Talent changes are easier to identify with pitchers earlier in the season, as changes in velocity, pitch shape, and pitch mix are more readily apparent. Change isn’t always good and turning one bad pitch into a good one isn’t a guarantee of success but it’s a pretty good start.

When a pitch has seen dramatically different results against it, chances are something changed, whether solely involving the aforementioned qualities above, or how the pitches fit together as part of a player’s pitch mix whole. Change is everywhere and ongoing, we just have to find the where and (hopefully) why.

Using Run Value (RV/100 pitches) as our barometer, we’ll see what we can see about which pitchers have seen the most dramatic turnaround with one (or more) of their offerings. Remember that RV is the total run impact, according to the base-count state when the pitch was thrown. The more negative, the better. Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Civale is having a fantastic season thus far. Through six starts, he has a 3.20 ERA and 1.04 WHIP in 39.3 innings. He has just an 18% strikeout rate and 10% K-BB rate, though, which is why he has a 4.42 SIERA. He isn’t missing bats all that well, but instead keeping the ball on the ground with a 54% GB rate that is 8th among starters. He has never been a strikeout stud, but he had a 21% mark coming into this year and with his depth of arsenal, there was reason to believe he could improve even more.

What happened to his strikeouts?

ARSENAL CHANGES

He has switched over from a changeup to a split-change and he’s using it more often, up 7 points to 16% usage. He has also used his slider more often, up 5 points to 14%, while his cutter usage is down 9 points to 20%. They are distinctly different pitches, too, with a 5-mph velocity split and very disparate usage profiles (sliders aren’t even thrown to lefties). He has also switched from a sinker to a four-seamer as his primary fastball.

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Yesterday, I listed and discussed the qualified starting pitchers that have most underperformed their SIERA marks. It was a good initial list of potential acquisition targets (hopefully to be had at a discount!) in which to perform further research. Now let’s move to the SIERA overperformers. This is the group you should be thanking Lady Luck for if you own any of them as their ERAs are likely to rise, perhaps significantly, over the rest of the year. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will be bad and hurt your fantasy team, but you may very well get far more value in return for what they will provide over the rest of the way if you dangle them to your leaguemates in a trade.

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Eno Sarris said not to look at HR rate. He said it and I’m going to listen. However, FIP and xFIP are not HR rates, and I’m going to look at that. Too often we assume that others know, or we actually know, what a statistic represents. We hear it, we think it, we know it. But, take a moment with me to reinvigorate our understanding of these two very important statistics.

FIP gives us an idea of how a pitcher performs regardless of who is playing defense behind him. It accounts for strikeouts, walks, hit by pitches, and home runs allowed. FIP gives us a better understanding of how a pitcher is performing than ERA. xFIP tells us all the same but accounts for the volatility of the HR rate. Quoting from our very own FanGraphs glossary, xFIP is:

calculated in the same way as FIP, except it replaces a pitcher’s home run total with an estimate of how many home runs they should have allowed given the number of fly balls they surrendered while assuming a league average home run to fly ball percentage (between 9 and 10% depending on the year).

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Just like we are usually better off using xwOBA over a small sample to evaluate a hitter’s performance, the same concept applies to starting pitchers and using SIERA instead of ERA. So much could happen outside a pitcher’s control, such as balls finding holes through the infield or routinely finding fielders, strong or weak bullpen support stranding baserunners or allowing them to score, etc, that ERA just isn’t a very accurate measure of performance this early. So let’s dive into the qualified starting pitchers who have most underperformed their SIERA marks. Like I cautioned with xwOBA, SIERA is not meant to be predictive, so don’t assume these pitchers will all post ERAs near their SIERA marks the rest of the season. Instead, I use it by simply substituting ERA with SIERA to determine how a pitcher has pitched so far. ERA is completely meaningless to me at this point, as SIERA does a much better job summarizing the skills I care about into an ERA-like metric.

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There’s a long pre-packaged intro that I have queued up to introduce this weekly post, but I’m not gonna use today. Let’s cut the crap and get to business:

Just play Jacob deGrom.

Now that that’s out of the way, FanDuel is solved, so we’re gonna focus on the SP2 slot on DraftKings — just for today. Instead of tiers, we’re gonna look at three types of construction and focus more on game theory than the skills of the individual players and their matchups. Think about lineups, not players.

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Baseball is happening! I decided for the entire season to run a weekly article on pitchers who have been “heating up.” I will dive into what it could mean for the pitcher and what you should do with them. This should be a captivating concept because it will be pitchers of all levels, anywhere from aces to pitchers you would have never drafted. That’s what it’s all about, catching players as they improve and acting on it before anyone else can realize. Welcome to “Throwing Heat!”

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Last week we looked at a group of hitters who were under 50% rostered, with 25+ PA, and over 6 points/game in Ottoneu FanGraphs points leagues. Today, we’ll turn our attention to the mound, and look at a set of SP who are under 50% rostered, have at least 2 games started to-date, and are over 5 points/inning.

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There have been some really exciting starts from young pitchers so far this season. On Sunday, Michael Kopech pitched five innings, faced 18 batters, and struck out 10 of them. When I saw that he was starting in place of Lucas Giolito on Sunday morning, I totally rolled the dice and got lucky. Adding a young pitcher who I’ve been rooting for over the past few years and it paying off was great. But, I’ll admit, it made me feel a little empty inside.

As I stared at the tv and excitedly encouraged whiff after whiff I slowly began to realize that a win wasn’t going to be possible. I knew Kopech would be on a pitch count and I knew he wasn’t going to suddenly become a rotation mainstay, but I went for it anyway, dropping a set-up reliever in order to gain some strikeouts. I felt oh-so-sad when Tony La Russa effectively looked into the camera and told me not to get used to it. Monday morning had me reflecting, was it worth it? Which is better to roster, low-pitch count starters like Kopech or middle/set-up relievers?

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Our MLB DFS lineups don’t start and end with pitching. I’m not saying to punt pitcher every night or even every now and then. I’m just stressing that each and every slate does not rest upon our pitching. That said, the pitcher position is so vital because it’s the slot where we can get the most accurate projection in an extremely volatile wing of DFS.

Our pitching 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.

TIER ONE — ACES: Scherzer, Giolito, and Buehler

What’s fun about tonight’s three aces is that they vary is price, so we can build three completely different lineups with them — especially on FD, where $1,400 separates the top-two and $2,200 separate the most expensive to the least expensive ace. Max Scherzer is the most expensive on both sites, while Lucas Giolito is the cheapest and under $10k on DK and Walker Buehler is the cheaper and under $10k on FD.

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