The 2022 Pod Projections are now available and include over 550 player forecasts! As usual in my Pod Projection posts, I’ll dive into my projection methodology (detailed in Projecting X 2.0) by sharing my process on several hitters and pitchers.
Yesterday, I compared my starting pitcher ERA Pod Projections to Steamer and discussed what was driving the gap. Let’s now review the pitchers I’m projecting for a worse ERA than Steamer. Remember in yesterday’s article I mentioned that my ERA projections are lower in aggregate, so the gaps are much smaller here. The important part is the ERA relative to the projection set, so these are larger differences than the absolute gaps would indicate.
After comparing my Pod Projections to Steamer for bother home runs and stolen bases, let’s now flip over to starting pitchers. This comparison is far easier, as it’s a ratio stat and therefore won’t need to be converted to the same PA scale. So let’s find out which starting pitchers I am forecasting for an ERA that is most below what Steamer is forecasting.
As we head into primetime drafting season, I will be rereleasing my positional ranks. Here are my current ranks for starting pitchers for 2022, my third of the offseason. I will post updates as things change with signings, injuries, or news in Major League Baseball. On the Sleeper and the Bust Patreon, you can see the rankings updated live.
You can review my ranks for other positions here: https://fantasy.fangraphs.com/category/rankings/
What will we do without the zeros and ones of spring training? The underground, black market .csv file that comes from the person who knows the person who operates a Rapsodo in a mini-camp? How will we go on without knowing spin rates or the depth of clay infield impression drilled by various brands of signature spikes? I have an idea, let’s make it up.
Buoyed by the welcomes we received upon our return to Fangraphs this season and the compliments extended to us last week, we now fearlessly resurrect what was, from 2015 to 2019, an annual Birchwood Brothers feature: a consultation of the Holy Quadrinity. For newcomers, and for that matter oldcomers: years ago, Bret Sayre, then of Baseball Prospectus, posited that “the three skills that are most important to the art of pitching [are] getting strikeouts, reducing walks, and keeping the ball on the ground,” and that pitchers who can do those three things, as betokened by their above-average numbers in those categories, are worth the attention of those who ponder such matters. He called this approach The Holy Trinity.
Then we came along and, like John Calvin standing on the shoulders of Martin Luther, suggested a variant of Sayre’s approach. We call it the Holy Quadrinity, which admits only pitchers who are in the upper half of two categories (strikeout percentage and soft-hit percentage) and the lower half—in other words, the better half—of two others (walk percentage and hard-hit percentage). We figured this approach wouldn’t turn up much interesting stuff—that the guys who qualified would be the guys who had good seasons by any metric you cared to use. And there were a lot of those guys. But we were surprised to find how many not-great-season (and, occasionally, not-good-season) pitchers this approach identified. Moreover, and more importantly, although the Quadrinity isn’t infallible, it points you more often than you’d expect in the direction of moderately-priced or even cheap pitchers who go on to have better seasons than the market expects.
Yesterday, I shared my latest pitcher xK% equation and identified and discussed the nine starting pitchers that most underperformed those marks.
Let’s return to our review of 2021 performances, this time flipping over to starting pitchers. Back at the beginning of 2017, I revealed the latest version of my pitcher xK% equation. From an adjusted R-squared perspective, it was the best equation I had developed. I’m never satisfied though and decided to perform my annual xMetric review over the winter, which included xK%. Lo and behold, I was able to develop an even better equation, which seemed impossible, but nonetheless, actually happened.
The 2022 Pod Projections are now available and include nearly 550 player lines! As usual in my Pod Projection posts, I’ll dive into my projection methodology (detailed in Projecting X 2.0) by sharing my process on several hitters and pitchers.
The Starting Pitcher (Part II) Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Nick Pollack
Strategy Section
Podcast (beat-the-shift): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS