In my previous post, I looked at the hitting landscape for The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational (TGFBI) drafts. I also analyzed my own personal team from league #14, which was dubbed as the “league of death.”

Onto the pitching …

General Observations

Starting Pitchers

Let’s first compare starting pitcher ADPs from the past two seasons of TGFBI.

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With the increasing specter of a very delayed start to the season, teams on the bubble of contention have more incentive to make a play at fielding their best roster from day one. The lengthy Major League season is designed to weed out fluky short term performances. For example, the Phillies finished fourth in the NL East last season, but they led the division through the end of May.

The 2020 season was shaping up to be a good one in terms of competitiveness. I count only seven not making any effort to contend. Another eight are probably best classified as long shots with a chance to surprise us. At the very least, they’re moving in the right direction. It’s these eight teams that are most positively affected by a shortened season.

This can be great news for prospects, especially pitchers on innings counts. So today, I’d like to look at some pitchers who are now poised to receive a larger share of the workload.

Established Guys

Lance McCullers Jr.

Julio Urias

Brandon Woodruff

Carlos Martinez

Dinelson Lamet

These guys aren’t meant to be the focal point of this article, so let’s touch upon them briefly. All five have experienced health-related woes in recent years which were expected to affect their availability for a full 32-start season. McCullers and Urias are the only ones known to be on an innings limit, but it’s fair to assume the others were going to be very closely monitored at the very least.

All five of these arms have the potential to go on ace-like tears. One characteristic of this group is a propensity for short starts. McCullers and Lamet are max-effort pitchers who aim to fire five highly effective frames before heading to the shower. The Brewers love to maximize their pinch hitter usage which limits Woodruff’s ability to work deep into games. Martinez used to munch innings, but he hasn’t started since the first half of 2018.

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Let’s dive into another Pod Projection! As a reminder, the 2020 forecasts are available now and include over 500 player lines. The projections follow the same process that resulted in the most accurate non-aggregate system of 2019 as calculated by FantasyPros.

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Last Thursday, I identified and discussed six starting pitchers that my Pod Projections forecasted a significantly better ERA than Steamer. Now let’s turn to the starting pitchers my projections are forecasting a significantly worse ERA than Steamer. It is important to note that I’m clearly projecting a better run environment than Steamer, so there are far fewer pitchers I’m projecting a worse ERA for.

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In the second installment in my series on the factors impacting components of BABIP, I move on from flyball BABIP for pitchers to ground ball batting average for pitchers. This analysis produced one result that really surprised me: whether or not a pitcher has a tendency to allowed pulled grounders does not have much of an impact on the ground ball batting average they allow. I didn’t anticipate this, because hitters put up a collective .180 batting average on pulled grounders in 2019, but a .306 average on all other grounders. For pitchers who allowed at least 225 grounders in seasons between 2015 and 2019 (n=286), the negative relationship between pull rate and ground ball batting average allowed (GB Avg) was significant at p < .05, but with just an .012 Pearson’s r.
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Today I continue my series comparing my Pod Projections with Steamer to uncover guys with categorical upside and downside. Previously, I was focused on hitters. I now turn my attention to starting pitchers and ERA.

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03/04/20

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to Fangraphs! With a standard $20 membership, you help maintain and improve our database of stats and graphs as well as our staff of 8 full-time employees and over 50 contributors. The premium ad-free membership at $50 year supports site growth and also includes faster load speeds and better site performance. You can also support monthly for just $3.

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• @sporer – Host
• @justinmasonfwfb – Co-Host

STARTING PITCHERS Pt. 5 (#81-101 + 10 more!)

• NFBC Average Draft Data (set to Online leagues and start date of 2/26/20)

81-86 (1:40)

• Johnny Cueto
• Brendan McKay
• Steven Matz
• Michael Pineda
• Ross Stripling
• Reynaldo López

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03/02/20

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to Fangraphs! With a standard $20 membership, you help maintain and improve our database of stats and graphs as well as our staff of 8 full-time employees and over 50 contributors. The premium ad-free membership at $50 year supports site growth and also includes faster load speeds and better site performance. You can also support monthly for just $3.

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer – Host
• @justinmasonfwfb – Co-Host

NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS/INJURIES/RUMORS

• Blake Snell’s elbow (2:00)
• Aaron Judge’s shoulder/pec issues (5:05)
• Andrew McCutchen likely not ready for OD (11:30)
• Griffin Canning likely not ready for OD (14:00)

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A little more than a year ago, Alex Chamberlain and I looked into what type of impact a slew of Statcast measures had on a pitcher’s overall BABIP rate. Hard-hit rate and exit velocity on ground balls (EV GB) had the strongest correlations, but it seemed unlikely that the latter would have much to say about which pitchers would be best at limiting hits on flyballs in play. In general, it seems that BABIP could be influenced by different factors depending on the type of batted ball.

So let’s test that out. This column is the first in a series of four where I will be looking at the impact of various measures on flyball BABIP and ground ball Avg, both for pitchers and hitters. I’m kicking this off with an analysis of flyball BABIP for pitchers.
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Can you believe March is just two days away? Draft season is upon us! I’ve updated my rankings and added 50 starters since the last one came out in January. I’ll have another update in March with some notes on most of the entrants (I can’t promise I’ll have a tidbit on all 175 arms, but many will have a stat or note similar to this run of rankings).

As you know, I feel there are globs of talent throughout the SP rankings wherein a 20, even 30 spot difference isn’t as vast as it seems because we’re splitting hairs between very similar arms and yet even knowing that I still agonize over the slottings and move guys up or down 2-3 spots like crazy before posting a new set of ranks. You’ll see tiers set up by the blue bars and that indicates the beginning of a new tier.

Enough chatter, let’s get to the rankings and start discussing them in the comments below. Again, if you think #34 should #29, I’m less interested in that as I probably agree that they could be flipped. Let’s focus on the bigger splits, like if you feel #83 should be #45 or #27 should be #62, etc… Of course you can also just make comments or ask questions about a pitcher without relating it to their ranking. I’m open to discussing my thought process on any of the 175 pitchers.

In the March run, I’m probably going to rank about 70 and then separate the other 105 into specific groups (prospects, injury arms, K-heavy, etc…) since I think that has some use in addition to a 1-175 list.

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