Steve Pearce, Jake Arrieta, And Information Gaps
Since I released my initial, flawed roto rankings on Tuesday, we’ve been discussing my most unusual choices. Wednesday was Carlos Carrasco day, and yesterday was Adam Jones‘ turn to shine (in the sense that he was a featured part of the article). Today I’ll focus on highlighting a class of player who could be misrepresented. You may not believe it, but I haven’t conducted advanced analysis on every player. Shocking, I know. While I have an idea of an embarrassing quantity of player values, some of those are based more upon impression than science or scouting.
Within these rankings, the poster child is probably Steve Pearce. I know his power outburst is based purely on pull-field home runs. In ranking him the 20th outfielder – one ahead of Jones – I’m saying his .263 ISO is mostly real. He’s been a lefty masher for years (.472 wOBA last season), but he also posted a stout .377 wOBA against fellow right-handers. His BABIP ran a little hot against same-handed pitchers, so that’s something to watch.
That’s all surface level analysis. I need to scout and find some deeper hooks before becoming a true champion of Pearce. What if pitchers just stopped throwing pull-able pitches to him? Could he still hit for power? Perhaps my assumption that he’ll play everyday with at least league average performance against righties is wrong. Maybe his numbers against lefties will drop from Earth shattering to merely good. Pearce smells like an obvious candidate for regression, yet my ranking seemingly accounts for none.
What we have in Pearce is a very classic rankings conundrum. There is information supporting bullish and bearish predictions. In many ways, Pearce reminds me of vintage Allen Craig. I watched plenty of both players – Pearce last season and Craig in his good years – without ever understanding why they were hitting well.
On the other side of the fence, I have Jake Arrieta penciled in as the 16th starting pitcher. The bullish pick is based off his strong strikeout, walk, and whiff rates combined with a sub-3.00 ERA, FIP, xFIP, and SIERA. On the FanGraphs player page, he has everything a fantasy owner could want in a pitcher. Admittedly, I also have some warm and fuzzy feelings for Arrieta. He helped me to finally defeat my former college teammates in our alumni H2H league.
The problem, insofar as there is one, is that I don’t recall watching Arrieta last season. That seems impossible to me, but at the very least, his starts weren’t memorable. Especially with pitchers, who are so much easier than hitters to scout, I’m slightly worried about the lack of visual feedback in my ranking. He does rank 27th in the latest version of pitch arsenal score, which does something to allay my fears. As a commenter pointed out, his slider rate is a cause for concern, although it’s slightly below the warning level Jeff Zimmerman identified during his research.
Rather than get into the mucky details, here are a few other players who rated relatively highly despite some information gaps.
- Rene Rivera
- Brandon Belt
- Chris Carter
- Josh Harrison
- Danny Santana
- Jorge Soler
- Oswaldo Arcia
- Rusney Castillo
- Yasmany Tomas
- Mike Fiers
- Jake Odorizzi
- Tanner Roark
This “information gap” I’m referring to isn’t enough to change how I rank these players – at least not substantially – but it does mean I have less conviction about their place in the rankings. I can use the information readily available on FanGraphs but that can only brings us so far. To take your fantasy play to the next level, you have to find insights above and beyond those available to your league mates. That, I suppose, is the lesson of the day.
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It seems that each of the players you listed all can be catgorized in the “have shown flashes of being good, but only in short sample sizes” or “have been better than prospect profile suggested, and 2015 will validate big league performance or bring them back to earth.” In other words, it seems the players you listed are all potential break out candidates for 2015, or brokeout in 2014 and this year will show if they are legit or not, due to finally getting playing time or improving in a major statistic that changes the type of player they are. And the “information gap” really is there sample sizes reaching points that will legitimize whether or not their current level of production can be maintained in the future. Pearce, Arretia, and Harrison are in the group as well, but the difference is that they have had their breakouts.
I don’t have “warm and fuzzy” feelings about Arrieta, primarily because I’m an Orioles fan and his tenure with the team was marked by an awful lot of 2-0 and 3-1 counts. When Showalter read him the Riot Act in 2013 (admittedly I’m assuming this is true because he did start throwing more first pitch strikes) he threw a lot of pitches right down the middle of the plate, with predictable results.
Two things do stand out about last year: 1)Something happened with his slider last year. In 2013 he threw the slider just under 14% of the time, threw it for strikes just under 60% of the time and had a whiff rate of 11.5%. 2014: slider usage jumps to 29%, for strikes almost 72%, whiff rate 13.8%. Apparently, the Cubs fixed something with his slider and he became more confident throwing it.
2)Arrieta threw his curveball more often and with better results. In 2013: 15.1% curveball with a 12.6% whiff rate. 2014: the curveball usage increases modestly to 17% but his whiff rate jumps to 18.2%.
I’m not really surprised about his success with the curveball last year; when he was with the Orioles it was obvious that he had a good curveball, could throw it for strikes and had a decent whiff rate with it. Why he didn’t throw his CB more often during his time with the Orioles is a mystery to me.
With Pearce I’m buying. Yes, it’s only one season. But as one of your writers pointed out in an article about him during the season, he’s changed his stance dramatically and looks so much more relaxed at the plate than he did before. Also, Pearce is a decent OF and a pretty good fielding 1B, so Showalter is going to have him in the lineup often and he should be able to come close to the Steamer projections for ABs and HRs. The excellent walk rate cinches it for me.
I’ll also add this: last year it was a much cooler than normal summer in Maryland. (2013 was also slightly cooler than normal.) I’ve lived in this region all of my life. Weather is unpredictable of course, but I’m banking that this summer will be warmer and more humid than 2014. The ball carries further in such conditions and Camden Yards is already a favorable environment for hitters.
Steve Pearce has had a healthy FB% the last two years.
I’m pretty sure that Arrieta’s “slider” is actually a cutter. The Orioles as an organization don’t typically let their guys throw cutters. I know they had Bundy stop throwing it entirely as he was progressing. Perhaps this is simply a case of Arrieta suddenly being encouraged to throw his best pitch with a new organization.
The Cubs seem like they’re willing to acquire failed prospects/players from other organization with the expectation that they can redeem those players through tweaks. Arrieta’s tweak may have been as simple as allowing him to throw the cutter more often, or at all.
I meant to mention that the slider is more of a slutter. It has enough velocity differentiation from his fastball to probably mark it as different than a cutter, yet there isn’t enough differentiation for it to be a slider. A true cutter should only be 1-2 mph slower for most pitchers. Otherwise, it’s a sign they’re getting around the ball and putting some slider action on it.
We can quibble on definitions of cutter and slider all day. The salient point is that the high slider rate may not be as big a warning sign.
For clarity, a cutter is thrown identically to a fastball. It’s the grip that creates movement – usually the way the seams interact with the fingertips on release. Eno has a picture of Jesse Chavez’s cutter grip. Pick up a ball and mimic it rolling off your fingertips to see how it looks.
A slider is usually accomplished by loading the baseball and then snapping the wrist clockwise (for a righty). A seam is used to gain extra leverage.
A slutter is some form of hybrid. Usually, it’s a slider grip without the slider wrist action. Or at least not as much. It’s unclear how it affects injury risk.
Thanks for the info James and Brad.
Somebody I know is a Cubs fan and he told me the secret to Arrieta’s new found success was the cutter use.
I looked for the cutter in the PITCH f/x data and couldn’t see that he was using it all that often.
Know I understand why: a slutter is going to confuse the computer.
It illustrates the limitations of relying on the Pf/x data to figure out why a pitcher is suddenly succeeding.
Put very simply being a Cub fan and watching him since he came over from Baltimore he suddenly gained great command/confidence of his plus stuff. Pitching ahead the vast majority of the time sure helps a lot. Ask his teammate Edwin Jackson. By the way he had a stretch to where he and Kershaw were very comparable as the came back this year fairly close to the same time. He had no hit type of stuff in at least a few consecutive outings with a weak defense behind him all year. His stuff was so good in fact Wellington Castillo rarely could frame any of his pitches.
I think the three starts where he held a no-hitter into the seventh were pretty remarkable. Or his last two starts, whose combined line reads 16 IP, 3H, 1 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 23 K. Those were also good. But I guess that’s your point: preliminary rankings over-weight observer’s bias, small sample issues, etc.
unGIFiness is the new market inefficiency
Arrieta brought a no hitter into the 8th inning 2 times!!!! moron!!!! Something is pretty memorable about that!!!!!!
While I watch a lot of baseball, I don’t watch ALL of it. And the Cubs were one of the teams I saw the least last year, although I did watch them more down the stretch to get a feel for Baez.
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