Archive for starter

(Dave Andersen published a similar post for hitters in our Community section last week. Check it out here.)

I want to say something inspiring such as “it’s never too late to make a move,” but that’s patently untrue. In two of my leagues, it’s too late. Very, very too late. That kind of statement only applies to contenders.

Interpret it in a different context, however, and it carries some weight. If you play in a dynasty league, you can, and should, always make moves.

Major League Baseball has a bounty of young, electric pitching talent. A lot of that talent remains largely unowned, too, while other pitchers retain lofty ownership numbers because of their name recognition.

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A month ago, I ridiculed Justin Verlander. He had just come off a start during which he allowed seven earned runs and couldn’t escape the fourth inning. Through his first six 2015 starts, he posted a 6.62 ERA with only 5.82 strikeouts per nine innings (K/9).

Like clockwork, he showed up to his next start in Boston and twirled a gem, throwing eight strong innings but failing to factor into the decision, as the game went into extra innings.

Then he went to Tampa Bay (well, St. Petersburg, but who’s keeping track) and cranked out another eight innings with a whopping 10 strikeouts. The last time he strung together two straight eight-inning starts was almost exactly three years ago — July 15 and 20, 2012. Last time he struck out 10-plus batters? His final start of 2013.

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He did once. Can he again?

Ian Kennedy has been one of the least valuable starting pitchers of 2015, a fact probably unsurprising to San Diego residents and his fantasy owners. Of all pitchers who have thrown at least 60 innings and generated negative wins above replacement (WAR), his ratio of strikeouts to walks (3.18 K/BB) and xFIP (3.83) rise to the top of an admittedly short list.

Still, his rate of strikeouts per nine innings (8.31 K/9) ranks 36th among all starters, and his walks-per-nine (2.62 BB/9) is nothing to sneeze at, either. It’s easy to see why fantasy owners hold out hope: his adequacy in preventing baserunners points to reasons why his 4.58 ERA is, perhaps, too high.

Unfortunately, Kennedy is a fly ball machine who has (almost) never enjoyed the friendly confines of a pitcher’s park. Per ESPN’s Park Factors, Kennedy’s home parks have mostly benefited hitters:

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If you sort Yahoo!’s player page descending by ownership, Justin Verlander shows up on the second page. That means, at 70-percent ownership, he ranks in the top 50. Julio Teheran shows up there, too, at 73 percent. What the two have in common: more than 1,000 other players have been more valuable than them.

Verlander deserves an ounce of clemency: his 31 innings haven’t allowed him ample time to generate value. His 6.62 ERA, sixth-worst among all pitchers who have thrown at least 30 innings, really damages his stock.

Then again, so would his 5.01 xFIP, good for ninth-worst. Or his 6.06 FIP, good for fifth-worst. He has simply done nothing to inspire confidence in anyone, yet because of name recognition alone he’s owned in far more Yahoo! leagues than the pitchers I’ll present now.

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It took a dominant 11-strikeout, zero-walk performance from Taijuan Walker for the fantasy world to finally take notice of him. I don’t have ownership trend data to exemplify this, but I do have an anecdote: he was available in every league I’m in before the start, and he was owned in every league I’m in shortly after it.

The truth is Walker had demonstrated progress, described here by Eno Sarris, in his prior four starts, notching 27 strikeouts to three walks in 29 innings. Someone who hadn’t been paying attention to Walker probably wouldn’t have noticed: his ERA prior to the recent five-game surge stood at 7.33, and he had completed the sixth inning only twice in nine games. Once a hyped prospect, he looked like a 22-year-old who still needed seasoning to reach his potential.

No longer, as you will probably have to give up an asset of value to acquire Walker from a fellow owner now. The price may not be too steep given his poor ratios (4.94 ERA, 1.39 WHIP), but this is likely the highest they’ll be for the rest of the season.

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I expected to follow up my xK% differential post from last week with a complementary xBB% differential post. For those who don’t enjoy surprises, I’ll let you know now that that didn’t happen. In its stead, I bring what I hope is good news — news that will not only influence a future xBB% differential post but also may impact general pitcher analysis henceforth and possibly international diplomacy.

The title of this post, however, is a tad misleading. I think I can say, with some degree of certainty — and I hope to demonstrate, with some degree of competency — that pitch sequencing indeed plays a role in a pitcher’s walk rate, as the devilishly handsome Mike Podhorzer has postulated. What I can’t describe, with any degree of certainty, is the magnitude of the role it plays. In truth, I desperately want to prove Mike wrong: there must be other factors, outside of pitch sequencing (and pitch framing, perhaps), that help explain a pitcher’s walk rate. For example, I have tried incorporating O-Swing% and Zone%, two PITCHf/x metrics provided by FanGraphs that I swore would fill in the cracks, but they offer little in the way of additional explanatory power.

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I’d like to talk to you about Dellin Betances.

Wait! Wait. No. No, I wouldn’t. I’d like to talk about Mike Podhorzer first. Mike has published a lot of great work covering the fundamentals of the xK% (and xBB%) metric for pitchers (and hitters), so if you are unfamiliar with or falling behind on his work, I recommend you first click here, here or here. But if you’re lazy, the short of it is: xK%, or expected strikeout rate, is an equation birthed from a linear regression that measures how a pitcher’s looking, swinging and foul-ball strike rates as well as overall strike percentage correlates with his strikeout rate. It doesn’t predict future strikeout rates as much as it retrospectively adjusts past strikeout rates; thus, it is a good tool for identifying pitchers who potentially benefited (or suffered) from good (bad) luck in a previous season – say, 2014.

Like many other metrics completely unrelated to xK%, however, there is evidence that certain players consistently out-perform (or under-perform) what their xK% rates predict their actual K% rates should be. (Mike alludes to this trend in his quip about Jeremy Hellickson, a xK% underachiever, in one of the articles linked above.) Similarly to how a power hitter will post consistently higher ratios of home runs to fly balls (HR/FB) than a non-power hitter, or how Mike Trout will probably post some of the highest batting averages on balls in play (babip) in the league for years to come, it appears there is some skill, or perhaps a particular characteristic, inherent to pitchers who consistently best, or fall short of, their xK% rates.

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