Archive for Miles Mikolas

After Monday’s smallish slate of games, there have been a total of 241 games played so far this season. That’s 9.9 percent of the total schedule. By the time Tuesday’s games are done, the status bar will have moved to 10.5 percent. For a very brief moment, we still have the opportunity to say, “we’re not even 10 percent through this season!”. That’s something of a comfort when coping with the angst that comes with having drafted players who underperform early in the season.

Mike Podhorzer has looked into a number of slow starters in separate columns for hitters and pitchers, and a couple of the subjects from the latter column have been particularly concerning to me. Mike pointed out that Carlos Carrasco and Miles Mikolas are both posting a lower SwStr% so far this season, but what had caught my eye about them was where they were ranking on Baseball Savant’s leaderboard for exit velocity on flyballs and line drives (EV FB/LD).
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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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And it’s evident you should now pay attention to him. Jeff Sullivan wrote about Miles Mikolas here — Sullivan does a good job of summarizing Mikolas’ skill set and how he’ll succeed stateside. Which is helpful. But, for fantasy purposes, it doesn’t help us a whole lot in terms of exactly what we should expect. Not that that’s Sullivan’s fault. He doesn’t keep a cross-league projection system in his brain.

So when you see a Tweet like this — from NEIFI Analytics, which FanGraphs has featured previously — it’s hard to ignore:

Congrats, Cardinals. Per NEIFI, Mikolas handily outperforms Jake Arrieta over next three seasons. Massive bargain, fantastic bet to be the most underrated FA of 2017 class.

— NEIFI Analytics (@NEIFIco) December 5, 2017

Then again, there are Tweets like this from ZiPS’ own Dan Szymborski:

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