Patrick Corbin is the king of slider usage. On average he throws his slider 40% of the time. Why? Well, when you have a pitch that is so good why not throw it more? Like a lot more. It worked wonders for Patrick Corbin and his performance level. Here are three pitchers who could benefit from a pitch mix change like this.
For the last couple of seasons, I have been waiting for a Tyler Anderson breakout. Over the course of 2017 and 2018, he induced whiffs on 11.9 percent of his pitches, which is good for the 21st-highest SwStr% among the 91 pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings over that span. As I seemingly write in every other column, it is well established that SwStr% is strongly correlated with strikeout rate, yet Anderson’s 22.3 percent K% from the last two years ranks just 41st out of those same 91 pitchers.
The reason for Anderson’s apparent underachievement is clear: he doesn’t get many called strikes. The Rockies’ lefty throws a lot of pitches in the strike zone, and he gets swings on those pitches at an unusually high rate. That helps his swinging strike rate, but the flipside is that he has frozen batters at a subpar 16.5 percent rate over his career.
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Even though this year’s Winter Meetings were slow prior to Thursday’s three-team deal involving the Mariners, Indians and Rays, the Rangers’ signing of Lance Lynn has yet to receive much attention. Lynn’s $30 million deal over three years pales in comparison on an annual basis to the contracts recently inked by Nathan Eovaldi, J.A. Happ and Charlie Morton. Given Lynn’s 4.77 ERA compiled with the Twins and Yankees in 2018, it’s no surprise that Lynn is drawing less interest than his free agent counterparts in the real and fantasy worlds.
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Tuesday’s decision deadline for players who received qualifying offers came and went, and Hyun-Jin Ryu was the only one of the seven recipients to accept. Ryu will get to follow up on a stellar, albeit injury-shortened, 2018 campaign by remaining with the Dodgers for another year, and he will earn $17.9 million while gearing up for another run at the free agent market.
Despite missing more than half the season with a strained groin, Ryu finished as a top-50 pitcher in Roto value (per ESPN), largely on the strength of a 1.97 ERA and 1.01 WHIP. While FIP, xFIP and SIERA all agree that he should have had an ERA in the 3.00-to-3.20 range, they don’t directly take into account Ryu’s history as an above-average strander. His 85.4 percent LOB% from 2018 is bound to regress, but his career rate of 77.5 percent is more than four percentage points above the typical major league average.
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Among starting pitchers who finished in the top 20 in Roto value this season, few were further under the radar on draft day than Blake Snell and Mike Clevinger were. Though Snell was the fourth-most productive starter in terms of Roto value (according to ESPN’s Player Rater) and Clevinger ranked 17th, neither were among the top 190 players in ADP in NFBC or ESPN drafts.
In addition to a surge in their totals of innings pitched, both Snell and Clevinger experienced surprisingly strong improvements in their walk rates. Free passes were a weakness for both of them in 2017, but this season, Snell trimmed his walk rate from 10.8 percent to 9.1 percent, and Clevinger lowered his from 12.0 percent to 8.3 percent. Both pitchers were already proficient at getting strikeouts and had done a fair job of avoiding homers. With even stronger skill sets heading into 2019, fantasy owners could see Snell and Clevinger as particularly appealing options in a pitching pool defined by uncertainty and risk.
But should we?
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