasons to like the pitching staff, it’s an exciting group despite the potential lack of help from the fielding unit.

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It isn’t quite fair to say that Clay Buchholz broke out because of his change-up. In fact, Colin Zarzycki found a much more reasonable explanation and wrote about it in his FanGraphs+ player cap. Buchholz also threw the pitch less than he’d ever thrown it before, so it’s kind of weird to focus on it. But the pitch is pretty excellent, and maybe it could have told us that more swinging strikes were on the way. And if it did tell us that, perhaps we can use that knowledge to spot a couple more pitchers that under-performed in the strikeout category last year.

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If you look at the individual player pages for each of the projected Detroit starters, you’ll see that the most recent article in which three of them were tagged was written by me. I’ll summarize the guys I’ve already written about this offseason and then cover the other two.

The only Tiger starter that Steamer projects to have a higher WAR than they did last year is Rick Porcello. I’m with Steamer in thinking Porcello can improve, but unlike Steamer, I think the improvement could be more than slight. Porcello improved in a lot of areas last year. Most notably, he went away from using his sinker as much and moved those extra pitches over to his breaking and off speed stuff. That helped him raise his strikeout rate to league average, and it didn’t hurt his above average ground ball rate. In fact, his ground ball percentage was higher than ever last year. He also improved significantly in a couple of areas in which he had really struggled. He didn’t give up hard contact as much as he had in the past as his ISO allowed was one of the 30 lowest in the league. And after the first month of the year, he almost never gave up anything hard to right-handers. He also got much better out of the stretch. His strikeout minus walk rate out of the stretch was about 3.5% before last year but jumped up to 7.3% last year.

It will be up to Porcello to continue to improve in those areas or at least maintain the gains he made last year. But there’s a factor outside his control that could help him improve this year. In fact, it’s something that will work in favor of all Tiger starters. That’s the presumably improved infield defense. Although the pitcher most likely to benefit from that improved infield is Porcello because he’s easily the most ground ball heavy pitcher in the rotation. Below is a chart showing the runs above or below average (DEF) for the Tigers who played the most at each infield spot last year and the Oliver projected DEF for the Tigers most likely to play the most innings at each infield spot this year. Read the rest of this entry »