This is Jordan Rosenblum’s debut at Rotographs. 

I’ve spent the last couple of seasons building out a fully-fledged projection system. You may have seen the StuffPlus-fueled version of them, ppERA, published by Eno Sarris over at The Athletic, or else variations of them elsewhere. Like most projection systems, mine includes aging curves, major league equivalencies, park factors, league run environment adjustments, historical performance, and regression to the mean.

My pitching projections performed well in terms of predictive accuracy in 2023, generally holding their own against other more established projection systems, with my rookie projections performing especially well. I must, however, concede that Steamer dominated the field overall—all hail! This article unveils my top 10 projected pitching prospects for 2024 and beyond, highlighting names worth breaking the TINSTAAP pledge for.

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The Starting Pitcher Preview (Part II) episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Paul Sporer

Strategy Section

• Relievers moving to the rotation
  • Good source to find fantasy players?
  • Candidates for 2024
• San Francisco Giants plan for 2024
• Total Solar Eclipse
• Spring Training
  • Red Flags
  • Green Flags
  • Injuries in Spring Training
  • Spring training stats on FanGraphs !!!
• How to value older / aging pitchers
  • Survivor Bias
  • How cost plays in to the risk
• Supermodels
• How to value pitchers coming over from a foreign league
  • Foreign pitchers vs hitters
• 9 Pitcher roto roster – how to split SP/MR/CL?

Starting Pitchers

• General player pool observations
• Lower tiered pitchers
  • What to look for?

ATC Undervalued Players

• Starting Pitchers
  • Jordan Montgomery
  • Nestor Cortes
  • Eduardo Rodriguez
  • Ryan Pepiot
  • Aaron Civale
  • Griffin Canning
  • John Means

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Last season around this time I wrote an article showcasing a recipe that would help select starting pitching in drafts. I queried the heck out of a dataset containing 2022 end-of-season pitcher data and 2023 projected data, slicing and splicing the list down to an interesting group of pitchers, each having done or expected to do the following:

• A SwStr% in 2022 of at least 11%. (2022 MLB SP average – 10.7%)
• A K/9 projection (steamer) of eight or better. (2022 MLB SP average – 8.18)
• Positive pVals (Pitch Info) on at least two pitches in 2022.
• An ADP greater than 100.

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The Starting Pitcher Preview (Part I) episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Nick Pollack

What’s new at PitcherList?

• PLV 2.0

Strategy Section

• Pitch arsenal
  • Is it better to have one elite pitch, or a few good pitches?
  • Pitch mix changes
    • Blind spot of projections?
    • How to know when a pitcher will be more successful?
    • What to make of a pitcher throwing a new pitch?
• Should we trust certain teams / organizations to improve pitchers?
  • Ryan Pepiot

Starting Pitchers

• General player pool observations
• 12-team vs. 15-team leagues
• Which is more important – securing ratios or strikeouts?
• Should you chase wins?
• How much of a discount do you need for an injury concern pitcher?

ATC Undervalued Players

• Starting Pitchers
  • Framber Valdez
  • Logan Webb
    • How to throw a screwball
  • Max Fried
    • Partial tear vs. full tear
    • Yoshinobu Yamamoto innings
  • Zach Eflin
    • Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
  • Tanner Bibee
  • Justin Steele
  • Shane Bieber
  • Chris Bassitt

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It’s finally time to start my annual tradition of examining starting pitchers being drafted after pick 300 in NFBC drafts. For each article, I’ll examine about five guys when I find time between updating my outfield and top-200 hitter rankings and also Mining the News.

Previous articles

• Scherzer, Rogers, Manoah, Montas, and Gray Read the rest of this entry »

When something becomes sexy, I’m all in. Crocs and socks? Sexy. Minivans with a built-in vacuum cleaner to suck up all the floor Cheerios? Sexy. Throwing a four-seam fastball with a very shallow vertical approach angle due to some serious induced vertical break at the top of the zone? Sexy. Some things some people just can’t pull off. But when a trend becomes a trend, you’re either in or you’re out.

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As we move into draft season, I will be updating these rankings occasionally, when there is news to justify changes. The original rankings will stay at the bottom of the article to maintain my player notes. The original SP rankings were posted 1/31 and the most recent update is 2/28.

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It’s finally time to start my annual tradition of examining starting pitchers being drafted after pick 300 in NFBC drafts. For each article, I’ll examine about five guys when I find time between updating my outfield and top-200 hitter rankings and also Mining the News.

Max Scherzer (302 ADP)

What a horrible pick. If everything goes as planned, the 39-year-old is out until at least June or July while being a 4.00 ERA pitcher last season (3.77 ERA, 4.02 xFIP) and is projected to do the same this year (4.04 ERA, 4.07 SIERA). This ADP is from 12-team redraft leagues with no IL slots. Why in the world would someone plan on holding an old, hurt, average pitcher for three to four months on their bench?

The only way I’d even consider adding him would be in the last round with the intention of dropping him during the first FAAB period and then sliding him onto my roster once he starts his return. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I reviewed the hitters with the largest differences between their actual wOBA and their Statcast calculated xwOBA. Unlike wOBA that’s typically not a fantasy category and has an indirect effect on fantasy value, ERA is almost always a fantasy category. So it’s pretty clear why it’s important to compare it with Statcast’s xERA equation.

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1/21/24

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to our Patreon!!

Follow us on Twitter

• Jason Collette – Cohost
• @justinmasonfwfb – Host/Producer

PATREON

• Join our Patreon for live video feeds of each show
• Watch the video feed replay on YouTube

Notable Transactions/News/Rumors

• Josh Hader signs with the Astros
• Robert Stephenson to Angels 

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