HPAABOTRS

Among the peccadilloes and eccentricities that we’re willing to confess to in this forum, perhaps the most embarrassing is our continuing thirst for 80’s synthpop, which we were too old for even the first time around. The sillier and stupider the better, as far as we’re concerned: Human League, Soft Cell, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Human League, A Flock of Seagulls, Men Without Hats, and of course post-Vince Clarke Depeche Mode, goth-synth titans so dumb they make Ozzy Osbourne look like Harold Bloom. (Come to think of it: Have you seen Oz lately? Even with the makeover, he does look kind of like Harold Bloom, who’s looked pretty much the same for the last 40 years.)

We feed our synthpop jones primarily via (unsolicited and uncompensated endorsement coming up) the Underground 80s channel on Soma FM, which is internet-only, commercial-free, listener-supported streaming radio. DJ Rusty Hodge really knows his stuff, so in addition to the aforementioned synthpop gods, we get (for example) Vicious Pink, Kissing the Pink (different band, apparently), Kon Kan, SSQ, Experimental Products, Blancmange, and Book of Love. These are essentially fungible groups who sound exactly the same: boxy primitive-drum-machine beats, two-finger analog-synth riffs, and a collection of Bowie imitators, male and female (or, just possibly, the same one guy, perhaps Bowie himself) handling vocals on top, with the lyrics what you’d expect from Brits who left school at 15 or (if it happens to be Krautsynth) people for whom English is a second language. We dote on this stuff, but always find ourselves saying: who are these guys?

We mention this now because we find ourselves in a similar position in Fantasyland. Every other night, it seems, some starting pitcher whose name either means nothing to us or rings only the faintest bell gets summoned from the minors for a start—sometimes just for the nonce, more often to join the rotation when someone else craters. When we see these puzzling names on the schedule, we check the guys out via the usual sources, and while the contents of their arsenals differ widely, the bottom line for the experts always seems to be the same: whether a soft-tossing lefty or a hard-throwing righty, the pitcher in question always figures to wind up as a 4th or 5th starter. Fangraphs trails Baseball Prospectus in the all-important ridiculous-acronym category, so here’s our contribution to catch-up: let’s call these pitchers, collectively, HPAABOTRS, which is pronounced “HIPAA bothers” (which in certain respects it does) and stands for “He projects as a back-of-the-rotation starter.”

Anyway: the pitchers in question make their starts, we shun them, someone else grabs them, and they often do great: Taylor Jungmann, Justin Nicolino, Cody Anderson, just in the past week or so. Some of our readers, we recognize, may have dossiers on these guys already, and know enough about them to use Tyler Cravy but avoid Tyler Wagner. If you’re such a person, we salute you. We’re not, though, and it seemed to us, anecdotally, as if this group of pitchers is doing quite well overall—well enough so that you might want to grab every one of them for their first start. So we decided to check it out: If you just used every relatively obscure starter making his major-league debut, how would you do?

The answer: you’d do okay. We decided to look at every pitcher this season who (1) was making his MLB debut (2) as a starter, (3) wasn’t on a major-league opening-day roster, and (4) isn’t listed among Fangraphs’ Top-200 Prospects for the season [ because you don’t have to know much to grab Matt Wisler when he comes up]. The results: 11 pitchers as of Tuesday evening, including Cody Anderson, Justin Nicolino, Taylor Jungmann, Joe Ross, Jon Moscot, Tyler Cravy, Mike Montgomery, Tyler Wagner, Christopher Berk, Mike Wright, and Tim Cooney. The outcome: 64 2/3, 61 H, 17 BB, 22 ER, 42 K, 3.06 ERA, 1.206 WHIP, 3 W, 4 L, 6 QS. In other words, better overall than you’d do with an average major-league starter. The low 2.47 K/W ratio is of course dismaying, but what did you expect? The reason these guys aren’t elite prospects that everyone knows about is that they can’t blow hitters away, and thus don’t impress scouts and sabermetricians as much.

But maybe this small sample is too flattering. How did similar guys do last year? We added the requirement that the debut not occur after August 31st, when the bar presumably gets lower. The results weren’t as good, but were definitely congruent. Using Fangraphs’ 2014 Top-100 Prospects (no Top 200 last year), augmented by BP’s similarly-sized group, to eliminate the too-obvious, we wound up with 26 pitchers: Rudy Owens, Red Patterson, Drew VerHagen, Dallas Beeler, Marco Gonzalez, Jake Buchanan, Andrew Chafin, Buck Farmer, Kyle Ryan, Anthony Ranaudo, Yohan Flande, Christian Bergman, Robbie Ray, Yohan Pino, Chase Whitley, Scott Carroll, Anthony DeSclafani, Tsuyoshi Wada, Trevor May, Tyler Matzek, Jacob deGrom, David Buchanan, Odrisamer Despaigne, Jesse Hahn, Kyle Hendricks, Chase Anderson. (It speaks tragic volumes about the baseball half-life that about a third of those names are meaningless for 2015, but let’s shed a tear and move on.) The numbers: 141 2/3 IP, 129 H, 51 BB, 96 K, 3.49 ERA, 1.27 WHIP, 9 W, 8 L, 10 QS. Still a bit better overall than you’d do with an average MLB starter; certainly no worse. You’d pay a buck for that package of stats from a single player in the pre-season draft, right?

We don’t know what to do with this information. Are we really going to take a flier on the next guy who fits this model? That would be 27-year-old 6-season minor-leaguer Josh Smith, pitching for Cincinnati against Pittsburgh last night—that is, tonight, because we’re writing this on Tuesday afternoon, and agonizing over this very question as we do. How obscure is Smith? Brad Johnson, whose job consists of knowing this kind of stuff, wrote Tuesday in Fangraphs that he is flummoxed by Smith, about whom, he says, “we know so little.” At this point, with decent starting pitching the difference for us between immortality and ignominy, we’re probably so desperate that we’d try whoever it is who’s replacing the unfortunate Jon Moscot in the Reds’ rotation—not just Smith, but even Depeche Mode, Ozzy Osbourne, or Harold Bloom.

Nope–we couldn’t quite do it. We got Smith in our daily-transaction H2H league, then didn’t activate him. Back tomorrow with a report. (Wednesday morning update: Our uncharacteristic prudence was fortunate. Smith produced 3 IP, 3 H, 6 W, 4 ER, 3K, no decision.)