A couple weeks ago I shared my Hail Mary infield, a group of infielders you should consider collecting on a struggling team in the hopes that you hit it big with them returning to form. The idea is that you can also get them at a discount, thus a surge to their talent level would net a huge payoff. Today I’m going to hit the mound and discuss the Hail Mary pitchers. Pitching can deliver a bigger payoff in most cases. League standings will dictate which side you’re better off attacking, but a big pitching run can pay huge dividends in relatively short order.

Four of the five hitting categories are counting stats so the accumulation to make a move can be more of a slow burn. Additionally, the one rate stat (usually AVG or OBP) doesn’t usually move too quickly once we get around this point in the season as the ABs/PAs start to pile up. A single exemplary performance from a hitter – even something like 5-for-5 with a homer and six RBIs – rarely has the impact that one huge start does and once start stringing them together, movement comes quickly.

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It was a Monday night just a few weeks ago that I watched the destruction of two high-quality pitchers (one is a bona fide ace) sink my DFS evening yet again and I actually wrote about it at another outlet. Just three weeks later, I saw my DFS night end before it started as another pitcher had his face caved in and this time by baseball’s worst team both by record and wRC+ against righties. Michael Pineda was rocked for eight earned on 11 hits in just 3.3 innings with nary a strikeout to soften the blow.

It’s the second time in three starts that Pineda has been blown up like this and the fourth time this year he’s allowed five or more earned runs. This is the same guy who has a 16-strikeout game on his ledger this year as well as three others of nine strikeouts. This is the same guy who had a 2.72 ERA through his first seven starts of the season.

But the volatility, my god, the volatility.

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We’re nearing mid-June and you’re languishing in eighth place. Your sleepers  have not panned out as a group and you were dealt some tough injuries in April. What? Now Andrew Miller is headed to the DL, too? That’s OK, he was your backup plan to Dellin Betances in the first place so you still have an elite closer in Betances since you drafted both guys. But that offense… whattya gonna do about that offense?

Sitting near the bottom of the standings around this time of the year can feel hopeless. I mean, being 38 points out of first place feels insurmountable. After all, we’re definitely no longer at the “start” of the season and we are no longer seeing 20-point shifts by teams in the standings on a daily basis. And yet there is still a ton of time left in the season. Even enough to overcome a 38-point deficit. Of course, if you find yourself behind this 8-ball (or 38-ball, amirite?), standing pat probably isn’t the move.

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I committed Matt Holliday to my disabled list Monday, marking the 14th(!!!!) DL move I’ve made for my primary team this season. Perhaps the state of my team is implied by the length of its disabled list. If not, I’ll make it clear: my team has been bad. Pretty darn bad.

All of my drafts were especially poor. I drafted the same terrible, injured, underachieving players in every league, so it has been generally a nightmare all around. The hole I dug for myself is deep. Kyle Lohse broke ground on said hole with an 8-run Opening Day outing that lasted all of 3-1/3 innings, and we never looked back. Woe is me. Alas, it’s barely the second week of June, and I have already resorted to my Hail Mary play: buy low on everyone in sight.

Calling it “buying low,” however, is a bit misleading. It’s a shallow league, so there is arguably a stronger incentive for owners to cut bait on underachieving name-brand players in order to ride the hot streaks of unknown quantities, given they crop up more abundantly. What I’m actually doing, then, is loading up on underachievers from waivers. My team is already underachieving. These guys are already underachieving. How much worse could it get?

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We’ve talked in the past about how important playing time is and obviously it is ideal to roster as many starting players as possible. But sometimes a player is worthy of a starting role and simply has a roadblock or two in his way. Maybe he is a young player with a veteran in front of him. Maybe he is new on the scene so there may still be a question of sustainability. Maybe his team is just deep and can’t get all the good players in all the time. Or maybe his team is just too dumb to play the better player.

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Last week, I introduced xISO, a metric that calculates a player’s expected isolated power based on his batted ball profile (per FanGraphs’ recently added batted ball data courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions). Having looked at a handful of underachieving National League outfielders for its induction, I’ll expand the analysis of xISO here today.

I’ll reiterate some key points. I used all 12 years’ worth of batted ball data for all player-seasons in which a hitter qualified for the batting title. The OLS regression specified pull rate (Pull%), hard-hit rate (Hard%) and fly ball rate (FB%) as explanatory variables and produced the following equation, which I deliberately omitted last week:

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A few days back, David Appelman announced the addition of Hard Hit, Medium Hit and Soft Hit data to the batted ball stats on FanGraphs. Since then, I have been playing around with them, and found some interesting things.

But I had no idea what to make of those things. If a guy has an extremely high Hard Hit%, what does that mean? Should we expect regression? Should we expect it to continue? And what does that mean for fantasy value?

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Shin-Soo Choo is no longer elite. He used to be, though. Back in 2009-2010, he put up a pair of excellent .300, 20/20 seasons which yielded a 139 wRC+, good enough for 11th in baseball. Just two years ago in a much tougher scoring environment across the league, he hit .285 and went 20/20 yielding a 151 wRC+ (9th-best). The move to Texas wasn’t really an upgrade in park, but it didn’t project to really hurt him, either. After all, his best work came in Cleveland which is hardly known as a hitter-friendly ballpark (these days it plays plus for LHB, though not overwhelmingly so).

Injuries marred his debut season in Texas resulting in an uninspiring effort that saw him hit 13 homers with a .242 AVG, .714 OPS, and just three stolen bases (in seven attempts) in 123 games. Both the ankle and elbow injuries that nagged him throughout the season required surgery and so there was a reasonable expectation of health for Choo coming into the season. His 2014 campaign offered a discount as he sank to the 51st outfielder off the board this draft season. Given the wretched first month to his season, it’s hard not to wonder if either of last year’s injuries or perhaps a new one has cropped up for Choo.

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There was a time in fantasy baseball when prospect call-ups barely registered on the radar. I know that sounds crazy given how much we as a community overreact to them now, but when I first started playing there were maybe a handful of call-ups we were waiting for in-season and even then, expectations were tempered. Today, we often have outsized expectations attached to prospects which lead to a lot of disappointment. The newest names almost sure to disappoint the fantasy community are catchers Blake Swihart and Austin Hedges.

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Let’s cut straight to the chase. Take a look at the statistical snapshots below:

Obviously, Player 1 is benefiting from a higher batting average on balls in play while Player 2 is getting burned a bit by his. Still, take away their triple-slash lines (but leave the isolated power) and you have two players with almost identical numbers, down to the six steals on eight attempts and the meager isolated powers (ISOs). Where they differ a bit is in plate discipline: Player 1 has a much healthier walk rate than Player 2 and a couple fewer strikeouts. So while Player 1 is benefiting from the a higher BABIP, he can also reasonably be expected to post a marginally higher batting average and noticeably higher on-base percentage. Most importantly, the two hitters are eligible at the same position and are, thus, substitutable.

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