Last season, targeting a Pirates starting pitcher on draft day or even on the wire was ill advised for the vast majority of fantasy players. Sure Charlie Morton — 2.2 WAR, 5.77 K/9, and a 3.83 — didn’t have a horrible season, but when he was the Pirates best starter, there isn’t much upside left for the rest of the staff to aspire to. This season, Erik Bedard’s been pretty good, A.J. Burnett hasn’t been bad at all, and while they both would have been in contention for the title of Cy Young on the 2011 Pirates, they’re both sitting a ways behind the team’s ace, James McDonald.

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Although it feels like every other week we lose another established arm to testy ligaments (or well trained ligament surgeons), it has the alternative effect of making you dig a little deeper for starters who are not only worthy of a roster spot, but ones that ought to be actual contributors. It’s the proverbial silver lining – you may experience a catastrophe, but you might discover a hidden gem in the process.

Lose a Cory Luebke? A Neftali Feliz? There are solutions.

Justin Masterson was bombed by the Seattle Mariners in his third start of the year and he almost immediately started hitting waiver wires across the contiguous fantasy landscape. Being blasted by a team that has set historic marks for offensive ineptitude is just difficult to stomach after all.

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It’s that day of the week again, time for another walk along the waiver wire. Do you make it safely to the end or fall off and fail miserably with your free agent pickups? Luckily, you have the Mike Podhorzer guide ropes to help you keep your balance.

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Tommy Milone

Being a pitcher who focuses heavily on command while limiting home runs, Milone is the near perfect pitcher for spot starting in Oakland. He only has 30 innings pitched in Oakland this year, but he has a very nice .179 wOBA against at home. In leagues with inning caps or where you can afford using a starter in only about half of his starts, Milone is the near optimal pitcher to use as a spot starter in home starts only.

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Got a pair of back-end starting pitchers for you this week, one young and one old…

Anthony Bass | SP, RP | Padres | Owned: 26% Yahoo! and 16.9% ESPN

The Padres currently have four starting pitchers on the disabled list including three of their Opening Day rotation guys, forcing them to use retreads like Jeff Suppan and Eric Stults. Bass, 24, is the one replacement who doesn’t qualify as a retread. The right-hander owns a 2.89 ERA and a 3.29 FIP through eight starts and two relief appearances, and only once has he allowed more than three runs in an outing.

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As I have mentioned many times in the past, SwStk% is highly correlated with strikeout rate/percentage. Of course, as with any pair of metrics, there are always going to be outliers who do not fit the general pattern. Sometimes there is an explanation not captured by the metrics we are looking at, other times it is just a matter of some version of luck that should change soon. The latter case gives us an opportunity to forecast improvement or declines. So let’s take a look at the leaders in Swstk%, matching it with their strikeout percentages to determine if there are any imminent strikeout rate surgers.

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Jon Lester was pretty terrific in his last outing, throwing a complete game with six strikeouts while giving up eight hits (seven singles) and one earned run. Owners across the fantasy landscape collectively breathed a sigh of relief. And yet, it was against the Seattle Mariners who have a tendency to make starting pitchers of questionable quality look like Cy Young.

Over the last four seasons, Lester, 28, is ranked 5th among qualified starters in K/9 at 9.17, just a tick behind Tim Lincecum, Yovani Gallardo, Clayton Kershaw, and Justin Verlander. Over the same time span, he’s fourth in overall WAR at 16.9, ahead of Kershaw, Chris Carpenter, Cole Hamels, and Matt Cain, among many other great arms. In most fantasy drafts, Lester satisfies that “staff ace” slot for managers who like to lean on someone to anchor their pitching staff.

But this season, Lester started out with a couple decent outings, a couple of real stinkers, and then a couple middling starts. All along the way, he’s demonstrated an inability to re-create the swing-and-miss stuff that allowed him to breeze through similar tight situations in years past. In general, Lester has just lacked that polish that made him such an effective pitcher for the past four seasons.

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More than a month into the season, we are in full-fledged buy low and sell high mode. Though I always say it is much harder to execute these trades than all the fantasy advice articles you read will have you believe, it is still worth making an attempt. Today, I won’t be writing your standard buy low post, but rather analyze several pitchers who have been disappointments thus far and look at the reasons why you should buy low and why you may want to pass. Hopefully, we can then come to a verdict.

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Adam Wainwright

The Cardinals’ success without Adam Wainwright last season was a minor miracle. Chris Carpenter had a fantastic season at the top of the rotation and Jaime Garcia and Kyle Lohse did enough in the middle to make up for the fact that they struggled to find a capable back end of the rotation until the trade deadline acquisition of Edwin Jackson.

So far this season, Jackson is gone, Carpenter has yet to make his debut, and Wainwright isn’t exactly leading the team into the fields of glory. Lance Lynn has been a pleasant surprise and Jake Westbrook has already nearly equaled his 2011 WAR total, but it’s hard to blame Cardinal fans — to say nothing of fantasy owners — for wondering just when the pre-surgery Wainwright will show up. Read the rest of this entry »

Gavin Floyd has been a rather consistent pitcher the past few years, as his xFIP has been nowhere below 3.64 and nowhere above 3.73 over the past three seasons. This year, Floyd’s ERA looks great, with a 2.53 mark through seven starts and 46.1 innings, but once again his xFIP is comparable to season’s past, with a 3.77 mark.

The worry with Floyd is that his ERA has consistently been above his peripherals, which likely has something to do with his home ballpark. He has an 11.4% home run per fly ball ratio for his career, with a 12.4% mark at home and 10.6% away. Homers have not been kind to Floyd in his career, and especially not when pitching in his hitter friendly home ballpark.

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