Archive for Kevin Gausman

A total of 53 players were non-tendered prior to Monday night’s deadline, and a number of fantasy-relevant players were included in that group. Domingo Santana and C.J. Cron fit that description, and if they can successfully come back from injury, so may Steven Souza Jr., Taijuan Walker and Aaron Sanchez.

What is less clear is whether Blake Treinen, José Peraza and Kevin Gausman can still be called fantasy-relevant. They certainly were as recently as 2018, but each of them fell so far in 2019 that they failed to make the top 500 in ADP in the 2 Early Mocks. Yet, upon closer examination, all three have the potential to have comeback seasons in 2020. Even though they may not get much attention in fantasy circles this offseason, I’ll make the case as to why each is deserving of a spot on your late-round flier or watch list.

Blake Treinen

In 2019, Treinen lost all of the gains he made in his strikeout and swinging strike rates in 2018, and he even lost his long-held knack for getting grounders. This combination led to the escalation of Treinen’s ERA from 0.78 to 4.91 and to him losing the Athletics’ closer role to Liam Hendriks. The loss of whiffs is likely related to a decrease in average sinker velocity from 98.0 to 96.7 mph, as well as a drop in average sinker spin rate form 2371 to 2250 rpm. He was generally locating his pitches higher (see below), which would explain his middling ground ball rate (42.8 percent) and HR/9 ratio (1.38).
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When the Rockies opened their series against the Marlins on Friday night, it was business as usual for Scott Oberg, who tossed a scoreless inning to record his fifth save of the season. On Saturday, in response to feeling heaviness in his right arm, Oberg ultimately underwent a procedure to remove a blood clot from the arm. He was placed on the IL on Sunday, and in all likelihood, he will not pitch again this season.

With Oberg out, the Rockies turned to recently deposed closer Wade Davis to finish off a game they were leading 4-3 heading into the top of the ninth inning. Davis faced three batters, but he did not retire any of them. He began by walking Jorge Alfaro and then had two runners in scoring position as a result of a Lewis Brinson double. Then Davis blew the save by allowing a Neil Walker single. Carlos Estévez took over from there, but he allowed the Marlins to tack on two more runs, which were both charged to Davis.
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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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If you’re noting a greater sense of urgency in this week’s Two Good Starts, Two Bad Starts, that’s because it features a pair of pitchers set to make their next starts in mere hours upon publication of this piece. Many owners will have likely been anticipating Kevin Gausman’s Tuesday night start, as he is among the most-added pitchers in ESPN and CBS leagues. After a mediocre Braves debut back on Aug. 4, Gausman responded with two much better starts. While that may have been reason enough to pick him up, is it reason enough to start him right away?

Fantasy owners have not been holding Jose Berrios‘ two-game slump against him, as the vast majority of his owners (at least in CBS and Fantrax leagues) have him active — quite likely for his scheduled two-start week. An analysis into his recent starts will help us to see if that looks like the right call.
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For all intents and purposes, Kevin Gausman had a bad season. Like, catastrophically bad, such that has ERA was 10th-worst among qualified starters. That he was allowed to see enough innings to become a qualified starter should be construed as nothing short of a blessing for him.

On paper, sure. This narrative works on the surface, at the macro level. But Gausman had himself a season of two incredibly different halves. An aside: if you don’t pay attention to FanGraphs’ community research, you should. User jkved10 wrote a post about Gausman on July 24 — about the time I reluctantly convinced myself to roster him in my primary home league — in which jkved10 noticed a sudden change in Gausman’s release point. Kudos to the author for doing all the heavy lifting for me. Click through to familiarize yourself with the events that unfolded and the ensuing analysis, or dig around Brooks Baseball for yourself.

The results weren’t immediately promising at the time of his/her writing: a 4.94 ERA across six starts. Everything else under the hood, however, had changed: 12.2 strikeouts and only 2.6 walks per nine innings (K/9, BB/9), good for a 3.19 xFIP. Sure, everything else stunk; he was still allowing home runs and hits on balls in play at astronomical rates. But the peripherals very dramatically improved, having essentially doubled his K’s and halving his walks in that span.

Such success continued. In his 19 starts from June 21 onward, Gausman struck out 10 hitters-per-nine and recorded a 3.39 ERA despite a still-inflated rate of home runs to fly balls (HR/FB). A tale of two halves, indeed: prior to June 21, his 6.60 ERA was almost exactly doubly large. He was a second-half ace, and this was more than just regression to the mean — his success correlated, if not directly resulted from, his adjustment.

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There are only so many stones to overturn with waiver wire suggestions for the stretch run and only so many strategical quirks to point out, too. With that in mind, I’m going to turn my attention to 2017 — sort of. As Jeff Zimmerman recently pointed out, Kevin Gausman is shoving in the second half. Jeff noted the biggest change between halves is an improved LOB% and a drop in HR/9. Combing over his PITCHf/x data, there’s something I’ll be keeping tabs as the season winds down. Read the rest of this entry »

Alright we’re back for another edition of #2xSP, and after a weird Week 15 (0-5, 4.18 ERA, 9.5 K/9 and three quality starts), we’re off to a pretty good start in Week 16 (3-0, 2.55 ERA, 6.1 K/9, but just one quality start). I guess on the aggregate, those two weeks combined would be pretty solid.

This week was a bit of a struggle, but I really like the first name and the other two I’m semi-enthused about, so let’s get after it. First of all, here are the season marks:

37-35 record
4.01 ERA
8.1 K/9
2.8 BB/9
1.33 WHIP
52 quality starts

And here are this week’s recs (with team wRC+ in parentheses):

RHP Homer Bailey – 28.3% ESPN – v. LAD (98), @ARI (94)

“Hi, I’m Homer Bailey, and you might remember me from not pitching a full season since 2013.” While that is true, as Bailey made 23 starts in 2014 and just two last year before missing a ton of time with Tommy John surgery. Before that, he had surgery to repair a tear in his flexor tendon in his throwing elbow as well. Either way, he’s back and ready to roll, and has a couple decent matchups coming up this week. Beyond that, he’s looked pretty good so far in his four starts since returning: 3.66 ERA, 1.37 WHIP and 12.4 K/9. Opposing batters have hit just .269/.337/.321 against him, with the OBP a bit alarming but nothing else terribly out of whack. Either way, it isn’t often that you get a starter of Bailey’s caliber largely available on the wire at this time of year. Get on it. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

This isn’t necessarily a free agent/waiver piece, though, these three players are under owned and available in many leagues. If this trio of players isn’t available in your league, don’t fret. I’ve chosen to highlight them because I believe their rest-of-season value outpaces their current production or how they’re being valued — at least how I perceive them to be valued based on their ownership rates. If they’re owned, consider trading for them. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a weird week for me, delaying this article by four days. I originally intended to have this up by Monday, but a spontaneous — and completely awesome — decision to attend the NCAA Tournament provided the first delay. I got to see Oklahoma/VCU and the historically unprecedented Texas A&M win over Northern Iowa, so I didn’t feel too bad about being a day late.

Unfortunately, I got myself concussed in a fender-bender the next day (not my fault!), and spent the last few days listlessly staring out my window, the owner of a half-working brain. Hopefully, I’ve recovered enough for the following to make sense, but the fact that my 31st birthday looms this coming Monday means I’m in the midst of my annual birthday-related existential crisis, brain injury or not.

Regardless of the circumstances, it’s Bold Predictions time! I did pretty darn well two years ago, but last year my success rate was roughly equivalent to that of the Brooklyn Brawler. (Fun fact: The Brawler briefly performed in WWF as “The MVP” Abe Knuckleball Schwartz, a bad-guy persona used to rile up fans during the MLB strike of ’94.) Let’s turn the clock back to 2014 and get my boldness rate back to the sweet spot.

Here are my ten Bold Predictions for 2016, roughly arranged in ascending order from safest to craziest:

10. James Shields is not a top-65 starting pitcher, despite throwing 200+ innings for the tenth straight year.

How do we value a 34-year-old coming off a season like Shields just had? He logged over 200 innings and made his annual 33 starts, but posted his worst-ever walk rate — and it’s not even close — at 3.60 BB/9. His HR/FB ballooned to another career worst, at 17.6%. Shields also experienced career bests in two areas, strikeouts (yay!) and strand rate (hmm…).

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