NL SP: The Overvalued Club
“He’s a prime sleeper candidate”. “He has great breakout potential”. “He has huge upside this season”. Blah blah blah. Sometimes I get bored reading about all the potential sleepers and breakouts for the coming season. Too much optimism. I need some balance in my life. Avoiding the season’s busts, or in this case, the pitchers who will not earn their cost, may be just as important as unearthing the surprise stars.
I compared my own NL starting pitcher rankings with both the RotoGraphs staff composite (which includes mine…yeah this obviously makes this comparison less than perfect, but it’s close enough) and the current ADPs on Mock Draft Central. I then averaged out the difference between each pair of rankings (mine vs. RotoGraphs and mine vs. Mock Draft Central) to determine who my valuations indicate to be overvalued. Note that only those pitchers who appeared in all three sets of rankings were included.
The I Thought I Was A Sleeper? I’m Confused Club Member…
James McDonald
RotoGraphs Rank: 48
MDC Rank: 44
My Rank: 63
Isn’t it crazy when the same player could be considered both a sleeper and a bust (or overvalued in this context) depending on the source? McDonald seems to have been around forever, but the 26-year old has thrown just 140.2 innings in his career. Now in his first full season as a Pirate, it will be more difficult than ever to reach his potential, at least from a fantasy perspective. Besides his injury history, McDonald has been a fly ball pitcher in the Majors and his minor league track record does not give us much hope for that to change. Combine that with his mediocre control, and he is simply not someone I am too excited about. His SwStr%, Contact% and ClStr% from StatCorner hint at a pitcher whose strikeout potential is good, but not great. As such, he might be a cheap source of strikeouts in NL-Only leagues, but there are much better speculations to be had to fill out the end of your rotation in your mixed league draft.
Vice President of the Club…
RotoGraphs Rank: 33
MDC Rank: 25
My Rank: 56
David Golebiewski wrote an excellent article yesterday on Jurrjens’ missing ground balls, so I won’t add much to what he already said. It appears that his sparkling 2009 season when he posted a 2.60 ERA is still sticking at the forefront of fantasy owners’ minds. Of course, his xFIP that year was a much less impressive 4.34, so the 2010 regression, injury related or not, should have been no surprise. Bottom line with Jurrjens is that with only meh strikeout and walk skills, he will need to rediscover his worm-burning abilities to have any chance of contributing mixed league fantasy value.
And the CEO and Most Overvalued…
J.A. Happ(y)
RotoGraphs Rank: 53
MDC Rank: 37
My Rank: 80
I had to leave the “y” in there as I never fail to accidentally type it when spelling his name. This time was no exception. Maybe it’s a sign that I will be wrong about him, but I am pretty confident in saying that J.A. will not make his owners happy this season. Like McDonald above, it feels like Happ has also been around for a while now, but he has still pitched just 289 Major League innings throughout his career. With that in mind, it isn’t that crazy that Happ’s career 3.27 ERA is more than a full run below his 4.41 FIP and 4.61 xFIP, as not even two full season’s worth of statistics qualifies as a rather small sample size. Therefore, we simply cannot say just yet that Happ will be one of the rare exceptions to consistently outperform his expected ERA metrics.
Happ’s skills are as mediocre as you could find, as his strikeout rate has bounced around the league average, while his career walk and annual ground ball rates have been worse than the league average. A .266 BABIP and absolutely unsustainable 81.4% LOB% has made Happ look like a much better pitcher than he actually is. Though, his slightly higher than league average pop up rate and his fly ball tendencies have helped to reduce his BABIP. Even so, it would be wise to expect that mark to rise. That regression is going to cause Happ’s ratios to jump and ultimately hurt his fantasy owners. When you combine that with his injury history, I see little reason to invest, especially at the price required to roster him.
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
Reminds me of the old joke about Kevin Appier: “If you gave him an ‘H’, he’d be happier.”
thats awesome.
You deserve a raise
The price required to roster him? Do you live in Houston Mike? Happ is being treated like dirt in drafts. I’m talking real drafts here, not robots taking him based on the default ranking that ranked him based on his stats.
Happ is a SLEEPER this year because people are avoiding him like the plague.
Happ went for $9 in my NL-only, 14-team, 5×5 league. He was definitely overvalued there with no Houston fanboys.
JA Happ for $9 (assuming a typical budget) in a 14 team NL Only Rotisserie league?
Yes please. And thank you.
I’m with you. He has a deceptive delivery which helps his stuff to play up & I think he easily bests the modest projections put forth by BJames et al.
I believe I drafted him in the 19th round of a competitive 12 team league & I don’t think that sort of ADP is uncommon right about now.
McDonald was the 81st SP selected in our league, Jurrjens 58th and Happ is still available. Mike you could have had them all.
Hey idiot, how do you feel now? Jurrjens still overvalued?
why the hell are we so obsessed with K rates? Joba Chamberlain, Kerry Wood, these guys all showed “future talent” because of amazing K rates. What happened? O yea, stuff dwindles but the ability to get outs by outsmarting a hitter doesn’t. It’s why Moyer is still pitching at 700 years old. Jair had one season where he had like 100 bad innings. The rest of the career he’s shown the opposite. Yet these stats that measure everything he’s not good at say that’s the true Jair? What a crock of shit. Jurrjens obviously isn’t sub 2 ERA good, but he probably is sub 3 good. He’s only 25 too, so it’s not out of the question that he’ll get smarter and better.
We care about K rates because Ks are a fantasy category. If you play in a league with an innings cap, a low K rate hurts you.
Aside from that, it’s pretty hard to maintain that sub-3 ERA you mention with a K/9 rate below 6 (Jurrjens is at 5.5). It’s not impossible, but it requires great control, groundball rates, and/or luck. Over the last decade, 7 guys have done it:
Greg Maddux (2002)
Tom Glavine (2002)
Bartolo Colon (2002)
Derek Lowe (2002)
Tim Hudson (2002 and 2010)
Trevor Cahill (2010)
R.A. Dickey (2010)
Oddly, all 8 of those seasons were either 2002 or 2010 with none in between. More to the point, all of those guys except Colon and Glavine had very good groundball rates, which Jurrjens doesn’t.
What Jurrjens *has* done exceptionally well this season is avoid walking batters. If he can keep showing that kind of command, he’ll perform very well, and if you predicted before the start of the season that he’d cut his walk rate by almost 60%, congrats.