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.
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.
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.
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:
| FD | DK | SIERA | K/9 | BB/9 | HR/9 | Barrel% | Opp | Opp wRC+* | Opp K% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freddy Peralta | $10,200 | $9,300 | 3.32 | 12.60 | 3.76 | 0.72 | 5.9% | STL | 91 | 22.2% |
| Nathan Eovaldi | $9,100 | $9,800 | 3.61 | 9.33 | 1.49 | 0.91 | 6.9% | CLE | 91 | 23.8% |
| Shohei Ohtani | $10,800 | $8,700 | 3.89 | 10.97 | 3.97 | 0.93 | 7.0% | TEX | 80 | 23.2% |
| Adam Wainwright | $9,600 | $10,000 | 4.06 | 7.99 | 2.10 | 0.99 | 6.5% | MIL | 93 | 24.6% |
| Kyle Gibson | $9,400 | $8,100 | 4.64 | 7.21 | 3.44 | 0.95 | 5.1% | MIA | 82 | 25.4% |
| Glenn Otto ** | $6,700 | $5,000 | 1.76 | 12.60 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 20.0% | LAA | 103 | 23.6% |
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.
Recently, I started working through predicting which pitchers limit hard contact and by how much. Today, I dive into if contact out of the strike zone can be predictable and if that contact is weaker than contact in the strike zone. First, I need to go over a couple of concepts
The division of credit for WAR goes with 50% to hitting and 43% to pitching and 7% to fielding. People way smarter than I have determined that split.
Major Note: For simplicity, I’m going to adjust the pitching percentage up to 100% so the fielders are allocated 14% of the credit for what happens when a pitcher is on the mound.
On top of the fielding allocation, not every batter puts the ball in play with the league at an 8.7% BB% and 23.4% K% this season. So now, 68% of all at-bats end with a ball in play with 14% points of that 68% goes to the fielders and 54% (68%-14%) to the pitcher’s batted ball talent. So it works out that 79% (54%/68%) of a pitcher’s batted ball results should be attributed to him. Read the rest of this entry »
8/30/21
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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.
We’ll look at the three aces, the primary pivot off of the aces, and some DK SP2 options. Here’s my preliminary pool:
| FD | DK | SIERA | K/9 | BB/9 | HR/9 | Barrel% | Opp | Opp wRC+* | Opp K%* | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C. Sale | $10,700 | $10,200 | 2.43 | 11.70 | 0.90 | 1.80 | 3.8% | MIN | 87 | 24.3% |
| M. Scherzer | $10,500 | $10,400 | 3.17 | 12.17 | 2.48 | 1.35 | 9.6% | SDP | 109 | 20.5% |
| Y. Darvish | $9,900 | $9,900 | 3.26 | 10.90 | 1.91 | 1.13 | 7.1% | LAD | 116 | 21.2% |
| E. Hernandez | $7,600 | $7,600 | 3.33 | 11.09 | 1.67 | 2.09 | 8.8% | WSN | 89 | 23.6% |
| Z. Gallen | $7,900 | $7,200 | 3.95 | 10.52 | 3.54 | 1.30 | 7.6% | PHI | 96 | 22.6% |
| Y. Kikuchi | $7,700 | $7,300 | 4.06 | 9.49 | 3.51 | 1.46 | 9.5% | KCR | 99 | 20.4% |
The blue bar represents the START of a new tier.
I generally don’t include IL’d guys. It’s especially precarious this late when guys could just be shutdown if they are on bad teams.
I view these as 2-3 week rankings given the volatility of pitching so I will include at least 1 and probably 2 more updates on the site before season’s end, but I am updating them regularly on our Patreon.
FYI: instead of updating the rankings in September, I started the Daily SP Chart.
Sometimes conclusions to tough questions just don’t sit right, especially when the answer is “We don’t really know.”. How pitchers control batted balls has never had a simple definitive answer. I’m going to give it another shot.
I have some ideas of what might be a cause, but I want to start with a blank slate. What’s got me diving back in is the following table from a recent article of mine.
While a few percentage points of difference may not seem like much, I expected a lot more regression to the mean with my limited sample size. With just the above information, I felt I needed to re-investigate the subject. I know that some of the regression amounts have previously existed, but I wanted to dive in with some fresh eyes and new batted ball data. Read the rest of this entry »
Cleveland has become something of a starting pitcher factory. It really started with the emergence of Corey Kluber and reclamation of Carlos Carrasco in 2014 and has continued through this year despite a bevy of injuries. Their best starters – Shane Bieber and Aaron Civale – have spent months on the IL and derailed Cleveland’s season, but there has been plenty of opportunity for the likes of Triston McKenzie, Cal Quantrill, and Eli Morgan, showing that Cleveland is likely to remain a pitching force for years to come. I want to focus on McKenzie today.
