You’ll stretch yourself into pretzels trying to convince yourself that a past great is a buy low. And sometimes it’s worth it — Cole Hamels and Matt Cain seem to be doing just about the same thing they’ve ever done, and betting on their career numbers is a good bet. But sometimes, there just isn’t enough grip on the mat to reach your finger to click that trade proposal button. The mat gets slippery, and for good reason.

Is Yovani Gallardo just a downward-facing dog with no bounce left?

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Yesterday, I took a look at the potential pitcher strikeout percentage surgers based on the regression equation I developed and shared with all of you last week. Today, I will look at the opposite side of the coin — those pitchers whose expected strikeout percentages are significantly lower than their actual strikeout percentages.

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Last week, I published the results of my expected strikeout rate study. I used the looking, called, and foul strike rates data from Baseball-Reference.com. It is important to understand that the regression formula I concluded with is meant to estimate what the pitcher’s K% should be given his different strike rates. This is not meant to be predictive. Instead, in smaller sample sizes, it might be a more accurate picture of the pitcher’s true strikeout ability so far, which would then help shape your projection of him going forward.

With that said, here are the top 10 pitchers whose xK% is higher than his K%.

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Coming into the season, right-hander Chris Archer was widely considered the Tampa Bay Rays’ best pitching prospect. Our own Marc Hulet ranked him the Rays’ second-best prospect overall. So when the Rays announced he was getting promoted and would start against the Cleveland Indians on Saturday, many fantasy owners jumped on the waiver wire and submitted claims for Archer.

The excitement makes sense. The 24-year-old features a dynamite fastball-slider combination on the mound and has struck out at least a batter per inning in the last two seasons. In fact, Archer appeared in six big-league games a year ago and compiled an 11.05 K/9 strikeout rate in 29.1 innings, so he’s already shown that he’s capable of missing bats in the majors.

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Since you read Fan/RotoGraphs, you’re probably in the habit of looking at any number of peripheral stats while searching for your next streamer or roster plug. Allow me to add to the noise as you attempt to talk yourself into taking a chance on certain pitchers, while talking yourself out of others.

You might look at K%, for instance, which is a much better indicator of a pitcher’s usefulness than K/9, though K/9 is a much more common stat in that a number of sites will list it, and is included in lieu of K% on the default leaderboards at FanGraphs itself. Because K% displays strikeouts as a percentage of batters faced as opposed to the number of outs recorded (essentially what K/9 does), it is a better indicator of how efficient a pitcher is at striking batters out.

Understandably, then, K% correlates with IP, W, ERA, and WHIP at a significantly higher rate than K/9 does. Because I am an obsessive baseball lout, like you, reader, I recently explored differences in pitchers’ K/9 and K% just for the hell of it; while the results where not surprising, they were interesting. The results can be found here.¹

What was slightly more interesting was when I went started fooling around with F-Strike% and saw how it correlates with certain other 5×5 stats. Generally, it correlates well with those stats, especially WHIP and IP. Eno Sarris explored the effect of F-Strike% on BB% last summer, and found that F-Strike% “explains almost half of the variance in walk rate.” This jives with the -0.401 correlation between F-Strike% and WHIP that I found.¹

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This week I take a gander at a much hyped recent call-up, a former minor league strikeout leader and a man whose bad luck may finally be turning. It’s American League starting pitcher day, a time when we make no mention of those less exciting guys in that other league with names such as Clayton and Cole.

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There’s no way to know how often players push through injuries they shouldn’t; it certainly happens with some frequency, but the times when one can pinpoint the exact moment a player should have been placed on the disabled list and wasn’t are few and far between.

I have no idea when in 2011 John Lackey tore his ulnar collateral ligament – if my life depended on guessing, I could talk myself into a late July tear, which would mean he made an additional 11 or 12 starts carrying an injury that used to be career-threatening – but I do know that it affected his performance rather negatively. The problem is that there’s still not a good way to determine how much of his abominable 2011 was due to the injury and how much was simply a bad season. Read the rest of this entry »

Young pitching is killing it this year. My staffs, full of Matt Harvey, Shelby Miller, Jose Fernandez and David Phelps are treating me very well right now. From one standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to plan this kind of staff. The work done by Bill Petti and Jeff Zimmerman shows that, as a pitcher, you’re busy dying as soon as you’re born. So get the younger pitchers!

The problem is the lack of track record. In the case of two hot young things, we’re left with one start and a decision. When it comes to a redraft at least — in dynasties, those dudes are long gone.

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By this point in his career, it’s been pretty well-established that Doug Fister is an above-average starting pitcher in Major League Baseball. He’s compiled a 3.16 ERA (129 ERA+) over 432.2 innings the past three seasons, and since his trade to Detroit, he has proven his sudden transformation in early 2011 was not just a outgrowth of pitching in cavernous Safeco Field.

Fister is valuable in all fantasy formats because he provides above-average rate statistics (ERA and WHIP) and pitches for one of the best offenses in all of baseball, which should allow him to accumulate plenty of wins. And although his strikeout rate is below-average, it’s not so far below-average that owners are sacrificing one category for the benefit elsewhere.

With that said, owners seeking to upgrade a beleaguered fantasy rotation would be wise to target the 29-year-old right-hander in coming weeks. He already has solid numbers this season, as evidenced by his 3.62 ERA and 4.78 strikeout-to-walk ratio. His fantasy numbers, however, are lagging behind his actual performance. Fantasy owners can realistically expect improved performance from Fister throughout the rest of the season, which means he could be a legitimate value-buy right now.

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Francisco Liriano’s been kicking around the big leagues since 2005, and there’s really just never been middle ground with him. Here’s a fun trivia question: how many times has he had a seasonal ERA that starts with a four?

The answer: not even once. In parts of seven seasons headed into 2013, Liriano’s had an ERA in the five range four different times. Twice he’s been in the threes, and once, way back in that magical breakout of 2006, he finished the year at 2.16.

That makes him appealing because the talent is clearly there, but also an enormous risk, to the point where many fantasy owners just avoid him entirely. If he succeeds for someone else, the thinking goes, fine, but just as long as he doesn’t crater your team.

Based on his history, that’s not entirely unfair. Yet here we are, staring at a 25/6 K/BB and two earned runs in three starts as a Pittsburgh Pirate, and Liriano demands our attention once again. Proceed at your own risk.

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