What’s Wrong With This Pitcher?

So here’s this starting pitcher who arrived in the Major Leagues in 2013 at age 23, made 10 starts, 7 of them Quality Starts, and posted the best ERA of any rookie starter in the American League. Yet he got not a single Rookie of the Year vote, and was paid no pre-season attention by the Fantasy experts in 2014—he wasn’t even taken in the 15-team, 29-round Tout Wars mixed draft. And the experts were right: he started the 2014 season 0-6 before being sent to the minors. Of course, he got no support from his hitters (12 runs in 7 starts).

But he did in fact pitch pretty badly: he’s fortunate his record wasn’t minus 1-6. But then the guy gets it together in Triple-A, comes back up for good in July, and makes 15 starts, 10 of them QS. Nonetheless, he was again almost universally ignored in drafts this year. Maybe that’s because he had a terrible spring training, though that may have been due to the injury that has kept him on the disabled list for the first month-plus of the season. But he’s finally healthy, and has made two minor-league rehab starts. Unfortunately, the first one was dismal. Fortunately, the second one was superb.

Now this guy, according to one Fangraphs writer, has below-average stuff. Well, no: actually, he throws three average pitches, says a different Fangraphs guy. Not exactly, says yet another Fangraphs author: he’s got a great changeup, though a subpar fastball. He’s a left-handed pitcher who’s worse than average at getting left-handed hitters out. On the other hand, he’s better than average at getting right-handed hitters out.

He’s a flyball pitcher in a flyball hitter’s park, so that’s problematic, though he doesn’t give up especially many home runs, which is a relief; perhaps his team deflates the ball when he pitches. More hitters are pulling the ball against him, which is probably a bad sign, but fewer are making hard contact, which is probably a good sign. He doesn’t strike out a lot of guys (fewer than 6 per 9 innings), but he doesn’t walk many, either.

His 2013 looks kind of like a fluke, because his BABIP was .260, which is low; but his 2014 also looks kind of like a fluke, because his BABIP was .325, which is high. Really, though, there wasn’t much difference at all between the seasons: His FRA and FIP were almost exactly the same in the two seasons, and a bit better than average. His Z-contact rate seems to be increasing, which means he’s fooling fewer hitters with his good pitches, but his Z-swing rate seems to be declining, which means he’s fooling more hitters with his good pitches.

There was a huge gap between his second-half ERA and his second-half FIP in 2014, but that’s not necessarily significant, because good pitchers with even bigger gaps (like Clay Buchholz) are doing poorly, but perhaps it is, because mediocre pitchers with even bigger gaps (like Kyle Gibson) are doing well. Distressingly, his BUH% skyrocketed, though his MD was, reassuringly, zero, and then there’s his VFD, which is….Oh, sorry. VFD isn’t a stat-geek acronym—it’s the key to the dreadful secret about Count Olaf in the Lemony Snicket book we read to our kids last night. (Yes we did too, and please don’t spoil the story by telling us what it stands for.)

That’s right, the guy is Brett Oberholtzer, who is going to make his first major-league start of the season for the Astros at home against the Giants tonight. We have no idea what will happen. So what are we doing at the moment, other than amusing ourselves and trying your patience as usual? We are making two related points. The first is that, for any player who may or may not be worth having on your Fantasy team, the evidence as to which way you should jump is going to be ambiguous.

The second is that you generally don’t have the luxury of waiting to find out who’s right and who’s wrong about players like this. Take, for example, Nate Karns—a pitcher roughly similar to Oberholtzer in terms of pre-season value and probable upside. In our NFBC Main Event league, Karns was available as a free agent until last Sunday night. Then, seven starts into the season, a consensus evidently developed out of nowhere that his good stats are for real—the ambiguity of Karns has been resolved– and he went for $103 (from a start-of-season budget of $1000) in closely-contested FAAB bidding. If he’s still around in your league and you want or need him, either he’ll cost you some money or you’d better be high on the waiver priority list.

So we’re trying to stay ahead of the box, or out of the envelope, or something. We ourselves look at Oberholtzer and see a guy who was probably injured at the start of last season and didn’t tell anyone about it. We’re inclined to toss out his April and May of 2014, and when we do that, what we think we see is a somewhat above-average starting pitcher on an apparently above-average team. We see, in other words, a player who’s exactly what people have been calling him since he was drafted in 2008, and possibly since birth: a fourth starter.

He’ll get you some wins and help your rate stats a bit, though there will be a shortfall in strikeouts, especially since he has trouble going more than six innings. If such a player becomes available in-season and you need pitching—as we do, with a starting staff that includes Drew Hutchison, A. Wood, T. Wood, and assorted dead wood– he’s got some value. We got him on Sunday night for 7 FAABs, and we could have gotten him for 1. He’s our Pick Hit this week, and just to put our money where our pixels are, he’s replacing Travis Wood in our starting lineup.

And speaking of our Main Event team, how is it doing? Not badly. Last week, you’ll perhaps recall, we forewent our usual ad hominem approach to this blog. Likewise, we forewent our usual Steinbrenneresque meddling with our team, stayed out of the clubhouse, and let the boys play, with generally encouraging results—most notably, Yasmany Grandal’s eight heartwarming RBIs in a single game. We’re in 4th place in our league, and 150th overall, having gotten as high as 3rd and cracking the overall top 100 before a disappointing weekend.

With enormous regret, we jettisoned Andy Van Slyke to make room for Oberholtzer, on the theory that Van Slyke’s just not going to play that often while he’s with the Dodgers. If that changes, or he gets traded, we’ll no doubt be in there bidding again. We also can’t forbear mentioning that, in the no-transactions league whose January slow draft we chronicled in two now-archived Fangraphs posts—and in which we own, that’s right, Brett Oberholtzer–we are in first place. Since three of our top five starting pitchers have contributed nothing, and a fourth has contributed next to nothing, we can’t figure out how this has happened, and we don’t expect it to last more than one brief shining moment, but we’re enjoying it while it does.