Archive for Collin McHugh

It can be a struggle in deep leagues to fill out the final arms in your staff. Instead of talking about popular targets to chase in the middle rounds, I’m going to highlight ten starters to consider when searching for the final arms of your 15-teamer staff.

I originally set the ADP threshold at past the 300 mark, but I elected to dive a little deeper, setting the bar at 350 instead. That means guys I’d recommend targetting like Mike Minor, Dan Straily, German Marquez, Mike Leake, and Matt Shoemaker are off the list. This is legit deep, not that weak stuff.
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I didn’t care for Collin McHugh for the first half of 2017. You probably didn’t care for Collin McHugh. Why would we? He was returning mid-season from an impingement in his throwing elbow and tendinitis in his shoulder after he held a 4.34 ERA and 1.41 WHIP over 184.2 frames the previous year. It was an investment that just wasn’t worth your time…or so we thought. Instead of mediocrity, McHugh was quietly productive in his 12 starts – 3.55 ERA (3.82 FIP), 22.9% K rate, and a 1.29 WHIP across 63.1 innings. Not studly or game-changing, but nor the disaster we forecasted. This may be chalked up to being a fluke as his numbers aren’t so far off from his large 2016 workload, but I think there was something here that you should be aware of.

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Woof. After getting all excited about how Week 14 had started — and it still finished with a solid 2.52 ERA — the wheels came off last week a bit. Then again, we still have Dylan Bundy we can bond over, right? Right?!?

Hopefully this week will be better, as three names really stuck out to me while preparing for this week’s column. Or perhaps more accurately, there were three decent names and a fair amount of ‘meh’.

Here’s a look at the season numbers cobbled together thus far:

32-29 record
3.99 ERA
8.0 K/9
3.0 BB/9
1.31 WHIP
47 quality starts

Here at this week’s recs (with team wRC+ in parentheses):

RHP Collin McHugh – 33.6% ESPN – @MIN (99), @TOR (103)

There’s good and bad wherever you look with McHugh, who has a 4.73 ERA and 1.48 WHIP this season, but has also managed a solid 121-35 K/BB ratio through 121.2 innings. He was absolutely battered in his penultimate start against the Tigers (eight earned, just four outs recorded) but pretty much all of his starts around it have been pretty good. In his last eight starts, save the Tigers outing, he’s allowed three or fewer earned runs in each, with a quality start in seven of those eight. It’ll be interesting to see how he handles the Blue Jays in such close proximity; last start he also faced them, and threw six innings, allowing three earned runs — three solo home runs — with 10 strikeouts and just one walk. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the small sample, the pitching trend continues (as of 4/11):

Strikeouts are up. Offense is down. The MLB ERA as it stands is 3.39! You can read why in the The Hardball Time’s Baseball Annual 2015: Jeff Sullivan looks at whether or not sabermetrics have tipped the balance of power toward pitching and defense — it has. PITCHf/x evaluation is one major reason.

More and more, pitchers know what works within their own repertoires, and we can then tell some “reperstories” based on their pitch characteristics (movement and velocity) and outcomes (swinging-strike and groundball induction).

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The Astros rotation was surprisingly decent last year. As a staff they totaled 12.4 WAR which made them the 12th best rotation in the league by that metric. But I’m about 99.9% sure no Astros starter had an ADP that made him a regular selection in 12-team mixed leagues. Yet they ended up producing the 20th and 33rd most valuable fantasy starters. Insane. But drafters aren’t totally buying it as those same two pitchers currently have ADPs of 53 and 65. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this staff is that the five starters who threw the most innings for Houston last year may be the same five starters to begin the year with only one real threat to steal a rotation spot. For a rotation that no one thought was any good just a year ago on a team that is still rebuilding, it’s surprising not to see much, if any, turnover. Read the rest of this entry »

After evaluating Zack Wheeler and Jacob deGrom in my previous post on the 2015 Mets Commanding Rotation, I was hoping to follow-up by looking at pitch release point consistency for a number of pitchers that prevented contact in the zone but didn’t have elite swinging-strike/contact rates. Initially, I found good results using root-mean-square deviations.

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