Recently here at Rotographs, we released our rest of season rankings for starting pitchers, I had Tim Lincecum rated as the sixth-highest fantasy pitcher. To say the least, I took a little heat for that ranking. I will try to justify the ranking today.
On Thursday, I looked at American League starting pitchers who showed up on the last 30 day SIERA leaderboards that would be considered surprising. Today, I will cover the entire league, but look at the opposite end of the spectrum. These are the pitchers whose skills have really declined over the last 30 days. Is it the beginning of a trend or just small sample randomness over a long season? Let’s find out.
Felix Doubront is owned in just 39% of Yahoo! leagues, which seems excessively low given his performance in his first season as a major league starting pitcher. While the 4.24 ERA is not incredibly impressive, Doubront has struck out 22.5% of batters faced, averaging just under a strikeout per inning.
A simple way to determine which pitchers are “hot” is to use the Split filter and choose any one of the small time frames and then sort by SIERA. Since I think subtle changes in mechanics and other various factors could actually trigger a performance spike, I believe looking at the SIERA leaders over the last 30 days could be useful despite the small sample size. Here are some of the surprise leaders in the metric over that time span.
Stephen Strasburg is possibly the best starting pitcher so far this season. Here is a quick sampling of his stats:
11.6 K/9, 32% K%
2.6 BB/9, 7% BB%
2.82 ERA, 2.42 FIP, 2.60 xFIP, 2.60 SIERA
These numbers are good enough that I have him ranked as the best fantasy starting pitcher without taking the number of innings he pitches into account. The only knock against him is that he is not a ground ball pitcher with has led to a career BABIP 0.308. When he is on the mound, he is arguably the best fantasy pitcher in the in the game.
Starting pitchers. Man, there are so many of them. And every week, there’s a no-name that throws a shutout and burns bright for a few days. Those matchstick burns very rarely turn into anything substantial.
And yet we have to wait five days between starts, wondering what the next heaping pile of information will tell us. Imagine if a position player got 30 plate appearances every five days, we’d spend a lot of time thinking about them in between, too. Maybe this is the appeal with fantasy football, eh?
Off-topic. Point is, information about starting pitchers comes in leaps and surges. That makes them particularly tough to rank, but it also provides opportunity.
Ben Sheets has returned with a vengeance. In his first start since July 2010, Sheets made a big statement. Sheets pitched six innings, striking out five batters against the New York Mets on Sunday. He did not allow a run. With the Braves in need of some stability in their rotation, Sheets could parlay this opportunity into a full-time role. If his first start is any indication, it looks like he might have some value in fantasy leagues.
As news of Dillon Gee’s potentially season ending blood clot spread, Mets fans and fantasy owners began to speculate whether or not the Mets would call up Matt Harvey to assume Gee’s spot in the rotation. A slew of variables will weighted by Sandy Alderson, Paul DePodesta and company to ultimately determine what’s best for right hander and the club. But, here at RotoGraphs, all we care about is how Matt Harvey can affect your team should the Mets call him up. If Buffalo’s ace does to Queens, be wary. While his long term potential remains high — he projects to be innings eater with swing and miss stuff — he still has a way to go to get there.
These tiers are a bit later than the rest of the crew, as my vacation delayed my writing. All can breathe easily now as they have finally arrived! You can check out my June update here. A quick note: I have removed pitchers who were demoted to the minors since I have no idea when and if they will be returning to the Majors.
Welcome back Self! If you didn’t realize it (admit that you noticed immediately that my highly informative and entertaining posts were suddenly missing from your life), I have been away on vacation for the last 2 weeks. And yes, it was a great time, thanks for asking. Anyway, due to the wonders of the iPhone, I was actually able to keep up with all the baseball happenings for the first time on a vacation. Joining the 21st century is a nice thing. As a result, I found two free agent gems for you deep leaguers!