Remember that old fantasy baseball format that required you to choose a starting pitching staff rather than individual players? If that is still being played today, then give me the Mariners rotation. Intriguing arms abound in the Northwest with a nice mix of elite level veterans and exciting young hurlers.
In terms of evaluating starting pitchers for the fantasy baseball season, owners have patiently waited for Masahiro Tanaka to sign with a major-league team. Ballpark and competition matter when evaluating players, so now that Tanaka inked a seven-year, $155 million deal with the New York Yankees, we can proceed to the more important stage of determining probable performance and probable value.
Of course, the most obvious obstacle hindering most fantasy analysis regarding Tanaka is the switch from the Nippon Professional Baseball league to the major leagues. The right-hander twirled a sparkling 1.27 ERA in his final season in Japan, but it’s unclear how that will translate to the American League. Furthermore, how do we know where to draft him and what kind of peripheral statistics can we expect? He’s bound to get glossed up by the hype machine in the coming months, especially since he will be wearing pinstripes, but fantasy owners realize they must trim away the fat to get at some core truth.
I’m not going to pretend I can project Tanaka’s overall performance in 2014. No matter what, he’ll remain kind of an enigma heading into the season. However, I do feel we can glean some important relational information by comparing him to how owners treated Yu Darvish when he stormed the league a couple seasons ago.
They’re baaaaaack! What better way to open Pod Projections season than with the pitcher the Yankees just made a very rich man, Masahiro Tanaka. This is the third season I have been publishing my projections and once again, my methods have improved and incorporate more data than ever before. Of course, since my process is completely manual, that just means it takes even longer to project each individual player.
Before sympathizing with me for being tasked with discussing the Rockies rotation, understand that I actually chose this motley group to analyze. What can I say, I like a challenge. Although we typically have blindly avoided Rockies starting pitchers in the past, their rotation actually included a trio of starters who threw over 100 innings and posted an ERA below 3.50. Somewhat hilariously though, the remaining collection of hurlers that took the mound all posted ERAs of over 5.00. Now that’s more like it!
It’s no secret that Petco Park is a pitcher’s park. But for the sake of putting a face with a name, or rather some numbers with a narrative, I’ll point out that according to our basic park factors Petco was tied for the second most pitcher-friendly park last year. And prior to last year Petco had the lowest basic park factor in the league for nine straight seasons after opening in 2004.
Last summer, Bradley Woodrum discussed the changes made to Petco prior to the 2013 season and how they are affecting offense in the park. Offense is on the rise to some degree and that’s consistent with Petco not being the most pitcher-friendly park in the league last year for the first time in its existence. But it’s hard to say exactly how much the dimensions are bolstering offensive production. What we can say with some certainty is that even though it may not be the most pitcher-friendly park, it’s still safely pitcher-friendly.
Because of the nature of the park, pitchers for the Padres are always interesting to fantasy owners. So who is in line to potentially get the Petco bump this year? Below is a chart showing the five San Diego starters projected to throw the most innings along with their Steamer projections. Read the rest of this entry »
Based strictly on run prevention, the Giants starting rotation had consistently been one of the best staffs in baseball. Until 2013. Rather than once again rank in the top 10 in ERA, the collective group of starters posted a mark that ranked just 24th. Their disappointing performance could be illustrated by this sexy graph:
Writer’s Note: Feldman ranked 56th on Zach Sanders’ starting pitching rankings.
Hello friends, just thought I’d chime in with a few notes before the weekend on Scott Feldman as he moves back into the division in which he cut his teeth as a Texas Ranger.
There are a number of things to like — not love, but genuinely have an affinity for, I’d say — about Feldman’s approach. In Feldman’s early years as a reliever, he was more of a low-strikeout, groundball type of specialist. In light of what we’ve seen in recent years with relievers, a bit of an odd trend, actually.
But in recent years, he’s forsaken those groundballs for strikeouts — never a bad tradeoff — while still maintaining a grounder rate healthily above league average. In essence, he’s not far off league average in either respect (slightly above in GB rate, a little below on the whiffs). Read the rest of this entry »
It’s surprising Chris Tillman hasn’t developed into a superstar since he was part of Bill Bavasi’s talent dump to the Baltimore Orioles back in 2008 for one Erik Bedard. But after he posted a tidy little 2.93 ERA and 1.03 WHIP in limited action in 2012, he started to grace some sleeper pick lists headed into 2013.
Jarred Cosart is coming off a funky debut, one that is going to convince more than one less-than-savvy owner to proclaim him a sleeper. The number that counts is 1.95. That was his ERA. 94.5 is another positive number associated with him. That was his average fastball velocity. Unfortunately, the rest of the data set is oozing the disgusting goop of an ugly regression ahead.
Right before spring training starts is the time to begin finding players on the fringe. The great to average players have been well documented. Their value is visible in early drafts. To find some fringe pitchers, I looked for ones with an above average fastball, change and breaking ball. The list contains mainly the game’s best pitchers. Instead, I am going to focus on the talent pool’s shallow end and examine Tom Gorzelanny.
First, I will step through how I found a possible sleeper in a 31-year-old left handed middle reliever. I was looking for pitchers who threw three above average pitches and had a chance to start. Using PITCHf/x data, I collected the pitchers who had any above average fastball (two-finger, four-finger, splitter, cutter or sinker), one above average breaking ball (slider or curveball) and a changeup. Additionally, I wanted to make sure the pitcher threw the pitch on a normal basis. Fastballs had to be thrown over 20% of the time and for breaking balls and curveballs it was 10%. Additionally, the pitcher had to have made at least one start (team willing to start him) and had throw at least 30 innings (a bit of MLB experience). Here are the pitchers who met the requirements in 2012 (28 total) and 2013 (16 total).
