Rubby de la Rosa Looks Ready to Breakout

In looking through my three annual league rosters this morning, I noticed there were two players I have in each of those leagues. Those two are Marcus Semien and Rubby de la Rosa. To give some perspective, one of these leagues is a deep, 20-team industry dynasty league and the others are keeper leagues. I made a trade during the offseason for de la Rosa in the dynasty league because I love his velocity and think he has the potential to be one of those Garrett Richards type post-hype breakout pitchers.

When it comes to de la Rosa, it feels like he has been in the league forever. What is surprising is that he turned only 26-years-old in early March. The time with which he has been in and around the league has seemingly given some fatigue around adding him to their fantasy rosters, so I was able to add de la Rosa in both keeper leagues relatively early in the season.

The reason I am telling you this is that the more I look at de la Rosa’s numbers, the more confident I am in him moving forward both for this season and the future. Last week, Eno wrote about the limits of utilizing strikeouts minus walks pre-draft and one of the guys that popped up as having a high quality strikeout minus walk rate this season is de la Rosa. Eno finished the thought by saying “And this is also why K-BB is such a great small-sample in-season predictor: it ignores that data which takes the longest to become meaningful.”

So far this year, the only thing that has really kept Rubby from being owned across all leagues in all formats is his home run rate. This is somewhat to be expected pitching in Arizona, but his home run per fly ball rate is still much higher than his career average, while his strikeout and walk ratios are much better.
Rubby is currently owned in only 23% of yahoo leagues and I think those in standard formats leaving him on the waiver wire are missing a potential big win for the rest of their year. At age 26 it looks like he is finally putting it together. He has not changed his arsenal or the usage of his pitches, his velocity has not gone down, but it looks as if he is learning to be a better pitcher rather than simply a thrower.

To put some numbers behind that statement, his swinging strike rate, contact rate, and zone-contract rate are all the best he has ever had, excluding his 11 relief appearance season with the Red Sox in 2013. To put his swinging strike rate in perspective, his 12.6% mark is 11th best in the league. He has a better rate than guys such as Felix Hernandez, Madison Bumgarner, Michael Pineda, Carlos Carrasco, and Jacob deGrom. Missing bats at as high a rate as he has is a formula for success, especially since that has come with more command. His command has greatly improved and he has not had to sacrifice velocity in order to do so.

Looking at this simplistically, guys with a 4.50 ERA, 3.34 xFIP, and 3.43 SIERA are not certain to straighten their ERA out, but they are statistical oddities that deserve attention. I am confident that Rubby, despite pitching in a homer friendly park, will be an asset in almost any format. While you still have the ability to pick him up, you should, and if you can trade for him at an extremely low cost, adding a guy like Rubby who has all the signs of a breakout down the stretch can be a big boost to any team for almost no risk.