Miracle WHIP?

There’s about a month to go, and maybe you need some Wins—usually the closest category—in your Fantasy league. Or perhaps your counting stats aren’t going anywhere, and your only chance to finish in the money is a sudden and decisive bump in ERA and WHIP. Or maybe, as was the case for us last year, your league has an innings maximum, your adversaries are nudging against it, you’re not, and you’ve got a chance to jump several points in Strikeouts, but you don’t want to torpedo your rate stats to do it. Or possibly you’re a DFS player, and you’re tired of putting Mike Zunino and Starlin Castro in your lineup because the only pitchers you can stand to use are the ones who cost too much and Zunino and Castro are all you can afford.

Yes, most of us need starting pitchers, and there are always plenty of them out there. The established good ones are, of course, happily wedded to their owners, none of whom is you. And the young and glamorous ones—Henry Owens, Aaron Nola, Manny Banuelos—command a Spitzeresque premium that you’re unwilling to pay. The rest of them are lined up, winking at you like the crew of a North Vegas brothel. Most of them are cheap, all right, but some have obviously been irreversibly damaged by life, and your problem with the rest of them is how to avoid infection.

As always, we’re here to assist. Back in June, we took a look at the stats of starting pitchers who were making their major league debut and were unheralded, which we defined as “not in the Fangraphs Top 200 Prospect list.” The numbers, for all of 2014 and 2015 up to that point, were encouraging—if you’d used every one of these guys in his first start, you’d have gotten about what you’d expect to get from an established major league 4th or 5th starter.

We’d love to tell you that this strategy continues to work, but unfortunately it doesn’t, as you probably know if you adopted it. Sorry. Since we weighed in on this subject, eight guys have fit the description: Matt Boyd, Toru Murata, Zack Godley, Tyler Duffey, Colin Rea, John Lamb, Jerad Eickhoff, and the dismaying Zach Lee (4 1/3 innings pitched, 12 baserunners, 7 earned runs). The totals: 39 2/3 IP, 61 Baserunners, 28 ER, 36 K, 3 W, 5 L, 2 QS, 6.35 ERA, 1.54 WHIP. Even without Lee’s contribution, those numbers ain’t good. So except for the occasional good matchup—like Eickhoff’s against the Marlins, which we touted to you on Twitter last week—there’s nothing there.

Still,don’t despair. We have no true obscurities to promote to you, but there’s at least one experienced starting pitcher out there who’s under-owned
(24% of Yahoo leagues, 22% of ESPN), has pitched better this season than it looks like he has, and figures to have a good September.

That would be Kyle Hendricks of the Cubs, whose saga would fascinate us even if we didn’t already own him and hadn’t lived and died with him, and benched and started him at the most inopportune moments. The second most interesting thing about Hendricks is that all of his stats are pretty good, except the ones that matter to us. He’s in the upper third or so of MLB starters in Groundball-plus-Infield Fly Percentage; in Strikeout Percentage minus Walk Percentage; and in Weak Contact Percentage. His Component ERA Percentage is near the bottom of the league, his HR/FB percentage is on the high side, and his BABIP is near the top.

So what we have here is a starting pitcher on a solid, contending team who’s had a measure of success and has, on the whole, been pretty unlucky. Reason enough to grab him, probably. But the most interesting thing about Hendricks seems not to involve luck. The guy just can’t pitch into the sixth inning. The numbers, once you go looking for them, leap out at you. Hendricks doesn’t have big split differentials. And, like any other human, he has nightmarishly dreadful days and dreamlike sublime ones, most notably his complete-game shutout against the Padres in May, right after we benched him. Essentially, though, he’s a five-inning pitcher. The proof: in 37 major-league starts, his ERA in innings 1 through 5 is 3.40, and his WHIP is 1.10. He’s attempted to navigate the 6th inning in 23 of those starts. The result: a 5.73 ERA and a 1.72 WHIP in that inning. You’d almost just as soon have Zach Lee.

(Here again we wonder, as we have in other contexts, whether a statistical construct is dictating on-field strategy. Would anyone care whether Hendricks pitched in the sixth inning if it didn’t take at least 6 innings for a “Quality Start”? As it is, Hendricks has the second-lowest QS percentage among ERA-qualified MLB pitchers, which is what the foregoing would lead you to expect.)

We wish we could tell you that Hendricks’s 6th-inning meltdowns consistently correspond to some pitch-count number. But they don’t, which is probably why the Cubs have let him pitch into the 6th so much. Sometimes it takes Hendricks about 75 pitches to get to the 6th, and sometimes it takes about 90. The outcome’s the same, though.

But (we hear you saying), you must have us confused with someone who cares. If we managed the Cubs (we hear you continuing), we’d infallibly yank Hendricks after five, but Joe Maddon is signed through 2019, so he probably won’t get fired for at least another year, and he sees things differently. We hear you. Indeed, we’re huge Maddon fans–and we’re starting to think he’s got the situation sussed. Take a look at Hendricks’s most recent starts. Against the Giants on August 8th, he took a 5-3 lead into the 6th, put the first two hitters he faced in the 6th on base, and got yanked. Result: crisis averted, Cubs and Hendricks win. Hendricks’s start on August 14th was the worst of his career, and no strategy other than making him stay home could have salvaged it. Then, on August 21st, Hendricks goes five innings against the Braves, throws 93 pitches, and gets pinch-hit for in the bottom of the 5th with the Cubs down 3-2. Result: Cubs win 5-3.

So maybe, just maybe, the Cubs are on top of the situation. Obviously, Maddon isn’t going to say for public consumption something like “we’ve concluded that Kyle is just a five-inning pitcher. Too bad, because his stuff is great, as long as it lasts, and if he could carry it an inning or two longer he’d be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. But we’ve got a World Series to win, so we’re never going to let him pitch beyond five.” You don’t get any votes for Manager of the Year if that’s how you go about your business. And suppose we’re right about this. You get eight more starts from Hendricks, 40 or so innings in all, ERA and WHIP as indicated above, no QS but, say, 4 wins. Worth a shot, we say–starting tonight, when Hendricks goes against the Giants again, this time on the road.





The Birchwood Brothers are two guys with the improbable surname of Smirlock. Michael, the younger brother, brings his skills as a former Professor of Economics to bear on baseball statistics. Dan, the older brother, brings his skills as a former college English professor and recently-retired lawyer to bear on his brother's delphic mutterings. They seek to delight and instruct. They tweet when the spirit moves them @birchwoodbroth2.

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cuck city
8 years ago

IIRC, he has had several freak things happen as well during his good starts that prevented him going deep — rain delays after 4 solid innings, etc…