Archive for Starting Pitchers

For many of us, our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season. 

In doing that, part of the process is looking back at the season to see some of the emerging young players and ascertain whether or not their emergence was real and repeatable. One of the classic ways to do this is by looking for comparisons of these young players to established major leaguers to serve as proof of concepts. 

Scouts have done this forever and it has worked in the recent past. Hunter Brown’s association to Justin Verlander foreshadowed the former’s rise to ace status. Many in the industry connected Parker Messick’s arsenal and style of pitching with Hyun-Jin Ryu, and Messick has had similar results so far. Chase Burns’ reliance on the fastball and slider was compared to a young Spencer Strider’s prior to the former’s debut, and Burns has been just as good as the vintage version of Strider. 

Over the course of the next few months, I’ll provide a handful of potentially instructive comps we can make to help illuminate this growing crop of young starting pitchers.

For Part 1 of this series, where I find comps for today’s young emerging aces, I took a look at the Mariners’ Kade Anderson, comparing his arsenal, arm slot, and potential prospect arc to that of perennial All Star, Max Fried. 

Today, I’ll compare two Dominican flamethrowers in Angels’ rookie Walbert Ureña and Marlins’ veteran Sandy Alcantara. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the final two weeks of the season. Or close to it, anyway. When games wrap up Sunday afternoon and evening, we will officially have 14 days remaining before the regular season wraps up on September 27.

With the end so near, sit/start calls for your rotation have changed. Maybe in your head-to-head league, things are pretty normal – you max out innings and games played; if you have a limit on games started by your pitching staff, you try to identify the best starts that fit under that limit. The stakes are higher, but the process might be the same.

But in season-long leagues, there are some nuances that should change your typical thought process.

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In the immortal words of Sugar Ray, sometimes, all we need is to “turn tomorrow into yesterday.”

For many of us, that time is right now. Our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season. 

Which of your waiver wire adds will you want to bring back next season? Who were you envious of that you want to target in drafts next year? You’ll spend the offseason asking yourself these questions. So will I, and it will be my goal to help you answer some of these questions. 

But before the season ends, I want to slow down just a hair, to enjoy the rest of this season. Late Wednesday night, I found myself falling asleep to highlights of Kade Anderson’s first truly successful outing for the Mariners, holding the Rangers to one run over six innings and collecting his first win in the majors. 

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Welcome back to the Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit for Ottoneu points leagues. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence.

For a lot of Ottoneu head-to-head leagues, next week is the championship week. Pay extra close attention to your matchups and make sure you cover every single start to hit your GS cap. Good luck!

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This preseason, they told me that Chandler Simpson was a butcher in the outfield…

He may not be PCA-esque, but he’s greatly improved his defensive rating — from -8.2 last season to -0.3 this season.

On the Agenda: 

1. Quick Hits
2. Various News and Notes
3. Streaming Pitchers

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As we move on to the final stages of this fantasy season, one more splits chart could be beneficial for those looking for streaming options in a playoff run. This chart plots xwOBA vs left-handed pitching (LHP) and right-handed pitching (RHP) on each axis, with filter options for which teams to target depending on their split, with the biggest gap differentials also included. This is done using handedness split data since the break, which now has a big enough sample in its own right while capturing recent form that full-season data would dilute. This piece will identify which handedness offenses struggle with and also look at probable starters up until September 19th, for specific matchups for both pitchers and offenses. Bear in mind this is overall offensive production; there will be specific hitters within lineups that may do well against a certain handedness despite the overall offensive struggles, and vice versa.

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Five straight games with a dong for Elly De La Cruz!

On the Agenda: 

1. Closer Chaos
2. Quick Hits
3. Various News and Notes
4. Streaming Pitchers

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There’s no such thing as a perfect fantasy draft. Even national contest winners in fields of 3,000 teams will have drafted several busts or players who haven’t earned their value. We can still win our leagues despite making tons of mistakes in our draft. In fact, there will be leagues won by teams that drafted two busts in the first two rounds — the 2026 top 24 has been historically bad. A drafter could have started with Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh, but could have a monster lead on second place if they drafted Dillon Dingler, Jordan Walker, Miguel Vargas, Jacob Misiorowski, Cam Schlittler, and FAAB’d Jacob Latz, Parker Messick, Liam Hicks, and Kody Clemens.

Last week, I discussed Raleigh and the biggest busts on every AL team. You’ll note that some of my selections were players with a 200+ ADP. I didn’t want to force early-round busts just for the sake of it, especially for teams whose highest-draft-capital players were within a reasonable range of returning their fantasy value. That will be the case again for the NL group. An example for this week is Trea Turner. Though he ranks 91st on the 12-team Fantasy Player Rater and is not returning full value on his ADP of 27, Turner has been healthy all season, earning nearly $12 to date. He has scored 90 runs with 17 HR and 18 SB, and I would not consider him to be a bust.

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When examining leaderboards over a small sample (say, the last two weeks or maybe a month), you find a mixture of high-end players and surprising ones. If you are looking for late-season adds, those high-end arms aren’t likely available, but what about some of the unexpected names? We’ll look at players rostered in less than 80% in Online Championships to identify and examine pitchers in these deeper, 12-team leagues.

This isn’t intended to be a deep dive into these pitchers because we have limited time for the rest of the season. Success can occur with strong skills, luck, or a mix of both. What have they been doing? Is it sustainable? How do we feel about the upcoming matchups? We’ll examine five starting pitchers who have performed well since August to see if they can be reliable down the stretch.

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OpenCommand, introduced by Doyoung-Tom Kim, is an absolutely incredible open-source dataset that offers a new way to track pitch locations based on target-miss distance, how far a pitch landed from where the pitcher was actually trying to put it, estimated from the catcher’s setup and camera tracking. Without going too much into detail about the workings of OpenCommand, I would highly recommend checking out his work and the great lengths he went to account for camera angles, plate depth, etc.

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