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.
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.
Follow us on Twitter
STARTING PITCHERS Pt. 5 (#81-101 + 10 more!)
81-86 (1:40)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
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
NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS/INJURIES/RUMORS
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Time now for our ever-popular annual effort to identify players—pitchers this week, hitters next—upon whom Fortune smiled or rained pigs last season. Our theory is that this season, as is her wont, Fortune will aim her slings and arrows at other players than last year’s star-crossed guys, whereas last year’s lucky guys will need industrial-strength umbrellas. We further theorize that the Fantasy Baseball draft market fails to accord luck the respect it demands in this, as in all other, human affairs, and undervalues the unfortunate and overestimates…you get the idea.
And how do we ascertain who was lucky and unlucky? Quite simply, in fact. For lucky pitchers, we try to find guys who had high BABIPs and high HR/FB Ratios but low Hard-Hit Percentages. Then we flip that over to find the unlucky guys. Uncomplicated as this approach is, it steers you in the right direction more often than you might expect. Thus, last year it steered you towards Stephen Strasburg (we know you already knew he was good, but we were suggesting he’d be even better, and he was) and away from Jose Alvarado (who quickly blew up as Tampa Bay’s closer). Read the rest of this entry »
Every now and then, I need to refresh my memory on what the baseline stats are for various pitch types, and that brings me back to this piece on pitch type performance from fellow RotoGrapher Alex Chamberlain. I am not only reminded of how inferior sinkers generally are at inducing whiffs and preventing hits on balls in play, but of Alex’s advice to pitchers: “Seriously, don’t throw a sinker.”
But, of course, lots of big league pitchers do, and 33 of them threw at least 500 sinkers in 2019. Given that pitchers stand to give up fewer hits if they switched from their sinker to another offering — assuming their version of that alternative pitch was at least decent — it seems like pitchers who ditch or de-emphasize their sinker should get more attention for doing just that. It also would seem that more pitchers would make that change. In every year of the 2010s, there were no more than 10 pitchers in a given season who decreased their sinker usage by 10 percentage points or more (and also threw at least 100 innings both the current and previous seasons).
Read the rest of this entry »
02/26/20
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
NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS/INJURIES/RUMORS
STARTING PITCHERS Pt. 3 (#46-65)
46-50 (9:30)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
The Pod Projection process sharing continues! The 2020 forecasts are now available and include over 500 player lines. As usual, I’ll dive into my projection methodology (detailed in Projecting X 2.0) by sharing my process on several hitters and pitchers.
It is time for an update to my starting pitcher ranks for 2020. I will be discussing some of these with Paul Sporer and Nick Pollack on tomorrow’s Sleeper and the Bust Podcast, so definitely listen to that.
All ranks are based on 15-team standard leagues. ADP is from ADP and reflects Online Championship’s data since 1/1/2020. For more ranks of mine for 2020, you can click the links below: Read the rest of this entry »