We’re three and a half weeks into the season and nearly at the point where the first major pitching metric stabilizes. We know that K/PA (or K% on the player pages) stabilizes at 150 batters faced, and starting pitchers are creeping ever so closer to that minimum. So at the very least, we have to start taking strikeout rates seriously, but that’s really about it. Let’s now take a look around the American League and some of the movers and shakes in starting pitcher land.

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Last week I briefly touched on some guys who had been getting raked across the coals in the BABIP/LOB% department, making their raw stats look like something out of a horror film. This week I’ll take a look at the flip side; guys who have sparkling ERAs, but looking under the hood implies that your nice new sports car might not be purring quite as well as you had hoped. Just remember, it’s very early and a lot of the underlying peripherals haven’t stabilized yet; we’re just looking for guys we don’t want to make the mistake of overpaying for.

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Yes, it’s still quite early, but I simply cannot help myself from analyzing my favorite advanced pitcher metric — the swinging strike percentage, or SwStk%. The majority of starting pitchers have only started three or four games, but a metric like SwStk% stabilizes relatively quickly, so the typical small sample size caveats don’t necessarily apply to the full degree. The following five pitchers have enjoyed the largest surge in SwStk% as compared to last year. Let’s see if they are doing anything differently, or if it just seems to be a good run.

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Felix Doubront | Boston Red Sox | Home to Oakland and home to Houston

Doubront is listed here simply because he’s widely available and gets two decent matchups next week. While it would be preferable if the starts were on the road (especially the one against Oakland), they are good enough that weekly players should give Doubront a look in H2H matchups, and daily players should give him a long look in the latter matchup.

Doubront has several problems; he issues too many walks (10% BB% in 2012), he gives up too many home runs (15.9% HR/FB), and he gives up a fair amount of hard contact (23.4% LD%). If reading that is sufficiently scary, feel free to skip to the next pitcher. But he does have the alluring ability to miss bats, and he has the ability to get strikeouts. Among pitchers with 160+ IP last year, Doubront ranked 28th in SwStr% and 17th in K%.

With the poor run prevention skills listed above, you wouldn’t be wrong to ignore Doubront. But if you’re in the market for a cheap option in daily cap leagues or desperate for a two-start option, you could do worse than Doubront with his strikeout skills and decent macthups. Read the rest of this entry »

The value of a stolen base may vary from daily site to daily site, but on the site where I play my daily cap contests, a steal is worth five points. Throw in the fact that a runner has to get on base to be able to steal another one and a steal becomes worth seven or eight points. And that’s assuming they don’t come around to score or do anything else in their other plate appearances. You could certainly do worse than seven or eight points from a slot. Needless to say, I like guys who can run a little (or a lot) in daily leagues.

In order to be able to better pick base stealers in daily salary cap formats, I decided to look at the pitchers and catchers who are the most and least friendly to base stealers. Read the rest of this entry »

Alright, we went 3-for-4 with our Friday and Saturday streamers last week! Things are looking up after a rough first weekend. Let’s dive right in for this weekend’s potential streaming candidates, and look forward to an update on how that “stream quality” metric looks after we have another weekend to work with.

As usual, I aimed for a 50/25/15/5 percent ownership streamers to play to all league types. Unfortunately, it’s a terrible couple of days for streaming, so we’re going a little deeper (and therefore a little riskier) for these ones.

Jarrod Parker (35.5% owned) – I don’t feel great about this one, so if you’re going to avoid one of these, let this be it. But there aren’t many great options this weekend, and I’m going to give Parker one more chance to show us something, despite the 10.80 ERA and 2.66 WHIP. The Rays strikeout 20.5% of the time, slightly above this year’s league average, and have a terrible .277 wOBA so far which only rises to .282 against righties. The Rays aren’t much more potent than their state counterparts so far, it seems. Plus, Parker has far more talent than he’s shown in three starts – he’s walking a lot of guys and striking out very few, possibly due to pitch mix changes post-Tommy John and some trouble with his change-up. But I’m willing to give him one more chance. Call it the Eno Sarris Effect, I guess. Or the Chris Cwik Effect. Just don’t blame me, is what I’m saying.

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You probably know my deal by now. I am extremely patient. It takes a lot for me to change my valuation of a player. After three or so starts, not much is going to alter my views of a pitcher. Unless I see a significant change in velocity, pitch mix or rumblings of some sort of injury, I stick to my pre-season guns for the most part. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at a couple of American League starting pitchers making waves early on.

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One of my favorite things to do during the first couple months of the season is to scour other rosters and/or the wire for guys that are performing poorly fantasy-wise but have more projectable underlying peripherals. This happens with hitters (see Jason Heyward and his 0.091 BABIP this year) but I feel pitchers are a better target. It’s tougher to “see” a pitcher’s luck. You can watch a guy smash liner after liner to the left fielder, but even when a starter gives up five bloops over short, he gets tagged as “hit around.” So, while very early on, here are the top three big league starters sorted by ERA-FIP (as of last night). These guys have ugly, ugly raw lines after three starts but, hey, there’s reason for hope.

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It’s hard to remember Trevor Cahill is only 25 years old. After starting 32 games as a 21-year-old, Cahill established himself as a useful major-league starter. Like most 21-year-olds, he was hardly a finished product. Over the last four seasons, Cahill has steadily improved his game, the way most prospects his age might improve in the minors. But because Cahill has done it at the major-league level, he almost seems like a disappointment. That’s not the case, as Cahill has blossomed into an above-average starter. One of the biggest reasons for Cahill’s emergence has been his increasing strikeout rate. Last season, the development of a cutter helped Cahill strike out more hitters, leading to a career-high 3.0 WAR season. If his first three starts this year are any indication, Cahill’s cutter is going to be even more of a weapon this season.

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It’s true, it’s true. Wednesdays aren’t usually filled with excitement. But wait! It’s deep league waiver wire day and I am positive you have been waiting for this week’s edition since the second you finished reading last week’s. Today I look at two National Leaguers who may be able to help you in a deep mixed or NL-Only league, though they are both likely already owned in your standard NL-Only.

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