Cal Quantrill came over to the Cleveland Guardians (should have been the Spiders) in a trade with the Padres that involved pitcher Mike Clevinger. Quantrill didn’t have much success in San Diego and Cleveland decided to use him in a relief role for 2020. After spending the first two months of 2021 in the bullpen Cal Quantrill finally got the call to join the Cleveland rotation. In 2021 he finished with 149.2 innings, appeared in 40 games, and pitch 22 games as a starter. As a starter, he produced a 3.12 ERA, 12.9 K-BB%, and 1.15 WHIP.

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Given the big adjustment to Major League hitters compared to minor leaguers, small sample volatility, and the randomness of the three luck metrics (BABIP, HR/FB, LOB%), rookie starting pitchers often disappoint. However, that disappointment is sometimes superficial and only on the surface. If you look deeper, you might discover that the pitcher did everything well he could control, but other factors conspired against him to inflate his ERA. With that in mind, let’s discuss five rookie starters with hefty ERA marks, but SIERA marks around 4.00 or below. These guys may even be sitting in your free agent pool and ready to be plucked as potential keepers next year.

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In most weekly leagues, the ability to add and drop players is gone for this season. Since there are no more moves, I’m going to analyze the most added and dropped players in NFBC’s Main Event and Online Championship with the main goal to create a composite replacement-level player.

For reference, the Online Championship (OC) leagues have 12 teams while the Main Event (ME) has 15. Both of the leagues require 23 starters each week with 7 bench spots (no IL spots). At all times, 360 players will be rostered in an Online league and 450 in a Main Event league. The reason I decided on the two NFBC formats were:

• The data is freely available.
• The information is from several leagues (43 Main Events, 199 Online Championships) with the same ruleset.
• The leagues remain competitive longer since there is decent money on the line.
• With two formats (12-team and 15-team), a comparison can be done on the different player pools.

I know at times we may seem a little NFBC centric here at Rotographs. Now, if some other platform had the ability to select a league type and make available all the adds and drops, I’d use them. The NFBC is the only platform that offers this service. Read the rest of this entry »

Our pitching in MLB DFS isn’t just a source of fantasy points. The price tags on pitchers make it so they shape they dictate the freedoms and restrictions of building our lineups. Before reading this article, it’s highly suggested that you read my article, “DFS Pitching Primer,” so the concepts discussed here make more sense.

That we’re not selecting the best players. We’re constructing the lineups which carry the most leverage without sacrificing many projected fantasy points.

There’s some talent on this slate with mixed matchups, so we have a lot of work cut out for us, tonight. Early on, my pool is:

Full slate, so I won’t go through every pitcher, as there are a lot of gas cans, too. If you think I’m leaving someone out, feel free to tweet me. I will confess Zack Greinke and José Berríos are close and might enter my pool. Marcus Stroman has a great matchup, but we can play Kyle Gibson for less in an even juicier matchup, so I left him out, but he’s fine, too.

Lucas Giolito off the IL is way too much of a pitch count concern; for his price, we need volume. He’s projecting very well, with a projected pitch count in the low-80s, so any word that he gets normal workload, and he’s high on my list. Just not aggressively foreseeing that at this moment of the day.

THE ACE — Gerrit Cole

Don’t be scared of Gerrit Cole without the sticky stuff. Since June 23, he has a:

2.89 SIERA
13.65 K/9
15.5% SwStr%
35.1% O-Swing%
2.76 BB/9
1.16 HR/9
11.4% Barrel%

Going into Camden Yards, there could be more concern for lesser control and his awful power prevention than Yu Darvish post-sticky stuff, but that 11.4% is on contact and Cole is inducing chases and not giving up contact.

The Orioles aren’t terrible, so we don’t have to play Cole, but Cole is the best pitcher on the slate and that isn’t close. The control and power concerns with the ballpark are valid reasons to bump him closer to the field, but he’s still way above the field.

THE PIVOTS — Nathan Eovaldi, Frankie Montas

Nathan Eovaldi is firmly the second-best pitcher on the slate and feels safer because he draws the terrible Mariners, who gift strikeouts to all pitchers. Eovaldi’s elite control gets him deep into games for innings, so the context raises his upside into ace territory. He just isn’t Cole.

Cole has that 13-15 strikeout upside every slate against all opponents in every ballpark, whereas Eovaldi is relatively capped. For the price, Eovaldi isn’t a huge step. Battling the megachalk possibility of Cole, his ownership is a huge discount, though. And ownership is a cost. Remember that.

If that’s still too much to spend under the condition of not playing Cole, Frankie Montas draws a tough strikeout matchup, but a great one for run prevention in a great ballpark for doing so. On DK, he’s more than Eovaldi, so the argument is tough; but, on FD, he gets cheaper — where we only play one pitcher. There are a lot of baked-in strikeouts, his control is just a bit worse than Cole’s, and his power prevention has been elite post-sticky: 0.56 HR/9 on a 7.3% barrel rate.

Where I’m not playing Cole, I’m loading up on these two at what could be single-digit ownership on FD. Eovaldi will catch some ownership on DK, but will still be at a huge discount. THE BAT like Eovaldi for more raw points than Cole on DK, so that could put his ownership on the rise, so keep a look out.

THE SP2s — Drew Rasmussen, Jesús Luzardo, Touki Toussaint, Kyle Gibson

Drew Rasmussen has the worse matchup we’re discussing. The Jays are packed with power and don’t strike out much. But Rasmussen has shown elite power prevention and strikeout stuff. Chances are, the Jays win this battle, but we don’t care about what will happen a vast majority of the time. We care about how often the Jays will wet the bed in relation to Rasmussen’s ownership. Rasmussen has the stuff to succeed and any group of hitters can fold any night. This is a solid low-exposure spot for leverage.

The Jesús is a solid pitcher who gives up too much power at times. The Nats really only have a couple of guys to supply it. If Jesús Luzardo can get through he heart of the order, his strikeouts should cruise through this lineup for free. He’s the top spend-down option on both sites, despite his control and power prevention issues, as his K/9 is enough for me. The play is volatile and we should watch ownership before we decide to hit the gas, though. Higher-owned, he becomes a bad play; low-owned, a fantastic play who allows us to do whatever we want for hitting.

Touki Toussaint is all over the place. He can’t find the strike zone, but it might not matter in a great spot for run prevention against the Quad-A Rockies. The Rockies aren’t a great strikeout matchup, but their active roster’s 32.8% O-Swing rate is among the worst in the league this season. This is a sneaky-great spot for Toussaint to rack up the strikeouts. The fear, of course, is whether or not he can command his pitch count to stay in the game long enough.

Everyone is gonna play Kyle Gibson — I think. He draws the Quad-A Cubs, who strike out a ton. Gibson himself doesn’t have the baked-in strikeouts to lock him in, but his lack of command could induce chasing that helps him compile the strikeouts. We’ve seen him go seven (and even eight) innings this season quite a bit, so his seven shutout innings with six strikeout ceiling is in full effect. The downside, of course, is that those potential strikeouts can easily become walks and he barely last four or five innings, which is why I’m more likely to be defensively underweight on the flocking field than aggressive overweight.

Stats cited are since 2020 unless otherwise noted. Park factors via EV Analytics.

Do the top starting pitchers on contending teams pitch more innings as the season goes on and their team fights for a playoff spot? Do the top starting pitchers on teams that are likely to clinch a playoff spot pitch less innings as the season goes on, to save their arms for the playoffs? Unfortunately, these questions arose in my mind after I traded a big bat for a front-line starter on a team that is sure to make the playoffs right at my league’s trade deadline. Was that a mistake? Should we value hitters more than top starters on teams likely to clinch early? Is that too many questions for an opening paragraph?

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Our pitching in MLB DFS isn’t just a source of fantasy points. The price tags on pitchers make it so they shape they dictate the freedoms and restrictions of building our lineups. Before reading this article, it’s highly suggested that you read my article, “DFS Pitching Primer,” so the concepts discussed here make more sense.

That we’re not selecting the best players. We’re constructing the lineups which carry the most leverage without sacrificing many projected fantasy points.

This slate is loaded with pitching talent, but I have a narrow pool a lot faster than I normally would. Without ownership data, yet, we’ll focus more on deductive reasoning to see how I narrowed this pool to:

Instead of analyzing tiers of the pool, this week, we should go down the list of who I’m likely not playing and why.

Carlos Rodón might be the best pitcher on the slate. It isn’t the matchup with the Red Sox that throws me off so much as his pitch count. He only missed one start with a sore shoulder and I wish he missed more and stretched out again in rehab starts. As is, we have no clue how limited he’s going to be. We can gamble on these scenarios often, but there’s enough pitching on this slate that we don’t have to bother our brains thinking much about it.

Tanner Houck is one of the best per-inning pitchers on this slate, but he hasn’t gone more than 5.1 innings in any starts this season. Yet, he’s priced right around the point where we want shots at six innings.

Joe Musgrove is still a really good pitcher post-sticky stuff, but he isn’t elite. Facing the Dodgers on a full slate, I want elite.

Framber Valdez is fine, but there are a lot of baked-in strikeouts on this slate and he has very little. Besides, his FD price is stupid. On DK, he’s viable, but we’ll get to a far lower-owned play under $10k later.

Tylor Megill is a good pitcher, but has some power prevention issues that don’t seem like early-career bad luck. Against the Yankees, we don’t need to test the skill luck factor.

Trevor Rogers is yet another really good pitcher on this slate. He’s as playable as Rodon, Houck, and Megill. Maybe more playable because his power prevention can neutralize the Braves right-handed thump. If he gets lost in the ownership shuffle, he’s the most likely to enter my pool as the day goes on. But, boy, the Braves can really getcha’.

Shohei Ohtani falls in the Musgrove category of a really good pitcher in a crappy matchup. Ohtani’s command has been on since his beatdown in Yankee Stadium, but the K/9 has fallen to 9.00 in the process. The Astros just don’t strike out, so our ceiling looks more like seven innings with five strikeouts than six or seven strikeouts. And this matters because a shutout, let alone clean innings, are hard to come by in this matchup. On DK, though, we could put him in my pool in the case that we have money left over, but we can spend down further for similar production.

Julio Urías has been great this year. The matchup against the Padres isn’t quite Musgrove or Ohtani’s hands-off matchup, but it’s still a left-handed pitcher against a lot of right-handed thump. That said, 9.67 K/9, 1.84 BB/9, and 1.09 HR/9 on a 5.9% barrel rate is all superstrong and no one is gonna play him at this price, so we can spend up to him with the extra salary. But, again, this is similar to Rogers’ situation. Except Rogers is cheaper and in a better spot.

Then, there’s a bunch of overpriced gibberish like Michael Wacha, Marco Gonzales, Madison Bumgarner, and Jordan Montgomery. Volatile plays with little upside like Eli Morgan, Matthew Boyd, and Paul Blackburn. Then, the gas cans like Chris Ellis, Griffin Jax, Daniel Lynch, and Jon Lester. Blackburn has a notable matchup with the Rangers, but should be overowned for the lack of strikeout upside.

I didn’t forget about Adrian Houser. There’s just nothing to say about him.

I also didn’t forget about Glenn Otto. The kid has electric strikeout stuff that we’d love on DK in a lot of matchups. But the Athletics don’t strike out much and this ballpark depresses strikeouts. Without an innings ceiling, we should be out. But if ownership funnels way up to Germán Márquez and Ian Anderson, he’s certainly viable.

Leaving us with:

Robbie Ray

Robbie Ray is the best play on the slate at first glance. This season has been really great for him because he’s finally found his command. With it, his BB/9 has fallen to 2.28 and his HR/9 down to 1.36 this season — despite an 8.7% barrel rate. Sure, he still gets hit hard when he gets hit, but “when he gets hit” is the caveat, as he’s still compiling 11.49 K/9.

Post-sticky stuff (since June 23), Ray’s gone at least six innings in 13 of 14 starts with 11.33 K/9, 2.17 BB/9, allowing only 0.79 HR/9. I’m not a recency bias guy, but this is clearly an elite pitcher finding his stride.

The Orioles are an about-average matchup, Camden Yards sucks for power prevention, but I don’t care. Looking at what we’ve eliminated, there are so many pluses here that the minuses are blips on the radar.

Tyler Mahle

Ownership on Tyler Mahle is usually tough to gauge on full slates. It looks like Mahle will get overlooked, despite having a great season so far because: (a) people don’t realize how much of a strikeout machine he is and (b) people don’t realize how many the Cardinals are against right-handed pitching. In a pitchers’ park at single-digit ownership, yes, please.

Ian Anderson

This is the chalk on both sites. Ian Anderson is criminally cheap on both sites for the Marlins matchup. So many strikeouts in here that the walks will likely not matter. If we’re spending down on FD, we’re eating the chalk here, but there’s a similarly priced pitcher who’s very similar to whom we can pivot on DK.

Germán Márquez

No one’s gonna play Germán Márquez because of Anderson’s situation, despite Márquez having slightly more K/9 and less B/9. Sure, Márquez has to battle Citizens Bank Park, but he battles Coors just fine, so why the hell would Philly be a problem. They’re an average, so the ceiling of seven strikeout in seven largely clean innings is certainly in play.

Anderson is the better projection, but Márquez is the better DFS play at microscopic ownership over Anderson’s megachalk.

Stats cited are since 2020 unless otherwise noted. Park factors via EV Analytics.

With September comes a number of minor league callups that figure to remain with the big league club through the end of the season. This includes new starting pitchers making their MLB debuts. Let’s discuss four of those.

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Yesterday, I discussed five starting pitchers who appear inside the top 20 in strikeout rate over the last 30 days. These weren’t necessarily the leaders, but interesting names worth a deeper dive. Let’s now flip to the other side and discuss five pitchers who appear near the bottom of the strikeout rate leaderboard over the last 30 days.

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As we head into the final month of the season, let’s discuss five qualified starting pitchers that appear inside the top 20 in strikeout rate over the last 30 days.

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Our pitching in MLB DFS isn’t just a source of fantasy points. The price tags on pitchers make it so they shape they dictate the freedoms and restrictions of building our lineups. Before reading this article, it’s highly suggested that you read my article, “DFS Pitching Primer,” so the concepts discussed here make more sense.

That we’re not selecting the best players. We’re constructing the lineups which carry the most leverage without sacrificing many projected fantasy points.

Both sites are very different on this slate because of pricing, but the overall slate is such that there are no truly great aces. Without ownership data, we’ll focus more on matchups to narrow our pool:

TIER ONE: KINDA’ ACES — Peralta and Ohtani

Freddy Peralta is the best pitcher on the slate, but he’s projected at only 75 pitches coming off of the IL. This doesn’t take him out of play if there’s an ownership gap between him and Ohtani that supplies us leverage. If Peralta is rolling — translation: throwing strikes — then, 75 pitches can get us some game depth to compile Ks with his elite K/9. His ceiling is capped at under 30 points, but his median projection might be good enough if we can get 15-to-20 from our SP2, as well.

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