We are now two months into the season and I’ve definitely evolved my thinking on a number of pitchers. I try not to overreact and change my outlook start-to-start, but we’re getting a relatively worthwhile sample on the books and pitchers are always changing so if you stay married to everything you thought in March, you’re going to get left behind on guys for better and worse. Here are three guys I’ve really changed my tune on so far (and they’ll weirdly all lefties).

Steven Matz is Really Good

I hated Matz’s draft slot coming into the season. I thought he was being way overdrafted as the 30th SP off the board and it was more because of his health than his skills. It felt like a lofty draft status based on six MLB stats. Coming up through the minors, he put up great numbers, but only once topped 106 innings in a season. He was pummeled in his debut after being pushed back to April 11th, but he’s been damn near unhittable since: 1.13 ERA, 0.85 WHIP, 49 Ks and 7 BBs in 48 IP. He has three scoreless starts and three where he allowed just 2 ER. A balky elbow caused another layoff in the midst of this run, but he has shown no ill affect with two brilliant starts since returning.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve seen a paradigm shift in fantasy baseball the last couple of years as starting pitchers are being trusted more and more as early round, bankable assets. There has been a sharp change in offensive environment across the league as the “PED era” has given way to “Strikeout era” and fantasy managers don’t want to get caught without a premium ace or two, similar to how you needed at least a couple 30+ HR bats in the early-2000s to have any chance in the offensive categories.

This year is the most confident I’ve ever seen the market be in starting pitching as the top 20 were all drafted within the top 70 picks overall. Another six after that still made the top 100. Taking it a step further, 18 of those 20 were top 50 picks compared to just 10 pitchers elected as such in 2015. We are now a month and a half into the season and a whopping 60% of the top 20 starters are underwhelming against expectations. Some are lagging in a category and feel just a click off from dominating. Others are just flat out bad. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be investigating what’s going on with those in the top 20 who are underperforming. Today, let’s look at of the biggest laggards compared to expectations: Max Scherzer.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s understandable if you came into the season with Chris Tillman buried on your starting pitcher list. After back-to-back intriguing seasons in 2013-14, he ran all the back toward and even beyond his ominous FIP numbers with a 4.99 ERA in 173 innings. In those two solid seasons, he posted a 3.52 ERA, but was all the way up at a 4.22 FIP. An already-tenuous skillset sank further, yielding a 1.9 K:BB ratio and took Tillman off the radar in just about every league type.

On Tuesday night he dropped seven strong on the Yankees, shrinking his ERA to 2.81 and tying a career-high with nine strikeouts (7th ever, 2nd this year). This time around, there’s actually support for his numbers. He has a 2.64 FIP thanks in large part to a 26% strikeout rate and just 24 hits allowed in 32 innings. His 9% walk rate is a little high, but workable with those strikeout and hit rates for sure. His 11% swinging strike rate is far and away a career-high and supports the surge in punchouts.

What’s Tillman doing to draw such strong results? Let’s take a look at the three main areas that I (and most, I think) often look to first when a pitcher is showing a big change in performance, for better or worse.

VELOCITY

I’m fairly certain that velocity is the first check for everybody when seeing what’s up with a pitcher. Brooks has Tillman up over a full tick at 93.8 MPH – a career-best and his first time north of 93 on average since 2012. The cutter is the only other pitch where more velocity would help and while he is up, it’s negligible at just 0.6 MPH. The 87.4 MPH mark is second-best in his career behind the 87.5 he logged in 2013. His velocity increase is a tangible, positive change, but it alone certainly doesn’t explain this jump in performance.

Read the rest of this entry »

I practice extreme patience in fantasy baseball because to me there’s nothing worse than overreacting on a guy, cutting him, and then watching him get back on track for one of your competitors. However, I also realize that sometimes the patience is exercised to a fault, especially in shallower leagues (10-13 team mixers where the waiver wire is going to be more plentiful). I’m trying to strike a better balance this year and be willing to take chances on available guys, even if it means cutting someone who might get back on track, but just isn’t performing right now.

Of course, to pick someone up, someone has to go. And that decision is often the more agonizing of the two so today I’ve got three arms drafted in the top 60 starters of NFBC leagues that I’m ready to move on from in favor of the latest hot prospect being called up or fast starters with some bankable skills changes behind their run. We’ve already seen Blake Snell, Henry Owens, Aaron Blair, and Jose Berrios get the call. And sure, they could flop and have you back on the wire picking one of these guys back up, but for now I’m comfortable cutting them to invest elsewhere in the hopes of a big payday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before you know it, we’ll be turning the page on the first month of the season even though it feels like Opening Day just happened. The baseball season seems to move at about 300x the speed of winter so I feel like the All-Star break will be smacking me in the face way too soon. You’ve probably heard it a million times – even from me – that early season analysis is hard because of the scant sample sizes. Yeah, it is hard, but if it were easy then there probably wouldn’t be jobs for twerps like me so I’d best stop complaining and get to analysis’ing (some say analyzing, but I mean, it’s obviously analysis’ing, right?).

Let’s take a quick look at two arms on the rise and see if we’re buying them the rest of the way:

Vincent Velasquez – If you were inclined to get super-excited by his 16-strikeout masterpiece about the Padres, he promptly laid a bit of an egg five days late (though only two of the five runs were earned) and brought everyone back to earth. Though I don’t think a modest start erases what many believed after the gem: he’s good, really good. In fact, the only thing holding Velasquez back this year is an innings cap that he will face this year. Additionally, if you were ready to discount the big outing because of the Padres, consider that he drew 27 swings-and-misses – a rarity even in this strikeout area. Look at what this joker tweeted out:

Pitchers w/27+ swinging strikes in a gm since '14: Kershaw 35, Kershaw, Carrasco, Stras 30; Sale 29; Max 2x, Kluber, Hamels, & VV today w/27

— Paul Sporer (@sporer) April 14, 2016

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Pittsburgh Pirates sign or trade for a pitcher, we all take notice. Of course, when you take A.J. Burnett and Francisco Liriano from 5.00+ ERAs to All-Star caliber arms (and Burnett even made the ASG last year), your bona fides are well established. Make no mistake that it’s a full organizational effort in Pittsburgh that helps turn these talented, but struggling arms into strong rotation (and sometimes bullpen) assets, but one guy tends to get the bulk of the credit as the face of the revolution: pitching coach Ray Searage.

Searage joined the team as the pitching coach in 2011 and he has been the point man for pitching during their incredible turnaround from bottom-feeder to contender. Jon Niese and Juan Nicasio instantly became more fantasy relevant the second they reached Pittsburgh. Niese because he was already a solid major league starter (career 3.93 ERA, three season at 3.71 or better) who could jump into mixed league viability with some refinement and Nicasio because he’s a live arm (mid-90s heat, filthy slider) who could be a few tweaks from being the next Burnett/Liriano.

One of the risks when we see something like this from a team is to just assume it’s always going to work. Reputations can foster laziness so I wanted to look back at Searage’s track record since joining Pittsburgh and see just how well he was doing with the reclamation projects. I found nine instances of eight starters (remember, Burnett left and came back) over the years and looked at their performance in both K%-BB% which highlights skills and ERA+ which measures performance relative to league context.

ERA+ is measured on a scale where higher is better and 100 is average. K%-BB% is simply the rates subtracted and again, higher is better. Average has grown from 10% to 12% league wide since Searage took over, but we’re more focused on what the individual pitcher is doing there as opposed to league averages.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, I’m naming my Wednesday piece now! It’s going to be called “Tipping Pitches”. It’s just a snazzy new name, it doesn’t mean I’m only going to be writing about Eduardo Rodriguez every week. But it will be my pitching-focused column whereas my other offerings at RG won’t necessarily always revolve around the mound. 

Whenever we see offseason movement for pitchers, we immediately analyze the park and league fit for the pitcher in question. And that’s understandable, those are big factors in how he might perform for the upcoming season, but one aspect that doesn’t always get its due as a factor is defense. It gets more attention when a pitcher joins a team with a good defensive reputation, but when a team adds a plus defender, I don’t think it’s always factored in for the pitchers on that team. Three pitchers stand out as major beneficiaries of defensive moves this offseason. Two saw their team add a defensive stud who should impact their bottom line while the third joined a team with a great defensive crew that is tailored to his game.

Garrett Richards gets Andrelton Simmons at SS

Richards probably doesn’t get enough credit for his 2015. He came in off the knee injury that cut his breakout 2014 short and was expected to miss upwards of a month at the outset. Instead, he didn’t miss any time and took 32 solid turns through the rotation. He wasn’t nearly as good as 2014, but regression was expected even with full health so the fact that the knee was likely playing a role at least early in the season should get him some benefit of the doubt. He still managed an above average 207.3 innings of work, a career-high.

Read the rest of this entry »