Late and drafts and even on the waiver wire, buy lows with extremely high upside are available. In both position players and pitchers, there are oft-injured players who are also oft-productive that can be drafted late or picked up as free agents. Here are three pitchers that I think can be worth a roster spot at the start of the year.
On Monday, I published the findings of a study that determined spring K% and BB% were actually meaningful for pitchers. On Wednesday, I looked at pitchers whose spring K% were well above what the Steamer projections were expected, while I looked at the other side on Thursday, those pitchers whose spring K% is well below Steamer’s projected season mark. Today I am looking at BB% and will start with the pitchers who have displayed much better control than anticipated.
A week and a half ago, I published my American League starting pitcher tiers, which were based on my projections and ranked pitchers in descending order of dollar value. One of the bigger surprises was C.J. Wilson landing in the third tier, ranking 16th among all AL starters. This ranking was behind guys like Brandon Morrow, Colby Lewis and Max Scherzer, who it is likely that the vast majority of fantasy owners would draft much later than Wilson. So why am I down on Wilson? Let me count the reasons.
Maximizing pitchers that make 2 starts in a week is a strategy used by some fantasy owners, especially in H2H leagues. The owners cycle through less desirable starters each week and get a new set the next week in order to win the counting stats. The first week of the season offers a unique situation because most of the 2-start pitchers are #1 and #2 starters for a team. Most of these pitchers are already owned. Today I am going to look at some of the few 2-start “aces” that may be available in a league
(Owned % are ESPN and Yahoo)
Erik Bedard (7%, 39%) – Erik is by far the best option among the pitchers I will look at today. His main issue in the past has been staying healthy. While he has a lower chance of getting a Win than a starter on a better team, he will supply a decent number of strikeouts (ZiPS projection is 8.15 K/9). Since an owner is looking to have him around a only a week, they might as well take the chance on him stating healthy that long. In a deep league, owners should actually look to keep him until he eventually goes on the DL.
After discovering on Monday that K% and BB% are indeed meaningful for pitchers during spring training, I looked at which starters might see a better K% than initially projected given their spring performance. Today I look at the opposite end of the coin, those who are in for a potential decline in their K% based on what they have done in the spring so far. Again, I compared their spring K% to their Steamer projected K% and looked at the largest differences on the negative end of the spectrum.
Brandon Morrow has always been an enigma to me. He has great stuff, but just can seem to put it all together for one good season. I am going to try to look at similar pitchers from the recent past to see if there is any hope of him breaking out.
Since the right-handed pitcher broke into the league with Seattle in 2007, here is where he ranks among the 156 starting pitchers with 400 or more innings.
K/9: 1st (10.0 K/9)
BB/9: 149th (4.5 BB/9)
% of PA that end in a BB or K: 1st (37.3%)
Brandon is a true outcome pitcher with most at bats ending up as either a walk or a strikeout. Besides being a true outcome pitcher, his career ERA has been significantly worse than his ERA predictors:
ERA: 4.37
FIP: 3.85
xFIP: 3.94
SIERA: 3.71
As Eno mentioned earlier this morning, we here at Fangraphs are engaged in a fight to the death with The Hardball Times for supremacy in Fantasy Squared’s THT vs FG charity league. We drafted some 330 players last night, narrowly finishing before the beginning of the Mariners/A’s game — ok, that’s an exaggeration, but it did clock in at nearly four hours.
First, some of the nuts and bolts about how the draft played out. It’s a 12-team league with $260 budgets, of which just $48 was left on the table. Of the $3072 spent on players, $991 of it was spent on pitchers, which amounts to less than a third of all spending. While that may not seem like much, it is actually slightly more than would have been allocated to the nine pitching spots if the money had been evenly distributed, especially since some teams used one or more bench spots for extra pitchers. 138 pitchers were drafted with the average cost settling just over $7; interestingly, the median value was lower at just $4. Read the rest of this entry »
So a buddy of mine calls me the other day in need of a 10th team for his home league. Apparently someone dropped out at the last minute due to work obligations and he needed to find someone competitive to fill the slot. Shallow league, very basic. 10 teams, mixed, 5×5 roto, standard snake draft. Happily, I obliged and decided that this would be a great opportunity to see just how long I could wait on drafting a starting pitcher while still maintaining a competitive staff in the league.
On Monday with the help of Matt Swartz, I determined that spring training statistics are not completely meaningless after all. Strikeout percentage (K%) and walk percentage (BB%) should indeed be taken into consideration when projecting the upcoming season.
With that in mind, it may be possible to get a foreshadowing of who the breakout and bust pitchers are for the year. Today I decided to look at the 10 pitchers whose spring K% is the most different from their Steamer projection, as in, their spring K% is much higher than the projection. I used Steamer because it has become my favorite pitching projection system and performed the best in the latest round of tests between systems.
It’s been a pretty tough few months for Ryan Madson. First the 31-year-old right-hander reportedly had a four-year, $44 million offer pulled off the table by his former team before they went all in on Jonathan Papelbon. After weeks of sitting on the offseason sidelines, he took a one-year, $8.5 million pillow contract from the Reds with an eye on a big multi-year payday next offseason. That won’t happen now. A nagging elbow injury this spring turned out to be a torn elbow ligament, and now the former Phillie will miss the season with Tommy John surgery.
An injury of this caliber has some far-reaching fantasy implications beyond the obvious — Madson being non-rosterable — so let’s break it down…
