Advanced Stats - Pitching Charts: Monday, April 6th

by Matt Trollo (MTro86) Last Updated 2015-04-08 14:31:38

We’re back for another season with a super-sized opening day issue. I’m really excited about some of the upgrades we’ve been able to implement over the off-season and how this article will be presented in 2015. This year, the charts will be embedded and sortable at the top of each column. The only differences are that due to size (width), the K/BB and Batted Ball charts are each now 2 charts instead of one and the Main Chart gets a scroller. Just as last season, I’ll be writing about starting pitchers every Monday to Wednesday and Friday with the possible exception of special circumstances every now and then.

Last season, I didn’t get to RotoGrinders until the middle of June, so many of you may not know what the charts look like at the start of the season when no games have been played yet. Hint: Lots of empty spaces for the first week or so. We’ll still have all the relevant stats from last season and beyond where labeled, but in the meantime, it might be more words and conjecture than numbers. The good news is that since we don’t have to wait on last night’s stats, the first article is ready to go nice and early.

Some chart intro paragraphs have been updated where necessary, mostly to reflect any changes in the time span covered in the stats presented.

Most of the stats in these charts are pulled directly from the Fangraphs.com database. If a stat is used that you are not familiar with and want to learn more about, their glossary does a terrific job of explaining all of the advanced stats I use in these charts.

Starting Pitching Main Chart

We’re using Seamheads.com 3 year park factors. Home team is in bold. Team Def = UZR/150. L2Yrs is a rolling calendar. Hm/Rd xFIP is since the start of the 2014 season. Opp team offensive stats are wRC+. Combo stats are explained below.

NOTE I’ve decided to leave in the stats for last season’s team defense and opposing team’s wRC+ just as a reference point, although we obviously expect things to change and in some places somewhat drastically due to off-season transactions.

Bartolo Colon is someone who shouldn’t surprise us at all. Working hard to keep himself in tip-top shape is doubtlessly what allows him to keep going and even meriting an opening day start just a month before he turns 42 years old. Or maybe it’s his ability to throw the ball exactly where he intends to almost every pitch and not walk anybody. He’s a below average (but not terrible) pitcher at this point in his career, facing what may be the top team in baseball in a neutral park. As I write this though, there is some question as to the health status of some of Washington’s top hitters (Span, Werth, Rendon) for Monday.

Chris Archer had somewhat of a breakout last season, buoyed by his 6.9 HR/FB. The Rays play in a pitcher’s park and have a team philosophy built around high fastballs as such, but that is not something you would expect one to repeat. In fact, a search on Fangraphs for best HR/FB rate by a starting pitcher with at least 500 IP in the Pitch F/X era shows that Clayton Kershaw is the only human being (and that’s debatable) with a career HR/FB south of 7.4%. I like Chris Archer and he may be a very good pitcher (though his peripherals believe he’s around league average currently), but Clayton Kershaw, he is not. Still, he misses enough bats and is facing a Baltimore offense projected to be a bit weaker than last year.

Chris Tillman exhibited a gap between his ERA and his estimators (FIP, xFIP, SIERA) last year that he hadn’t enjoyed before. We can credit a great team defense, which may return this year and helped him to a .267 BABIP, not far from his career .273 mark, but also an 8.3 HR/FB against a career 11.2 mark. When you’re allowing fewer fly balls than you have previously and fewer of them leave the yard, that’s a pretty good combination. That said, he’s still considered a fly ball pitcher in a hitter’s park, although, that’s not the case for this game in Tampa Bay. I could see him maintaining some of the gains he made from last year, but I’d have trouble betting on another season with an ERA below 3.5 if everything else remains the same.

Clay Buchholz is here because I guess the Red Sox are ranking by tenure? He was a mess last year and his health has been in question for the past two seasons, but there were a few positive glimpses and his peripherals were all right around his career rate of 4.00. What gives? Well, he couldn’t keep anyone from scoring with a 62.1 LOB%. I think we might be able to expect something better than an ERA over 5 this year, but don’t get your hopes up too high. The Phillies, like the Red Sox, were a disaster last year. The Phillies, unlike the Red Sox, project to be a disaster again this year.

Clayton Kershaw In the tales of the old Greek Gods, there were stories about Zeus being insatiable and frequently mating with human females. The offspring of these encounters would occasionally have partial God-like powers and characteristics in human form. One example would be Hercules. Another would be Clayton Kershaw. What do I need to say about Kershaw? And if you need me to say it, you may not be ready for MLB DFS. The Padres were an awful offense last year….the worst. They’ve made several offseason transactions to overhaul said offense and they should be better, at least on that side of the ball.

Cole Hamels is still in Philadelphia, when many people thought he might be pitching for the team opposing him today. He had a career-best 2.46 ERA last year, but the other numbers suggest he wasn’t much different than his 3.27 career ERA. Only his 3.07 FIP, bolstered by a career-low 8.2 HR/FB, believes anything different. One writer even believes the “relatively high authority level of the contact” made against him last year makes his ERA an even larger understatement. I’m not saying Hamels is worse than Buchholz, but the gap may be much smaller than it appeared last season.

Corey Kluber is another guy whose stats basically tell the whole story of how he came out of nowhere to win the a Cy Young last year. Some who were sabermetrically inclined were on the Kluber bandwagon the year prior, but nobody saw this coming. There really isn’t anything to suggest that last year was a fluke, but even if you think his 78.6 LOB% was a little too high or his 7.4 HR/FB a little too low, he should see an improved defense behind him this year (it couldn’t possibly be worse) that might help his .316 BABIP, helping to even everything out. The team he faces, Houston, is no longer an offensive slouch, though they are still expected to be near the league lead in strikeouts. The park is accommodating to HR hitters, but plays fairly neutral for overall runs.

Dallas Keuchel is another breakout nobody saw coming last year. His success came by pounding the bottom of the zone and leading the league with a 63.5 GB% (Tyson Ross was second at 57%). I mean, nobody else was even close. He was the only qualified pitcher with a fly ball rate below 20%. When you don’t allow fly balls, you can’t allow HR’s and even with a league average HR/FB, he only allowed 11. As you can see in the chart above, Houston had the only defense the metrics liked less than Cleveland and I really don’t know how that will shake out this year. If you believe he can maintain a ground ball rate around 60% and that the defense should positively regress, then there’s no reason to suspect he’ll be much different this year. I might note the he’s a guy who might run into some trouble if the league stops calling the low strike as is rumored, but not supposed to be in effect this year.

David Price saw the highest BABIP of his career (.306) because there’s a difference between defense in Detroit and defense in Tampa Bay. There has been some velocity dip over the last two seasons, but it hasn’t affected the stuff as Price saw a career-high 23.1 K-BB% last year. He may have realized that he’ll have to continue striking out a quarter of the batters he faces if he wants to keep his ERA under 3.30 in Detroit. Minnesota was a better offense than most people realize last year, but struggled on the road and didn’t make too many big changes in the off-season aside from former Tiger Torii Hunter.

Drew Hutchison had the same HR/FB rate as Keuchel, but allowed fly balls more than twice as often (45.2%) and subsequently allowed more than twice as many HRs (23). He had a 4.48 ERA last year, but exhibited an ability to miss bats, and many people are expecting big things from him this season, hence, the Opening Day start. It actually may have even started late last year, as in his last seven starts, he had a 3.32 ERA (with even better estimators) and struck out 33.5% of the batters he faced. The difference was a more potent slider, which became a weapon even against LHBs. In addition, the same writer who was bearish on Hamels’ contact management last year, is very optimistic about Hutchison’s potential. All that being said, yes Yankee Stadium could be trouble for fly ball happy RHPs (129 LHB HR Factor last three years), but it’s played as a fairly overall neutral park for runs over the last three seasons.

Felix Hernandez is another guy who makes my job a little easier. Like Price, he’s seemingly improved as his velocity has declined, mainly because his changeup defies many of the laws of velocity gaps (it’s not much slower than his fastball, yet is one of the best pitches in the game). He has a tough assignment against one of the expected top offenses in the league, but it’s often foolish to bet against the King in his home Court, the second-most pitcher friendly park in baseball.

Francisco Liriano is dominant at times and those times are when he throws strikes and his slider looks like one to batters before it drops out. He was surprisingly better vs RHB (.284 wOBA) than LHB (.331 wOBA) last year, though that’s not nearly been the case over his career. You might think the loss of Russell Martin could hurt him (and help Toronto pitchers, I forgot to mention), but while that may be somewhat true, the Pirates made sure they went out and replaced him with catchers that also rate well in framing metrics. Cincinnati is another park that plays surprisingly neutral for all of its HR prowess. A healthier Cincinnati offense should be better than last season’s version, but not tremendously scary. What I might be concerned about is Liriano losing control for a couple of batters and then one leaving the yard.

Henderson Alvarez is yet another in a string of surprises last year who gets an Opening Day start on Monday. He rode a 14.4 K% and 53.8 GB% to a 2.65 ERA that has some people skeptical about whether he can repeat such a performance. While a big park and strong OF defense will help most pitchers, if you clicked on that link in the Cole Hamels paragraph, you’ll find some concerning trends about Alvarez’s contact management trends too. If you didn’t, I’ll spoil it for you here: It seems Alvarez “was greatly aided by sequencing” last year. Combine that information with a low K-rate and it’s probably not what you’re looking for in a daily fantasy pitcher (unless the price is right). The Braves might be a much worse team overall this year, but they were already terrible offensively last season, so you probably shouldn’t expect too much of a change in that department.

James Shields has had exceptional defense behind him for the entirety of career up to this point. He’ll likely be looking back on those days very fondly soon as the Padres are giving people no illusions about their intentions on that side of the ball this year. The good news is that the Padres had a top pitch framing duo last year, but more bad news is that they traded both those guys and brought in nobody similarly inclined in that aspect. The good news is that Shields is now moving to a league without a DH and will be pitching half his games (theoretically) in a great big park. Again, the bad news is that his K% has dropped each of the last two years to where he was below league average last year and he already pitched in great big parks. The Dodger lineup is stacked this year and though their park has remained favorable to pitchers in overall run factor in our three-year measurement, HRs are up. Shields allowed 16 HRs with a 12.0 HR/FB on the road last year.

Jeff Samardzija makes his debut in that other Chicago uniform and quite honestly, it’s difficult to find something to say about him that his stats don’t already say. He did cut his walk rate almost in half last year, which is a great sign, but didn’t have to sacrifice anything in the K department to do it. The Royals have built themselves a reputation as being daily fantasy nightmares. They swing at everything, but don’t strike out or hit for much power. The true anti-three true outcome team. You can’t use most of their hitters in your lineup, but the upside in starting pitchers against them is somewhat limited as well. Part of that cast is gone and maybe they slide a bit more towards normalcy this season, but the general core of the issue remains intact.

Jered Weaver has consistently beaten his peripherals for years, mostly due to a strong defense in a good park and an elite pop up rate. Last year, that IFFB% was close to league average and his 8.9 HR/FB was the closest to league average it’s ever been, resulting in a career-high 27 HRs allowed. His ERA has declined (gone up) in three straight seasons, along with a velocity that now sits in the mid-80s. He’s still better than his ERA estimators, but the gap is narrowing and last year he was only really a league average pitcher. Some more alarming trends are that he had the lowest First Pitch Strike% of his career along with his highest BB% in five years. Batters swung less in and out of the zone against him as his O-Swing% fell below 30% (26.8) for the first time in five years. Weaver is best utilized at home against RH heavy lineups, where he has the best chance of remaining effective. That being said, Seattle is one of the few road spots where you might be inclined to still trust him depending on the price tag.

Johnny Cueto had his best season last year, mostly because he stayed healthy, but also because he struck out a quarter of the batters he faced. He’d never previously been much above average in that department. The concern, of course, is that he’s had a BABIP in the .230s and a strand rate above 80% in each of the last two seasons, spanning 304.2 innings. Even if you believe contact management is a strength and the Cincinnati defense will remain an ally, he probably can’t keep that up because nobody ever has. On Monday, he faces the top hitting team vs RHP last year.

Josh Collmenter is the opening day starter for potentially the worst staff in baseball. I’ll admit, I laughed when I looked at Monday’s probables and came to his name. I mean, wasn’t he the long man two years ago? Then I looked at the numbers. He’s got some deception that no doubt aided his .267 BABIP and his FIP was decent, but he was still sporting an xFIP and SIERA over 4, well above his 3.46 ERA. He’s still a tough sell in that park, despite being lights out against RHBs for his career (.273 wOBA), but at least I’m not still laughing that hard.

Julio Teheran has a .276 BABIP in 432.2 career innings. That’s not enough to establish a reliable baseline, but pitching in front of a strong Atlanta defense with Andrelton Simmons and Jason Heyward behind you probably doesn’t hurt. Except one of those guys won’t be behind him this year and Teheran is a pronounced fly ball pitcher (42.7%). With an 11.5 IFFB%, that’s about one free out per start. Now, with different guys running around in the OF, it remains to be seen what it does to his BABIP and, consequently, his ERA. His peripheral markers were nearly a run above his ERA and his K% was near league average, so it’s all about that BABIP.

Kyle Kendrick just like with Collmenter, had me laughing hard when I first saw the opening day probables. Unlike with Collmenter though, I’m still rolling on the floor. They may not be playing in Colorado, but Milwaukee isn’t exactly a pitcher’s park. And because I need to save space and time somewhere, we’re moving on.

Kyle Lohse is just unexciting from a fantasy standpoint. He does well enough and has now beaten his peripherals four years in a row, although his ERA matches his career FIP (4.28) and isn’t far off from his 4.37 xFIP and 4.46 SIERA. The difference is that his BABIP has been below .280 in each of the last four years, though he still owns a .293 career rate. As the sample gets larger (800 innings), you might have to buy into this trend of eclipsing his ERA estimators. Some guys can do it, at least through their primes. His 17.3 K% in 2014 represents a career high.

Madison Bumgarner is a top pitcher, but his season may have been over-stated by that incredible postseason run. That said, he did have an ERA just under 3.00, supported by his underlying metrics. He also set a career high with a 20.2 K-BB%, enjoying career bests in both marks. Bumgarner’s normally been a much better pitcher at home throughout his career, but was almost equally good on the road last season. He faces what we expect to be a weak offense, but in a tough park on Monday.

Masahiro Tanaka just said on MLB Network, as I’m typing this on Saturday morning, that he’s changed his pitching style and lost some velocity to compensate for the elbow injury he sustained last year, in order to avoid Tommy John surgery. We all know how these things almost always work out: Tommy John Surgery. He was a dominant pitcher in the 136 innings he did pitch last year, but my recommendation for him would be similar to any pitcher returning from injury. Watch and wait, especially when you have all these other wonderful options on opening day.

Max Scherzer gets his first start in a Nationals uniform. I’d expect him to be the same pitcher he’s been for the last two years. Without facing a DH and residing in a weak hitting division aside from his own team, maybe he’ll strike out 275 instead of the 252 from last year. He’s a fairly extreme fly ball pitcher and will probably still allow close to 20 HRs, but should benefit from having a competent defense this year more than anything else. The Mets added only Michael Cuddyer to a mediocre offense, hoping on health and improvement to make them better.

Phil Hughes left Yankee Stadium and had a career year. If not for a .324 BABIP (same as 2013), it could have been even better. Being a fly ball pitcher, maybe he was afraid to attack hitters in previous years, allowing 59 HRs over his last two seasons in a Yankee uniform. Now, in a nice big park, he set a record for efficiency with a 1.9 BB% and just 16 HRs allowed (6.2 HR/FB). The bad news is that his defense doesn’t project to improve much, leaving the BABIP in peril, while the HR/FB may regress just a bit up towards normal. There’s still no reason Hughes can’t continue to throw strikes and be a good pitcher. Remember, he was a top prospect in New York for years. The Detroit offense was one of the top hitting teams at home and vs RHP last year and is still loaded, though questions about health in the middle of their order persist to start the season.

Sonny Gray may have taken a bit of an unnoticed step backward in his first full season. His K and BB rates both fell to league average and his K-BB% went from 18.0% in his abbreviated 2013 to 12.1% last year. The defense helped him maintain a strong .277 BABIP. You might think the park played a part in that as well, but with a GB/FB over 2.0 and a below league average pop-up rate, that may not have been so much the case. What can we look to from Gray going forward? Probably still an above average pitcher who can be very useful in the right spots, at home vs Texas for instance, but maybe he’s not the total stud that a lot of other opening day starters are.

Yordano Ventura throws as hard as (or harder than) anyone, but has trouble turning that into strikeouts. He had an exactly league average 20.3 K% last year, which along with a slightly worse than league average 8.8 BB%, gave you pretty much a league average pitcher, despite his 3.20 ERA telling a slightly better story. The Kansas City defense is his friend and the big ballpark allowed him to give up only 6 HRs in KC (8 on the road in eight fewer innings). An assignment against what we’d expect to be an improved White Sox offense at home to start the season isn’t the worst thing in the world though.

Yovani Gallardo might be an interesting case this year, though probably not from a daily fantasy perspective. He’s changed his game over the last few years to go from a high strikeout guy to a pound the bottom of the zone, more contact, high ground ball type pitcher. It kind of made sense as a team philosophy for the Brewers with maybe the best framer of low pitches in the business behind the plate. Gallardo is no longer a Brewer and will no longer enjoy that kind of excellence behind the plate. In addition, he may be another pitcher who really suffers if the umpires and league decide to stop calling that low strike this year. I don’t know what he’ll be in Texas. I don’t know what he’ll try to be. He gets his first start in a good park against an offense that is projected to be a little bit worse this year after many off-season moves.

Combo K/BB Charts

These are the Combo K & BB numbers from above fleshed out. They are weighted equally in the main chart above. They probably shouldn’t be, but originally were due to size limitations. What’s the correct weighting? Who knows? But now you have all six components (Pitcher: L2Yrs, H/R, L14Days – Opposition: H/A, vL/R, L7Days) that make up the above numbers.

Combo K/BB Charts – Opponent

Combo Batted Ball Charts

See the explanation for the K/BB chart above.

Combo Batted Ball Charts – Opponent

K/SwStr Chart

Getting called strikeouts can be a skill, but it’s usually not a sustainable one at a large deviation from the league rate (catcher framing and other factors may make some difference here). K% correlates heavily with SwStr% though. Look for a large difference and you might find a potential adjustment before anyone else.

The fact that there is only a single, hard outlier in this chart for 2014 does well to validate what we’re aiming for here. But let’s talk about….

Bartolo Colon has a 2.59 K/SwStr over his career, which is near the borderline where these things are concerned, but has been a much different pitcher in his second career (counting from his 2011 comeback with the Yankees on). He’s now had a K/SwStr above 3.0 in three of his last four years and in the one year he didn’t (2013), had some defensively challenged catchers behind the plate in Oakland, at least as far as pitch framing is concerned. So there’s some precedent for this and Travis D’Arnaud has proven to be a good framer so far, even to the extent of a few extra passed balls. Colon might be among the two or three most extreme pitchers in the league here, where his pinpoint control would lead to more called strikes and I wouldn’t be completely shocked to see another year around the 3.0 mark.

ERA Estimators Chart

How a pitcher’s ERA matches up against his defense-independent estimators.

Most of the outliers here, we’ve already discussed in length above. I’m not going to rehash everything I’ve already written, but may say a few things I haven’t already about some of the standouts here.

Chris Tillman – We’ve already covered BABIP and HR issues above, but he now has an ERA right at 4.00 for his career with his estimators between 4.30 and 4.50 for through 680.1 innings. There might be something here that his defense no doubt plays a part in, but again, I’m sticking with the 3.5 or worse ERA prediction unless there’s a change in his peripherals.

Clay Buchholz – This is almost all about the strand rate we talked about above. The BABIP (.315) could see some improvement too, depending on the defense and we could see him get back to being a not entirely terrible pitcher if healthy.

Cole Hamels – In addition to what we talked about above (career low 8.2 HR/FB), we’d expect his second-best strand rate ever (81.9%) to drop back down below 80% too.

Drew Hutchison – There wasn’t really anything all that crazy about his peripherals, but somehow the ERA ended up much higher. I’m guessing this might have to do with some sequencing issues, maybe lapses in concentration, or something like that, which I’m not entirely qualified to speak to. I bet Russell Martin will help though.

Henderson Alvarez – We talked about the sequencing issue in the linked article in his paragraph above. This can somewhat be seen in 79.3 LOB% last year. His BABIP was surprisingly just above .300 with a just below (lower than) league average 9.5 HR/FB in a big park. There’s nothing that really screams regression in his numbers, but you just don’t expect a guy who allows a lot of contact the way he does (article linked above) to be able to pull this off again.

Jered Weaver – It was all said above. He’s been doing this his whole career, but not as well last year. Could this be the season the ERA climbs towards 4.00?

Johnny Cueto – There’s some deception here that the numbers don’t entirely catch for sure and that along with a good defense allowed his BABIP and LOB to play up to the extremes last year. Though, as we said above, it’s either too extreme or he’s an all-time outlier. He already is that probably, but I mean, like the all-time biggest outlier. In the history of the game, no starting pitcher (500+ IP) has ever had a LOB greater than 80% or a BABIP below .240 through an entire career. It’s kind of hard to believe he can keep up both.

Josh Collmenter – This was mostly about the BABIP we already covered.

Julio Teheran – BABIP, defense, Heyward, yup, all covered extensively above.

Phil Hughes – I said this many times last year and of course it’s still true this year: when all of the estimators match up except for FIP, it’s almost always about the HR’s, which we’ve already covered for him. The low HR/FB somewhat cancelled out the .324 BABIP, allowing his ERA to not fly too far above his xFIP and SIERA, but there’s room for improvement here.

BABIP Chart

A couple of years ago, both Dan Rosencheck and Steve Staude separately found that high Infield Fly Ball (IFFB) rates and low Zone Contact (Z-Contact) rates correlated well with lower BABIP for pitchers. I won’t pretend to know how much of the variation in BABIP can be explained by these factors, but since they seem to have some effect, here they are. See if you can use it to your advantage.

It’s presented as the difference between team and pitcher BABIP allowed because team defense can explain a lot of the variance from league average on its own. For example, if a pitcher has a much lower BABIP than his team’s allowed (red), then you look for some factors that may support it and maybe you’re onto something (check batted ball profile too).

Clayton Kershaw – Yeah, it’s scary that he could have been even better. Those metrics, along with a 19.0 LD% would have been able to justify an even slightly lower BABIP.

Johnny Cueto – I think we’ve already covered this in depth here, but his team allowed BABIP here accentuates the point. They were good, but still well above what he allowed.

Josh Collmenter – He didn’t limit line drives or induce an above average rate of pop-ups or have a zone contact rate that was even league average. He also didn’t play in front of a BABIP limiting defense. I don’t know what the hell he did.

Julio Teheran – Discussed and nearly beaten to death here. Neither the additional metrics in this chart, nor the line drive rate adds anything further to the discussion.

Pitcher Notes & Summary

In accordance with what I’ve written about the pitchers above, you may think I’m either higher or lower on many of them than I actually am. What must be remembered is I speak in terms of value here, not a particular pitchers overall talent level in regards to real life baseball. I’m not necessarily trying to tell you Drew Hutchison is a better pitcher than James Shields (that may or may not be true at this point in their respective careers), but just that they may be better or worse than mainstream perception would have you believe right now. Of course, many of you already read Fangraphs, so I didn’t have to tell you that.

Now comes the hard part. From here on out it’s mostly guesswork with just spring training and last year to go on.

Clay Buchholz – Well, I guess this is how the 2015 season is starting, but we’ve spoken of a number of reasons why he might be undervalued to start the season, coming off of last year’s disaster. Plus, he gets to face one of the weakest lineups in baseball and dropping the DH for a P could add a K to his final line. You’re going to have pull an SP #2 off the scrap heap today most likely. There’s a decent chance this isn’t a disaster.

Clayton Kershaw – It might be possible that we expect too much for him and that could make his price tag a bit high, but as far as we know, he’s the best pitcher in the universe until he’s proven not to be and it doesn’t much matter who the Padres got this offseason. You are sending a good chunk of your payroll his way though.

Corey Kluber – Might be a nice alternative to Kershaw. We don’t think last year was a fluke and even though the Astros may be destined for a better offense this season, K’s should remain high.

Dallas Keuchel – I’m surprised to find him near the bottom on some sites. He should be able to limit damage and keep the ball on the ground. Cleveland did struggle against LHP last year too. I’m only looking for him on the bottom half of the board though.

David Price – Looks to match up with Kluber on the price scale and there’s nothing wrong with him, but I think Kluber might have a bit higher K upside.

Drew Hutchison – I know Yankee Stadium can be scary for a RH fly ball pitcher, but the Yankees made no real upgrades to a mediocre offense and if his new and improved slider is really going to be a weapon to handle LHBs, you might have an opening day sleeper here. I don’t mind him at all as your SP #2 in GPPs and even as a bit of high-risk guy on one-pitcher sites.

Felix Hernandez – Sits right there Bumgarner and Scherzer in your second tier today behind Kershaw. He’s facing a tough offense, but was able to shut them out twice in September last year. You can rarely go wrong with the King in his Court.

Francisco Liriano – Represents a risk/reward type play on the middle of most boards today. The reward is lots of K’s vs a weak offense last year. The risk is walk, walk, boom in a small park.

Henderson Alvarez – Should limit the damage at a low price against a weak opponent, but represents a ceiling not much higher than his floor.

Jeff Samardzija – It’s not that I don’t think he can handle the Kansas City lineup, but the Royals represent daily fantasy hell. I’m concerned about the K upside.

Jered Weaver – Seems to be on the bottom half of most boards, where he might be worth the risk in a nice park.

Kyle Kendrick – If he shuts out the Brewers, this 6K word spectacular may just be the first and last pitching article written by me this year. I shouldn’t say that though because, you know, baseball and now it’s probably going to happen.

Madison Bumgarner – Should be able to dominate a weak Arizona offense even in a tough park. He comes at a slight discount to Kershaw because there’s slightly more risk.

Max Scherzer – Should also fare well in his debut. As a Mets fan, I have a good feeling about the team this year and like a lot of their kids, but as an analyst, I can’t find any logical reason not to roster Scherzer the same as you would any other top, reliable guy today.

Sonny Gray – Is surprisingly middle of the board on most sites. Maybe people aren’t as high as I thought they were on him. That’s probably where he should be on a day with every other ace going, but the ballpark and opposition probably make him worth a flyer as your #2.

Yovani Gallardo – I spoke about being intrigued by his move away from Lucroy to Texas. Even with limited upside now, he’s a bottom of the board guy today, who is far from terrible, facing what looks to be a degraded offense in a big park. It somewhat looks like they’re pricing him as if he’s going against last year’s A’s.

That’s enough conjecture from me. Good luck on Opening Day!

You can find me on twitter @FreelanceBBall for any questions, comments, or insults.

NOTE: Button for pitcher salary chart above opens in popup window