Finally, we have transitioned from the hitters to my favorite group of players, the starting pitchers. This is where the most disparity in opinion comes and so it will be fun to take a look back at how my starting pitcher Pod’s Picks performed.
The 2013 fantasy baseball season has come to a close, so it is time to look back at the season past and determine which players were the most valuable at each position. This week focuses on starting pitchers.
The players were ranked based on their 2013 production, using the evaluation system explained and updated on this site some time ago. To keep things manageable and avoid skewing the numbers, players were only considered if they amassed 140 innings over the course of the year to be factored into the baseline stats, but pitchers with 100 innings or more are shown below.. The replacement level was also adjusted to account for players eligible at multiples positions. The valuations are built for $260 budgets and traditional 5×5 roto fantasy leagues, where only one catcher is started.
One important thing to note is the premium (or lack thereof) placed on the position a player occupies in your lineup. For example, while a first baseman may be able to accumulate superior overall numbers, the availability of such production lower in the rankings severely dampers the amount the player was worth.
These rankings are meant to reflect a player’s value should he have occupied this spot in your lineup for the entire year. So, a player who missed time due to injury but put up great numbers during his time on the field would be worth less.
With all this in mind, here are your rankings. Read the rest of this entry »
It seems like every time I bring up how excited I am about Jonathan Gray as a fantasy prospect, the first thing I hear in response is some variation of, “Yeah, but what about Coors Field?” It’s a fair question, to be certain. While the Coors Field effect has been lessened since the installation of the humidor, it is still a very hitter-friendly park. Part of the explanation for this is that the thin air in Denver decreases the spin on breaking balls, thus making them easier to square up as a hitter.
But let’s back up a bit and talk about Jonathan Gray first, shall we? I live in Oklahoma, and was lucky enough to see the No. 3-overall pick pitch more times than I could count when he was in college at the University of Oklahoma. First and foremost, Gray has one of the absolute best fastballs in the minors right now. He has huge velocity, sitting comfortably in the 95-97 mph range and dialing up triple-digits when he reaches back for a little more. The pitch has explosive late arm-side movement as well, making it incredibly difficult to barrel up for right-handed hitters. I have seen him crank it up all the way to 101 mph, and it isn’t unusual at all to see him unleash one in the upper-90s in the 9th inning. When scouts talk about an 80-grade pitch, this is what they’re talking about.
Last week, I talked about the youngest regular position player in the Appalachian League: Mets shortstop Amed Rosario, who was named the circuit’s top prospect by Baseball America after the season. Sticking with the youth theme in the Appy, this week I’m going to focus on the league’s youngest regular starting pitcher, 18-year-old Rays righthander German Marquez. Marquez did not appear on BA’s top 20 postseason Appy prospects, but with solid performance (3.50 FIP), a nice arsenal, and plenty of time and room to develop further, I’d argue he deserves to be placed squarely among the circuit’s most intriguing players, and is definitely a player to watch.
Down in Arizona to get one last fix of baseball before the lean winter months, I had the distinct pleasure of getting to watch Alex Meyer pitch three innings of shutout ball against the AFL East All-Star lineup — while sitting behind two excellent young fellows from Trackman baseball. There’s very little PITCHf/x in the minor leagues, and usually competitor Trackman’s data is proprietary and under lock and key. But in Arizona, the company enjoys its best chance to openly market their radar-based approach to pitch tracking, and the numbers their system provided were an interesting guide to a dominant outing by the Twins’ best pitching prospect.
James Paxton, Enny Romero, Danny Duffy, Derek Holland, David Price, Chris Sale, Brad Hand, Martin Perez, Francisco Liriano, Jon Lester, Clayton Kershaw, Gio Gonzalez, Scott Kazmir, Matt Moore, Ross Detwiler, Patrick Corbin, Kris Johnson, Hector Santiago, Tony Cingrani, and Cole Hamels. A distinguished group of twenty, is it not?
The above list constitutes all lefthanded MLB starting pitchers who averaged 91.5 mph or more on their fastballs in 2013. As you can see, it consists largely of two groups: good, established MLB starters and unproven but exciting young guys who only got a few starts in the majors during the past season. Almost none of these guys have neither exciting presents nor exciting futures, and thus, anyone who projects to join this relatively selective club merits a closer look. One such pitcher is Pirates southpaw prospect Joely Rodriguez.
A large swath of the sabermetric community had been waiting a severe decline for Matt Cain. He was someone who annually outpitched his peripheral numbers and frustrated some with his success. After all, a guy can’t sustain a .260 BABIP over the course of multiple seasons, and he certainly can’t continue to compile below-average home run rates with such a penchant for allowing fly balls, even if we’re talking about the cavernous AT&T Park.
With a 4.00 ERA in 184.1 innings this season, it appeared the “good luck” had finally expired. His fantasy value experienced a massive decline, going from the 5th-ranked starting pitcher in ESPN leagues (and according to our own Zach Sanders) last year to the 64th-ranked starter in 2013. Even the folks who expected a dropoff probably didn’t expect anything so dramatic. Last winter, anyone who posited that Jose Quintana, Tony Cingrani and Luke Hochevar would be more valuable pitchers at the end of the season would’ve been laughed out of the room.
But here we are. Quintana (56), Cingrani (60) and Hochevar (53) provided more fantasy value than Matt Cain, who was on average drafted amongst the top-ten pitchers in the spring. That’s obviously a season-killer for owners, and it’s a given that his value heading into the 2014 season will be severely depressed.
Should that be a signal to buy low and expect a bounce-back season in 2014, or should his 2013 campaign be viewed as the inevitable dropoff that many have expected for the past half-decade?
Every year, there are always several prospects who emerge from obscurity to post majestic statlines in the lower levels of the minor leagues. As such a player strings together an extended period of statistical superiority, questions of his legitimacy as a potential impact player arise–do the numbers merely reflect hollow dominance of fatally flawed, cupcake opponents, or are they a sign of a player emerging as a prospect to watch?
In the immediate aftermath of such a statistical rise, there is always a need for firsthand observation of the player to contextualize both his present excellence and future potential. One player very much in this mold is White Sox pitching prospect Adam Lopez.
During the all-star break, I decided to undergo a little experiment. I took two groups of 10 starting pitchers comprised of those whose ERAs outperformed and underperformed their SIERA marks by the largest margins. There were 437 of you who answered the question “Which Group Posts a Lower ERA RoS?” and 61.1% of you voted for Group A, the SIERA outperformers. Despite this group actually posting a higher SIERA than Group B, you felt that the magic would continue. Let’s find out the results and if the majority was correct.
Yankees pitching prospect Rafael De Paula entered the season cloaked in mystery. There were three basic things known about him to the general prospecting community. First, despite being a coveted international free agent, he didn’t sign a contract until he was almost 21 due to maintaining a false identity, being suspended, and taking a long time to acquire a visa in the aftermath of the incident. Second, once he finally was officially a professional, he went out and tore up the Dominican Summer League in 2012, with a 1.46 ERA and 85/18 K/BB in 61 2/3 innings. Of course, his advanced age made those statistics even less relevant than typical DSL numbers, which mean little on the prospecting scene to begin with. What was more important was the third fact, which was that he supposedly had good stuff.
I saw De Paula show that stuff on April 21 against Hickory, where he threw five hitless innings with ten strikeouts. Today, I’m going to examine what allowed him to roll through South Atlantic League lineups with ruthless efficiency in the first half of the year, but also look at some of the rough edges that contributed to a drop in production following De Paula’s promotion to High-A at midseason.
