Archive for Lance Lynn

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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Sometimes I have to stretch a little to include certain pitchers in either the Two Good Starts or Two Bad Starts category. It’s just unwieldly to occasionally call this column Two Good Starts, One Bad Start and One Meh Start, for example.

In the case of Lance Lynn, his recent game log could be more accurately described as One Excellent Start, One Great Long Relief Appearance and One Decent Start. I’m not changing the name of the column, but I’m going ahead and squeezing the square peg into the round hole. If it feels better to convince yourself that Lynn’s final start with the Twins was genuinely good or that his long relief debut for the Yankees was really a start, I am not going to stop you.
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Each week I look at the collection of starting pitchers owned in under 30% of leagues (consensus Yahoo/ESPN ownership from Fantasy pros) with a few extra sub 10% discount options at the end, pointing out the options to consider if you need an extra arm or two at the end of your staff.

Let’s highlight my ten favorite starting pitcher options that may be available on your waiver wires, roughly ordered from top to bottom:

Under 30% Owned

Derek Holland (San Francisco Giants) – With Johnny Cueto going down with TJS, Holland looks to have a firm grip on a rotation spot in San Fran and you should capitalize on it. He moved over from the third base side of the rubber to first base in the middle of the June and the results have followed. Across his last 47.2 IP and 9 starts, Holland has boasted a 2.83 ERA, 26% K rate, and digestible 8% walk rate, making him a prime discount option.

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A bad start to the season somehow got worse for Lance Lynn on Monday night. He entered his fifth start of 2018 with a 7.71 ERA, having allowed five or more runs in three of his previous starts. By the time the Blue Jays forced his exit after five innings, Lynn’s ERA rose to a ghastly 8.37.
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About a month ago, I started searching for the league’s underthrown pitches. Pitches that despite inducing elite swing-and-miss, ground ball, and pop-up rates, are thrown with scarcity relative to other inferior offerings. It was as an enlightening a topic to research, as it dealt with untapped potential, as it was a fun series to write. Though to be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot of actionable fantasy advice to be gleamed. But in the process of writing those pieces, I had to grade each pitch. And arsenal scores, a subject of interest to the RotoGraphs community over the years, were just a stone’s throw from away from the groundwork I’d already laid.
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Now we’re off and running with the second week of #2xSP, and after an uneven but mostly good second week, we think we have some pretty good pitchers to give a look to as Week 2 gets underway.

Here’s how we’re doing so far this season (through half of Week 1):

0-1 record
2.93 ERA
8.2 K/9
1.3 K/BB
1.63 WHIP
2 quality starts

Brandon Finnegan (two innings, five walks) kind of blew up our rates, but Jerad Eickhoff and Dylan Bundy managed to give us a stretch of quality starts that only Meat Loaf could appreciate. This week, we have some familiar names who are a bit off the radar for some reason or another. Give ‘em a look.

Here are this week’s recs (with team wRC+ for this season in parentheses):

RHP Lance Lynn – 21.6% ESPN – v. PIT (67), @MIL (86)

The good thing from Lynn is that he’s run his pitch count up and around 100 for each of his first two starts after returning from Tommy John surgery which cost him all of the 2016 season. The bad thing is that he’s only managed 10.1 innings to show for it, with six earned runs (5.23 ERA), an 8-5 K/BB ratio and a WHIP of 1.45. On the positive side, he’s allowed a batting average of just .238 and is pretty much at his career groundball rate (44.1 percent). After allowing three home runs last time out I could see being gunshy about throwing him out there, but I’m taking a shot with a couple of weak inter-divisional offenses coming up on this slate. Sure, there’s a chance each of them turns it around just in time for Lynn to come to town, but I’ll take that gamble. When Lynn is right, he’s good for strikeouts, grounders and most importantly, wins/quality starts. Read the rest of this entry »

According to ERA, the Cardinals had the sixth best starting staff in 2014. But according to both WAR and xFIP, they were only the 17th best staff in the league. Every starter who threw at least 100 innings for the Cardinals had an ERA that was much lower than their xFIP/SIERA. Combined, the gap between the staff’s ERA and xFIP was -0.36, the third largest negative gap in the league. And our depth charts/projections don’t have any have any Cardinal starter significantly outperforming his peripherals again. 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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Last second I changed the title from “Having a Presence” to “Commanding Attention”. If I were to talk about the team as a whole, I would have had to go with “Having a Presence,” but I’m focusing on their rotation, and well…they command our attention…

It’s rough to be a Mets fan living in Minnesota. It’s rough being a Mets fan anywhere, but watching the Twins and their approach to 100 losses doesn’t help. Despite being only 6.5 games back from the 2nd Wild Card to date, I don’t think the Mets will have enough offense to sustain next year, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be fun to watch. There will be quite the trio that commands attention – or even a quartet with the assumption that Noah Syndergaard makes an impact. And with a quartet…who knows?!

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Plenty of pitchers go through an early season manic phase before crashing back to earth in the second half, but few who pitched as well as Lance Lynn did after being thrust into the rotation find their jobs as unsecure the next season as he does going into 2013.

Lynn was given his shot at starting late in camp last year, less than a month before his regular season debut, and only because it appeared as though Chris Carpenter wouldn’t be healthy in time to break camp with the team. Lynn adapted to the role well and went 8-1 in his first 10 starts with a 2.54 ERA and a 1.07 WHIP. His next 10 starts were less encouraging as he went 5-3 with a 4.40 ERA and a 1.43 WHIP.Still, even after he made the start that finally pushed him out of the rotation on August 24, Lynn’s overall line wasn’t horrific by any stretch of the imagination. A 13-5 record with a 3.93 ERA, a 1.34 WHIP, and 9.0 K/9 is certainly workable, even if he was in the midst of something of a swoon at the time. Read the rest of this entry »