If chicks dig the long ball, then scouts dig the high-octane fastball. And 22-year-old Royals right-hander Yordano Ventura has quite an electric one. His 97.5 average fastball velocity was the highest among every single pitcher who made a start in 2013. Even cooler, his fastball touched 101.9 mph according to PITCHf/x. It’s not outrageous for a reliever to throw that hard, as nine of them have since PITCHf/x has delivered reliable data. But starting pitchers simply don’t. Ventura officially unleashed the fastest fastball in the PITCHf/x era.

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I have a H2H league with my old college teammates that’s a little bit…funky. It’s a 6×6 league that includes K/BB with the usual five pitcher categories. We also roster about 1.5 times more pitchers than position players. In most leagues, it’s typical for owners to spend about 70 percent of their budget on position players. But for my league, the optimal split favors pitchers.

I ran my own models, used the tools available at Last Player Picked (currently defunct) and Baseball Prospectus and kept coming away with the same result – Cliff Lee was the most valuable player in the league with a suggested auction price in the upper $50’s. While I had my doubts about the valuation, I happily selected him for $34. According to Zach Sanders, he returned over $25 in normal leagues last season and I have every confidence that he blew away the $34 I paid for him in my league.

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Zack Greinke had another excellent season in 2013, placing 14th in the end-of-season starting pitcher rankings and sporting the league’s fifth-best ERA at 2.63.

But how did Greinke rank outside the top-ten despite a top-five mark in ERA, a top-10 mark in wins (15) and a top-15 mark in WHIP (1.11)? It’s because for the second straight year, Greinke’s strikeout rate saw a dramatic drop, even though his swinging strike rate rebounded to double-digit levels.

Should we be concerned that Greinke struck out just 20.6 percent of batters he faced, and is there anything else concerning in his profile?
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While he’s thrown over 1,000 innings in Japan and almost 350 in a two-year span here in the United States, Hisashi Iwakuma still seems to be one of the best kept secrets in both real and fantasy baseball. You could blame it on the lack of attention given to the small market that is the Pacific Northwest, but King Felix sure commands everyone’s attention and I’ve heard many a conversation about young, talented pitching that always seems to garner a Taijuan Walker reference. He’s done nothing but dominate hitters since joining the Mariners rotation midway through the 2012 season and despite finishing third in the American League in ERA amongst qualified starters, he seems to get passed over faster than your Aunt Susie’s Jell-O mold she brings to Christmas dinner every year. Is it a lack of knowledge by the masses? A lack of trust? Whatever the case may be, don’t fall in line with the lemmings. Sleeping on Iwakuma this year means that you’re going to blow a golden opportunity in your draft to steal high-end talent a a seriously discounted rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I reminded you all about my preseason lovefest for Andrew Cashner. What I neglected to mention because it wasn’t all that important, is that Cashner opened the year in the bullpen for the first couple of weeks of the season. Who took the rotation spot I expected Cashner to fill? Tyson Ross. Meet your early Pod’s Favorite Sleeper Pitcher.

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Last season, John Lackey was selected as the 244th overall player in Yahoo! leagues according to Fantasy Pros. He wasn’t auctioned frequently enough to show up on their auction values report, so we can safely say that he cost $1 or wasn’t drafted in nearly all leagues. Lackey rewarded the few owners who took a flier with a $8 performance according to Zach Sanders. Owners were slow to buy into Lackey as a viable option. As late as September 6th, his ownership rate was at just 61 percent in Yahoo! leagues and that may have been his season high.

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Strikeouts, man. Alone, they predict next year’s ERA better than FIP! They’re an important category by themselves, and then they predict good work in the other categories, so they’re a double threat. At some point though, you have to worry about the other categories too. Edinson Volquez cough cough.

Matt Moore is no Edinson Volquez. But his followup season had enough flaws that you might be worried that — despite the strikeouts — Moore’s not going to age very well.

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Yu Darvish may have compiled the least-heralded sub-3.00 ERA season in recent memory. Unfortunately, most of that stems from a lackluster 13-9 record, as his run support was putrid through certain stretches. To illustrate that point, in 17 of his starts, the Rangers scored three or fewer runs, which will certainly make it difficult to become a 20-game winner. Only logging 13 wins caused most of America to forget about Darvish’s stellar season, and it even got to the point that area sportswriters questioned his ability to hold leads late in games.

Regardless of the lack of attention lavished on the right-hander, fantasy owners certainly took notice. Zach Sanders had him ranked as the fourth-best starter in the league, while ESPN tabbed him as the five-best starter. In short, he anchored fantasy rotations and was a bona fide stud in every style of league.

Darvish took a significant step forward in 2013 due to BABIP and his strand rate. They combined to see his ERA drop from 3.90 in 2012 to 2.83 this past season, but the core components of his performance suggest his overall effectiveness was similar. His FIP remained almost identical, while he traded a few more home runs for fewer walks and more strikeouts.

His home run rate jumped from 0.66 HR/9 in 2012 to 1.12 HR/9 this past season. His HR/FB certainly changed for the worse, but it appears the larger discussion point should surround his decreased ground-ball rate. It decreased roughly five percent, and while that’s not a significant downturn, it seems at least interesting to note his home run rate increased in tandem with more fly balls.

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It was no secret that I was a huge Andrew Cashner fan heading into the season. You could say that he was my sleeper/undervalued pitcher of the year. I drafted him for my LABR team and Tout Wars squad, shared how upset at myself I would be if he didn’t make it onto every single one of my teams, boldly predicted that he would outearn every starting pitcher on both the Braves and Mets pitching staffs and lead the National League in ERA, and was most bullish on his fantasy value compared to the rest of the RotoGraphs rankers. And yet, despite posting a fantastic 3.09 ERA and ranking 41st among starting pitchers in fantasy value, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed.

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I’ve seen Andrew Heaney pitch several times, but the most memorable occasion was at the 2012 Big XII Baseball Tournament. Oklahoma State and Oklahoma were facing off at 9:00 am on a Wednesday. Bleary-eyed and still trying to wake up, I snagged a coffee and a breakfast burrito (not my usual ballpark fare) from the concession stands and headed down to take my seat behind home plate. Clearly, my expectations for this game were pretty low; after all, this was possibly the earliest start time many of the players had ever experienced.

I may have been a bit low on energy, but Heaney was ready to roll. The lanky lefty took the hill like it was 7:00 pm on a Friday and proceeded to systematically dismantle a very good Oklahoma team that would go on to the super-regionals. Through the first eight innings, Heaney allowed only two soft singles, with one walk and eight strikeouts, on just 86 pitches. His fastball was a tick below his usual velocity, as he was maxing out at 92 mph instead of 94, but his three-pitch mix still had opponents flailing wildly. His mid-80s slider was maybe even better that morning than I’d previously seen, and he was consistently hitting the strike zone with his low-80s change-up as well.

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