Archive for Corey Kluber

My bold predictions article from last year was summarily found to be not bold. The very first commenter said it wasn’t bold and 63 people gave that comment a thumbs up. Another commenter sarcastically chided me saying “You mean Rickie Weeks won’t have (a) career worst season again?” As it turns out, Weeks did have his career worst full season according to wRC+. Not sure if that makes me or the commenter dumb. Probably both.

What I did in last year’s bold predictions was take guys from each position that weren’t being drafted as starters who I thought would be starters.  Only three of my ten predictions came true, which is the same batting average Eno thinks is normal for these bold predictions articles. Of course that could just mean that I’m so bad at this that I couldn’t get more than 3/10 right with such obvious calls.

But I’m getting back on the horse this year with a slightly different saddle. The mistake I made last year was discussing players I had ranked as starters in my preseason ranks. This year I’ll be discussing guys that I have ranked just outside starter territory that I think could end up beating my projection and ranking. This means that all players discussed will have an ADP that is, on average, lower than that of the players I discussed last year (all ADP from ESPN). I guess technically that makes the predictions more bold.

If you still don’t think the predictions are bold enough, sorry. My real goal here is to simply identify some guys around the diamond that I think are undervalued in drafts. The ‘bold’ in the title is there on mandate from the higher-ups. If it was up to me, this post would be titled something like ‘Undervalued Players at Each Position.’ If you happen to think some or all of the predictions are actually bold, that’s all the better. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Blake Murphy detailed how some teams are using a lot more players in their lineups late in the season so that we can identify good pitching matchups. More youngsters in the lineups means better stats for pitchers. But young hurlers don’t see as much late season experience because of innings limit concerns. This explains why a large majority of the probable starters today are guys who have been in the majors for most of the season. In my estimation, all but three or four of today’s probables have been around for most of the year.

Today’s probables also happen to be a pretty above average bunch. Below is a chart showing how today’s starters have fared this year compared to league average.

Because there are so many good starters going today, you’re probably going to need to load up on more expensive hitters facing the few bad starters today. To save some money for bats, we’ll pick some of the cheaper starters with at least decent matchups. After the jump there will be a chart showing which of today’s starters you should be stacking up hitters against and how those starters fare against hitters of each handedness, and then we’ll pick some names.

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As Bryan Grosnick pointed out on Tuesday, the home run is king in daily contests. In Draftstreet scoring, a home run will get you a minimum of seven points (one point for each total base plus 1.5 each for the R and RBI). So I wanted to give y’all a list of the pitchers who allow the most home runs per plate appearance. The cut off for the reliability of HR/PA is 1320 batters faced (per @pizzacutter4) Here are the pitchers above that cut off that are on an active roster with the highest HR/PA (one or more standard deviations above the mean) against both left and right handed batters. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many ways to express how bad Cleveland’s rotation was in 2012. Their staff was 3rd worst in ERA, WAR, xFIP and SIERA. They were 29th in K% and 28th in BB%, which left them tied with the Twins for the worst K%-BB%. Their “best” pitcher was Zach McAllister who gave them 125.1 innings of 4.24 ERA ball. Ubaldo Jimenez continued to see his velocity decline, and his ERA was over 5.00 as a result. The man who is likely to pitch in their 2013 season opener, Justin Masterson, posted the worst ERA of his career (4.93). They had three other pitchers who threw more than 80 innings, Derek Lowe, Josh Tomlin and Jeanmar Gomez, and none of them had an ERA below 5.50.

Thankfully, it would be almost impossible for their staff to be much worse.

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